Happy Father's Day Locavores!

Today was my first Father's Day! I called my own father last week and asked if he wanted to have a BBQ at his house and he obliged. My contribution to today's fatherly festivities was some local, pastured, ground beef burgers. My father has read this blog and for some reason refers to me as "The Green Grocer" so I wanted to school him a bit on buying local and there was no better way to start than with the taste buds. I stopped over at the Headhouse Farmers' Market to pick-up the meat, as well as the upcoming week's fruit and vegetable haul for my family. While there are more than a couple vendors at the market that have pastured ground beef, I knew where I was going - Natural Meadows Farm. I have purchased pastured ground beef from Natural Meadows before and made some juicy delicious cheeseburgers with so I knew if I wanted to impress my family, I wasn't going to buck the system.
I made 12 burgers with a mixture of three pounds of the meat with added salt, cracked pepper, a couple of pastured brown eggs (also from Natural Meadows), a couple of good squirts of Worcester sauce, and some chopped red onion (also locally grown and purchased at Headhouse). My father and I barbequed them together (a couple of fathers sharing a Father's Day moment) and shared one before we brought them in for the rest of the family to enjoy. He was impressed and my father doesn't easily impress. I'm the liberal of the family so sometimes I am the butt of some good-natured ribbing about my local eating habits but he could only compliment the food. In fact, EVERYBODY at the barbeque was impressed and it gave me the opportunity to explain the benefits of pastured animals over the usual corn-fed-crap. And there it was. My family and I on my first Father's Day digging in and enjoying some local food and discussing it along with the environment and omega-3s I couldn't have asked for a better Father's Day gift!