Yesterday, we drove four and a half hours to Denver for groceries. Not kidding. Well, my husband also needed some truck parts, and the Mack dealer in Denver is his best shot of finding what he needs. So it was a business trip. But he could have gone to Hays in half the time if we hadn't also been in serious need of groceries.

I went into Vitamin Cottage with a notebook page, scribbled full front and back with my shopping list. I have been in survival mode since moving out here. In Summit County, I hated to put non-organic food in my body. I have lived in the middle of a non-organic farming community. My parents helped start an organic flour mill and pounded it into me, the importance of real food grown using real, traditional methods. But produce in western Kansas is not organic. Only one thing saved us from having to make this trip months ago. I now have an organic product map for the area in my head. Organic coconut milk can only be found one place in Western Kansas- Mel's Foodliner in Leoti. Organic celery and potatoes can be found in Dillons in Garden City, over an hour away, but where we go every week or two just to break up the monotony and remind ourselves that cities still exist. Garden City has a Sam's club which stocks organic spinach, baby lettuce spring mix, and organic baby carrots. Wal-mart occasionally sells organic onions, although if they are out, I just buy non-organic onions because onions are rarely treated with pesticide anyway. It's such a first world problem, not being able to buy food because it has all been doused in pesticides, but when the people around you threaten to drop like flies from cancer, it starts to seem pretty important.

We have been living on Sam's Club citrus. I have made a list of foods I think probably won't kill us to eat non-organic, and citrus is on that list. So is asparagus and kiwi. I keep getting conflicting reports on the pesticide levels in frozen blueberries, but my craving for berries got so strong I broke down and bought some. Bananas and avocados also rank low on the "dirty foods" list, so I buy them.

The holes left in our diet are fall fruits (peaches, plums, apricots, apples), and summer garden produce (cucumbers, squash, bell peppers, tomatoes). A friend had pity on me one day and gave me some vine ripened tomatoes from his greenhouse, and I resisted the temptaion to just eat them whole, juice and seeds running down my chin, in favor of slicing them into small chunks and making them last through a week and a half of salads, which we ate with our eyes rolled back in our heads, especially since he had included a bag of spinach and kale, and a bag of lettuce, freshly picked, sweet and tender. We literally moaned in exctasy. We still dream of those salads.

Never in my life have I felt so disconnected from my food source. Never in my life has it seemed more wrong to have to drive an hour, or occasionally four and a half hours, to go to a grocery store and buy food that could be grown not fifty feet from my door. Only I did not live here several weeks ago. I did not plant anything. It is early spring. In a few months, we could start eating from my garden, but right now, our sustenance comes from Argentina, Mexico, California.

So, we drove to Denver to buy foods not available in Garden City- organic apples and tomatoes, non-baby carrots, organic beans and rice and nuts. $250 worth of food. My husband nearly had to clean out his pants when I gave him the reciept, even though I had warned him.

Here is what I bought:
Potatoes
Onions (yellow and purple)
Daikon Radishes (greens attached)
Tomatoes
Avocados
Coconuts
Oranges
Grapefruits
Kiwis
Frozen berries
Spinach
Lettuce
Celery
Bok Choy
Almonds
Bananas
Raw cashews
Quinoa
Chia seed
Brown Rice
Raisins
Dates
Dried Papaya
Raw cacao
Garbanzo beans
Navy beans
Red lentils
Split peas
Dill
Chili Powder
Oat flakes
Brown rice pasta spirals
Veggie bowties
Canned tomatoes
Vegetable stock
Olive oil
Balsamic Vinegar
Coconut Oil
Corn chips
Bread

Then, home to unpack it. I spent a while googling the best way to crack and remove the meat from a coconut, then put the creamy white chunks in the fridge to await this morning when I made them into a gallon of coconut milk that is now cooling in my chest freezer as the oil floats to the top. Then I made energy bars, and since they were my best yet, did my best to remember what I put into them and wrote it down. This is a new leaf I am turning over, writing down the recipes when I have a win in the kitchen.

They remind me of Grandma's no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, except they do not have ingredients like sugar and butter substitute. Okay, they are much more substantial that no-bake cookies. But if you haven't had a no-bake cookie in over two years, like me, they bring back all the good feelings of an after-school snack that a no-bake cookie does, at least for someone to whom they were given as an after school snack, just because your mind thinks they are enough the same. And oops, I just realized that I forgot to write down my chocolate ingredients in the above recipe. Add several tablespoons raw cacao nibs and1/2 cup cocoa powder to the ingredient list because I have added it to the paper, but the picture's already up.

My father in law showed up with a bottle of wine in the evening, and I made a hearty soup for dinner. B had just bought a box of wild-caught Alaskan Pollock, and really wanted to try it, so I pan seared a filet for each of us, finishing them in my fresh coconut milk, fresh squeezed lemon and dill weed. The soup was a mix of split peas, red lentils, quinoa, onion, celery, carrots, and a potato with skin on. After these were cooked, I added a tablespoon of miso, some kelp granules, several handfuls of frozen okra, and a bunch of chopped daikon greens. Then I sniffed it and it still seemed bland, so I dribbled some of the wine from my glass into the soup. That fixed it so well, gave it the tang it was missing, that I slopped more. Then it needed a hint of warm cheesy flavor, so I sprinkled in some nutritional yeast. I served it with a bottle of balsamic vinegar on the table, and that added the perfect warm zest it needed.

And this is why I can never give anyone my recipe. When cooking is a creative process and you know you will love the finished product no matter what it ends up as, it is sheer joy. When you follow a formula, cooking as math, it is drudgery. But cooking as art, that is when cooking is love.