Transition Times

As soon as the ball dropped on New Year's eve, I reached for one of the last Christmas cookies. These cookies had been staring me in the face ever since I brought them home from a cookie party a week before Christmas. Now they were mine!
At 12:01, I ate the cookie, followed by some turkey with mayo. (I had purchased the mayo a couple of weeks in advance, in anticipation of the new year.) I woke up in the middle of the night, sick. Guess I will have to ease back into mayo, or maybe give it up altogether.
Many reintroduced foods have been a challenge for me in the past couple of weeks. There is something really wrong with lots of the conventional food that many of us buy. I visited a discount store and bought a few condiments and olive/type concoctions. Many of the food items in the store, if they were labeled at all, came from China. I don't really trust this food anymore, and will ease back into as much local food as much as I can muster.
This week, I have been enjoying the re-emergence of local navel oranges, limes and tangerines brought to the table. The Meyer lemons growing in my backyard are almost ripe. I have added beyond-100-mile California almonds, raisins and milk back into my diet, with an occasional banana from somewhere else. We enjoyed a large plate of steamed carrots, turnips and asparagus harvested from the community garden, along with the usual leeks and greens. I have prepared chayote in many new ways.
So this year I resolve to find more friends in warmer locations to grow backyard bananas, to learn how to make some decent pickles and kraut and to move farther away from "denatured" foods of all kinds.