In a grocery store, in the aisles of processed food, you'll see plenty of labels on the packages boasting of the great nutritional contents and the wonderful health benefits of the product. "High in Vitamin C!" "Heart Healthy!" "Bursting with Anti-Oxidants!"

Meanwhile, in the next aisle over, you'll find broccoli, with no nutrition and health claims plastered all over it. Yet few people would argue that broccoli is less nutritious than, say, Froot Loops.

Yes, that's right, even Froot Loops is being labeled as a healthy food! There is now an industry-backed label program in which food products that meet a certain standard can bear a green checkmark symbol indicating that the product is part of the "Smart Choices Program".

Froot Loops qualifies. Why? Well, apparently the claim is that Froot Loops is healthier than donuts. I guess if a food exists that is less healthy for you, then they can call their food healthy. Or something.

Actually, I think the real criteria is that if the food has been mixed with enough vitamins, then it's considered healthy. I guess if McDonald's sprinkled some vitamin C on their french fries, they would become a health food.

Tomorrow's cooking activity: Making tomato sauce. Lots of tomato sauce!

I like tomatoes, but sheesh! Remember that book, The $64 Tomato? I think it's safe to say that our tomatoes are costing us far less than that!

Enter our desire for local pizza!

Recently, when our hankering for pizza has been too strong to ignore, we've been ordering from Fratello's Pizza & More. True, the food isn't local, but the business is 100% local, operated by a couple of brothers (thus the name, since "brother" in Italian is "fratello"). They're very friendly, and I've had some nice conversations when I've stopped in there to pick up a pizza.

However, as I said, the food isn't local. To get a truly local pizza, we'd need to make it ourselves.

Awhile back, when I was shopping in Food Fantasies, I saw in the refrigerated food section that they had bags of pizza dough. Take it home, roll it out, add pizza sauce, cheese, and toppings, then bake. Easy!

We decided to try it. Dawn had experimented with making some tomato soup a couple of days before that, and we still had some of that left. It was a bit thick, so we figured it might work as a pizza sauce. With some cheddar cheese from Ropp Jersey Cheese and some sweet red pepper as a topping, we had a pizza!

Our first attempt was reasonably good, so we decided to try again, with a few changes. First, we wanted to use mozzarella cheese. The cheddar cheese just didn't have the right taste, and it wasn't as "sticky" as mozzarella cheese. Second, we wanted to make a real tomato sauce, rather than just repurposing a thick tomato soup. Third, we wanted to make our own pizza dough. The flour would still be non-local, but at least the dough would be truly homemade.

Getting local mozzarella cheese turned out to be easier than I expected. I knew that Ropp Jersey Cheese was planning to start making mozzarella cheese last winter/spring, but I had never seen any at their booth at the farmers' market. So when I went to the Old Capitol Farmers' Market on Saturday, I asked Jessica whether they had any mozzarella cheese. She got a bit of a sly look on her face and said, "Maybe." :-) It turns out they do make mozzarella cheese, but in very limited quantities, and you have to ask for it. She only had 1 pound that day, and she said they only have it about every third week! Yikes! (And now I've just given away the secret! See how much I do for you, Internet?) Well, in any case, we now had mozzarella cheese!

Dawn found an easy pizza sauce recipe on the Internet, so we made up a batch, using most of our tomatoes (from our garden and from the CSA), as well as basil from our garden. It was easy, but it took far longer than I expected to reduce to the right thickness, so be sure you make your pizza sauce well in advance!

Lastly, there was the pizza dough. Dawn bought some whole wheat flour (from Bob's Red Mill in Oregon, which is only within our 100-mile radius if you measure with very long miles).

On Monday evening, were ready to make homemade pizza! But the dough failed to rise.

Well... crap.

The dough did eventually rise, but by then it was well after dinner time. Actually it was bed time! We put the dough in a bag in the refrigerator and vowed to try again the next day.

So yesterday we rolled out the dough, added the pizza sauce and the mozzarella cheese, then finally popped it in the oven! We decided to go without any toppings, to get a better idea of whether we liked the taste of the crust and the sauce.

About 12 minutes later the pizza was ready! Here's my review:

• Cheese: Great!
• Sauce: Good!
• Crust: Not bad!

Okay, so "not bad" isn't the highest of praise. Still, it was acceptable. Being whole wheat, it was a bit heavy. Plus, we didn't preheat the pizza stone in the oven, so the center of the crust was not as crispy as we would have liked. We'll experiment to see whether we can come up with a better crust, but even if we can't, this still made for a pretty good pizza, even without any toppings!

We've got more mozzarella cheese. And more pizza sauce. And there's a green pepper in the garden that's looking ready to harvest. Would it be wrong to have pizza two nights in a row?

(Don't worry, I'll be writing a much longer dull post explaining the saga in mind-numbing detail.)

Yesterday's garden harvest was 10 Brandywine tomatoes weighing a total of 9½ pounds (very good!), plus a zucchini weighing 4½ pounds and measuring over 18 inches long (not so good). The largest of the tomatoes weighed 1½ pounds!

After I got home from work and harvested all of that, Dawn decided to make a tomato soup. The recipe called for 5 pounds of tomatoes, so that sounded like a good way to quickly use up some of today's bounty!

Here's a summary of the recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. It's called Summer Tomato Soup:

• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup diced shallots (8-12)
• 5 pounds ripe, red, juicy tomatoes, rinsed and cut into big pieces
• Salt and freshly milled pepper

Over low heat, melt the butter in a soup pot, add the shallots. Prepare the tomatoes. Add the tomatoes, plus 1 teaspoon salt and a ½ cup of water. Cover and cook for 3-4 hours, stirring occasionally. Run through a food mill (to remove the skins). Add salt and pepper to taste. Makes one quart.

