All Over Albany

Eat Local Challenge: Kabobs à la Celinabean

Local, easy, kid friendly and grillicious.

The Honest Weight Food Co-op's LocalHarvest Festival is this Sunday in Albany's Washington Park. AOA is a media sponsor of the event, so we thought it would be fun to ask a few local food bloggers to come up with some easy meals made with local ingredients.

For today's challenge, Celinabean's Celina Ottaway brings on the beef.

In an ideal world -- the one in which I run half marathons before breakfast, save the lives of a dozen children before lunch, and then whip up a beautiful all organic, all local dinner for friends and family before falling gracefully on to my pillow and dreaming sweet dreams of, I don't know, the perfect Greenmarket heirloom tomato or some such -- well, in that ideal world, I would have both happy carrots and happy cows. All my vegetables would be from local farms -- chemical free, etc... and all my meat would be raised near by with plenty of fresh upstate air and grass and freedom. Every bite would be delicious in a fresh, alive, flavors dancing way and it would never involve Campbell's or, God forbid, store brand frozen pizza.

This is my ideal world, but it is not the one in which I feed my three children - day in and day out, when I am frazzled, when I'm up all night worrying about our family budget, and when I am slogging it through 5Ks that leave me proud but unable to lift up my head afterward much less shop or cook dinner.

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