This will be my last Daring Bakers entry until May, so I'm glad it was an exciting one! This month's challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux. They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand.

The best thing about this challenge is that it offered six different elements, each of which could be flavored however we liked. The base recipe was mostly chocolate, but I wasn't in a very chocolaty mood, so I decided to go with a vanilla, almond, orange and white chocolate yule log. The layers you can see above are an almond-orange dacquoise cookie topping a frozen vanilla mousse surrounding a layer of creme brulee and a layer of crunchy orange and praline white chocolate, then, at the bottom, white chocolate ganache and another almond-orange cookie. The whole thing is coated in a white chocolate icing.

The layers are made one at a time, and then gently nestled into a bed of mousse. The only changes I made to the recipe were to add a little orange zest and juice to the praline crisp, ganache, and cookie layers. In retrospect, I should have added some to the vanilla mousse as well.

Once again, you can see that my icing skills are subpar, but man, this thing tastes great. It's a perfect make-ahead holiday dessert, and really visually impressive (even moreso if you can make an even layer of icing!). All the layers interact together well in taste and texture, but my favorite is the praline crisp layer. Praline paste, white chocolate, crispy French cookies and orange makes for a crunchy, nutty, and satisfying mouthful. The only drawback to this project is that I didn't dare drive it across New England to family celebrations, so we're left to try to consume a giant loaf of incredibly rich frozen confection on our own! Maybe I'll go get another slice out of the freezer right now...

This month's Daring Bakers' Challenge is Shuna Fish Lydon's Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting (follow the link for the recipe). The challenge is being hosted by Deidre of Chronicles of Culinary Curiosity, with help from Alex of Blondie and Brownie, Jenny of Foray into Food, and Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go.

This cake felt a little bit like an afterthought, what with the extravaganza of Thanksgiving cooking (to be honest, I am still in a food coma), but it came together quite well, and then we had the advantage of a post-T-day crowd to help devour the result. This cake is really tender and moist, and rich but not overly so. I still haven't mastered the creation of a truly fluffy cake&mdash you can see that it is pretty dense&mdash but it was so smooth and almost creamy that it really didn't matter so much.

I was also pretty relaxed about adding the caramel syrup and cream to the frosting, and slopped in too much of both, so the frosting was not quite stiff enough. It also had a slightly gritty texture, although I am not sure why. I'm definitely making a note about this recipe though, because the flavor was extraordinary. Brown butter and caramel: a match made in heaven.

Let me start with an overview of my performance on the Eat Local Challenge: for the first half of October, I was eating entirely local at home and eating out about 20% of the time. I started out feeling like I was cheating every time I ate something outside the home, but as I realized that my life always involves regularly dining outside the home, I started to feel better about being able to maintain local eating the 80% of the time that I cooked my own meals.

The second half of the month saw a rather dramatic increase in the demands on my time, and a fair amount of traveling, so I was eating closer to 60% of my meals out of the home. At home, things were still local, but I think a couple times I forgot what home looked like! Then, in the past few days, I was served a cold with a side of sinus infection, and as I've said, when I am sick I develop carb cravings that cornmeal just won't satisfy. You can imagine what happened chez Potato, and local didn't really figure into the resulting three-day flour-fest.

Eating locally for a month, or at least attempting it, was incredibly thought-provoking. I kept thinking back to the people who lived on this land before industrialized agriculture and globalization brought such variety and constancy to our food supply. Not just because I was eating a few of the same foods, but because finding, processing and cooking that food moved to the forefront of my mind. I imagined&mdash what if I didn't just have to travel to a distant specialty store to find my locally produced grains (ah, irony), but if I had to grow, harvest, and grind them? Or if those damn squirrels that ate all the corn I was growing this summer really meant I would have no corn all season? I thought about colonists missing the luxuries of their hometowns, and about people who had lived their whole lives with no wheat flour or oranges. At the same time, the cornmeal I was eating every day kept getting more and more delicious&mdash an element of deprivation, something that goes hand in hand with local eating in Massachusetts, is truly the best seasoning. I really came to appreciate the things that added crunch and variety to the diet, and my willingness to work for them grew. Take the squash seeds shown above: while I might occasionally roast pumpkin seeds, they most often end up in the compost because of the effort required to de-slime them, but this month every last one was cleaned, toasted and savored!

Ultimately, I think what I learned was that I was already eating as local as is really feasible for me. I estimate that we usually eat about 50% local, with 30% of our diet being grains and processed ingredients that are not produced locally, and 20% of meals eaten out of the home. We get our meat, dairy, eggs, and produce locally already, and living with corn as our only grain, while technically doable, is pretty miserable. Ditto forgoing the small variety of imported ingredients I use for ethnic cooking and the fresh fruit I crave in the dead of winter. Not only that, but giving up those non-local things does nothing to support local or sustainable agriculture, it only makes me grumpy! Not having the options of the modern market is interesting to contemplate, but voluntarily giving up something as wonderful as wheat flour... well, it is untenable. So, I give myself a C+ for October, but I think I'm doing alright overall.