We didn't have any shallots, so she substituted an onion. We also don't have a food mill, so Dawn blanched the tomatoes for about 10 seconds, then removed the skins, before cooking began. With 3-4 hours of cook time, obviously this wasn't for that evening's dinner! (Instead, we had corn on the cob from Veenstra & Heck's CSA, plus a salad from the farmers' market and a donut peach for dessert.)

After cooking for about 3 hours, it smelled really good! I plan on having some of it for lunch today, so I'll let you know how it was!

We still have the Old Capitol Farmers' Market on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, of course. Since I'm at work on Wednesdays, Dawn and Orlando normally go.

Except today.

This morning, while I was at work, Dawn went out to the car, started the air conditioner to cool things off, strapped Lando into his carseat, closed the door -- and then realized that she had just locked herself out of the car!

Lando wasn't in any danger, because the air conditioner was running, so Dawn stayed calm and Lando of course was unworried. However, I was a good 20 minutes away from home. By the time I got there to unlock the door, Lando had grown extremely upset, which made Dawn somewhat frantic. At 4 years old, he couldn't understand why she wouldn't roll down the windows and turn off that annoying classical music! :-)

Everybody was fine, but Dawn was understandably a bit shaken up. In addition, we had a friend who was supposed to drop by for a visit, so there was no time to make a trip to the farmers' market in any case.

So, no blueberries today!

On the plus side, however, when I picked up our CSA share at the Vincent Family Farm on Tuesday, I was able to get eggs and butter from Todd!

Eggs I can get from several farmers; generally we've been buying from Bear Creek because they are convenient, having a booth at the both farmers' markets. (However, this week they won't have a booth -- because they'll be at the Illinois State Fair showing their Belgian draft horses!)

Butter, on the other hand, is difficult to find! So far, Todd Vincent is the only local source I've located. Even then, he has a limited supply, so it's very hit-or-miss as to whether he'll have any. This week, however, I lucked out!

So, a good day at the CSA on Tuesday, but we missed the farmers' market on Wednesday, and there won't be a farmers' market on Thursday!

Come Saturday, I'm hoping for more blueberries, plus some green beans to freeze. Yum!

P.S. Our Internet service is still extremely flaky. Hopefully it doesn't go out entirely!

I knew it was going to be hot today (mid-90s), so I planned to start at 9:00 AM. (People who mow their grass before 9 AM should be shot. Well, they should at least be secretly glared at with resentment!)

I fired up the riding mower, cut the first lap of the lawn (enough to make it clear to everyone how badly the lawn needed to be mowed), and then the mower stopped.

By "stopped", I don't mean that the engine quit. The engine ran fine. The blades didn't stop either. They kept turning fine. It was the wheels that stopped.

I could have mowed the grass that was directly under the mower all day, but that was it.

Forward? Nope. Reverse? Nope. Could I push it? Yep.

Long story short: A stick got in a place where sticks don't belong and knocked a belt off.

The good news is, it's something I can probably fix. The bad news is, now I have to fix it.

All I have to do is figure out how to do so. One obstacle is that I have no service ramp to roll the mower on, so that I can more easily get at things from below. I went to Lowe's, but they didn't have what I want. I guess I'll try auto service supply stores tomorrow.

To add to the fun, our Internet service has been very erratic for the last week or two. It will be working fine, then it will stop working for a few minutes, then it will work for a few minutes, then it will be out for several minutes, then it will work for an hour, then it will be out, etc. On, off, on, off. It's very annoying! I'll be calling Comcast in the morning.

Aw, Shucks! 24 ears of sweetcorn, ready to be shucked.

Naked Corn! Ready to be blanched.

24 ears of sweetcorn made about 4½ quarts for freezing. We'll need plenty more for this winter!

I did a quick "back of the envelope" calculation. Let's suppose that for a typical lunch or dinner, we would use about 2/3 of a quart bag (e.g. 1/3 of a bag of corn, plus 1/3 of a bag of green beans, plus some bread). That means that 3 meals would use up 2 bags. That means that over the course of 3 days (6 meals total, not counting breakfasts), we would use up 4 bags. Over the course of a month, we would use 40 bags. Over the course of 6 months (the months when there are no farmers' markets), we would use about 240 quart bags of food.

Yikes!

Of course, this is very much an approximation. In addition to ignoring breakfasts (which generally involve eggs, cheese, and/or fruit), I also haven't taken into account things like potatoes (which don't need to be frozen or canned). I also haven't accounted for frozen chicken, beef, pork, etc (which I eat, but Dawn doesn't). Bread? Milk? Butter? Cheese? Occasional dinners out or trips out of town?

There's plenty of variables to consider, but the message is still the same: We need to preserve more food!

To "flash freeze" them, you gently wash them, gently dry them, then lay them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet in the freezer. Given space limitations, I am only able to flash freeze 3 pints at a time.

I did 3 pints last night, then this evening I put those into freezer bags and started another 3 pints.

I noticed the same thing when we were flash freezing strawberries earlier: Frozen berries are surprising. They're hard; they roll; they "clink". In short, they are marbles.

Don't tell our 4-year-old son, however. He'll want to play with them!

On Saturday, we'll flash freeze more blueberries, but our main project will be blanching and freezing sweetcorn! (Oh, and it's Dawn's birthday, too. I guess I should treat her nicely, huh?) ;-)