For those of you who don’t know me, let me introduce myself. My name is Luise Bolleber and I worked in Oryana’s kitchen about seven years ago. I was the kitchen manager back in the days before the store expansion. The deli was just getting back on its feet after a hiatus and I had the privilege of introducing all kinds of new goodies like the Good-For-You cookie. I worked closely with Fred, who now works in receiving, Kathleen, who recently left Oryana, and Merceditas, who is now retired. I have good memories of those days in the kitchen, when Bob Struthers used to come in and make all kinds of suggestions to us while our hands were elbow-deep in tofu veggie spread, and we would all have wonderful, philosophical discussions about life. I left Oryana in 2002 to move downstate but returned last summer and was fortunate to be asked to return to do in-store food demos. Now my job entails doing one food demo a week, along with Nancy Schwalm, natural foods cook extraordinaire who made the demos a terrific part of shopping at Oryana. I also work on the website, write for the newsletter, and develop recipes for demos. So I am very happy to be back here and delighted to be sharing my musings on all things Oryana related.

One thing that makes me very happy these days is browsing the produce section of the store and seeing so much beautiful local food. I did a demo a couple weeks ago and needed some red leaf lettuce and was thrilled to see absolutely fresh and perfect heads of red leaf from Sweeter Song Farm in Cedar. You can see how much stuff in the cooler is local by looking for the orange and pink labels. (The non-local produce is on yellow labels.) I would say a good third of the cooler is now local veggies, and that percentage should keep increasing as the season nears its peak.

Yesterday I saw that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has added the word “locavore” to its volume. ‘Locavore’ means one who eats foods  grown locally. It was added because “We’ve made the judgment that these are not just words used by specialists…These really are words now likely to show up in The New York Times, in The Wall Street Journal,” says John Morse, president and publisher of the dictionary. How great is that?! So if you haven’t already,  jump on the bandwagon of eating local, and local organic if possible. And check out what great stuff is in stock at Oryana.

I so enjoy sitting down to a meal at home and appreciating the fact that most of the meal’s components are from local sources. There is something satisfying about that, just knowing that I’m supporting local farmers and appreciating how fresh and delicious locally produced food is compared to things that have been shipped from a gazillion miles away.

Green Cuisine takes place on Wednesday this week and I plan to be there. Oryana will be passing out samples of delicious tofu veggie spread (prepared by yours truly) and they are expecting quite a crowd. I’ve never been to the Food For Thought farm in Honor but it should be fun. It will be nice to discover other sources of great local food products. I will report back on that event and hopefully figure out how to post photos of the event on this blog.

That’s it for now! I plan to post here at least once a week with Oryana-related news that’s hot, interesting, cool, and fun. Maybe we can get some interesting discussions going too after we set up the comment option.

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