Challenge mash-up time! Today is posting day for the October Daring Bakers Challenge AND my Eat Local Challenge update. As I feared, I spent a lot of the past week traveling and eating at friends houses and parties, but I did alright on eating locally at home. To top off the week, I used all-local ingredients to make my Daring Bakers October Challenge. Well, except the four. And being a baking challenge and all, there's a lot of flour. And the sugar isn't local either. There's not much of that, though. And the olive oil, that's an exception. So, ok, it's probably a 40% local pizza.

This week's challenge is hosted by Rosa's Yummy Yums, and you can find the recipe for the pizza dough there. It makes an incredibly smooth, silky and elastic dough. I ate a mouthful of the raw dough and it slurped and stretched between my teeth and lips like a slab of mochi pulled out of hot soup. The challenge calls for tossing the dough in the traditional manner, which was surprisingly successful in two out of three tries. On my second ball of dough, I caught the toss off-center, sending it crumpling in on itself and rendering it too tough to reshape&mdash it made fine breadsticks, though.

I topped the pizza with a simple fresh garlic and olive oil sauce, pre-cooked sliced sweet potatoes, onions, some of my homemade guanciale, and some grated homemade gouda. While the pizza spent its eight minutes in the oven, I sauteed some shredded Brussels sprouts in the grease from the guanciale... mmm, the perfect side dish.

The past week was the busiest I've had in a while. A confluence of meetings, social events and projects made for a series of late nights and early mornings&mdash and even when I was thinking about food, cooking it became an afterthought. At home, and in my packed lunches, I managed to keep up with my local eating, but I had at least six events outside the home that involved meals. Meals that it would have been rude or severely inconvenient to pass up for a pyrex full of pre-cooked local kale and pork chop. Some of those non-local meals I ate unapologetically&mdash the ones cooked by friends or family, or the well-deserved dinner out&mdash while others, like the bland catered lunch meetings, I wish I could take back. This division really underscores my goals with the Eat Local Challenge: I never meant to make myself feel guilty for eating outside the home, but rather to make as many of my meal choices consciously as possible... and sometimes, schedules interfere with even that.

Unfortunately, this coming week looks just as busy as the last. I wish I could say that I was going to manage to carve out some time to make something really delectable, but I am seeing a lot of quick meals and eating out in my future, especially since I'll be traveling for a couple days this week. Still, when it comes to the food that comes into my house, I'll be keeping it local!

It turns out the second verse is not quite like the first. Two weeks of eating local in wheat- and sugar-free MA is a lot harder than one. Around the end of the first week I realized I was missing a lot of things - the crunch of a good crust of bread, the intense sweetness of jam or chocolate, and the filling warmth of pasta. On Wednesday a blood-sugar crisis and a couple glasses of wine caused me to suffer a psychotic break and eat half a bag of Hershey's pumpkin spice kisses while hanging out at a friends place (verdict: surprisingly good, until about kiss number 10). I knew something had to be done if I was going to make it through the month. The first thing turned out to be taking a lot of borderline exceptions while being socially obligated to eat out all weekend, but the second was a true marriage of intention and desire: homemade corn tortillas.

They are simple, if not quick, to make, and the fresh-ground Gray's cornmeal creates the most intense corn flavor I've ever tasted in a tortilla. The hint of home-rendered lard in there doesn't hurt either! The variations in thickness and texture created by my uneven rolling and cooking make for a delightfully varied mouthfeel. And a second cooking in the oven, after a quick coating of oil and salt, produces the perfect snack food, rivaled in my current universe only by roasted squash seeds. They are excellent eaten plain, coated in honey or topped with melted cheese and egg. I just might make it through the next two weeks after all!

So, ok, now that that's out of my system, back to the technicalities of the Eat Local Challenge. It's turned out that in order to make my diet 100% local, there were only a few eliminations, the big ones being refined sugar, flour, and most grains. Goodbye bread, pasta, and crackers. Goodbye also to the afternoon pick-me-up piece of candy. This means no granola for breakfast, no crackers with my lunch, and potatoes or polenta instead of bread or rice with dinner. It's slightly lower carb than our regular diet, but actually not as huge a change as it might sound. I eat granola most mornings, but eggs, polenta and yogurt with fruit were all in the rotation, so it is not that weird to skip the granola. I bring leftovers for my lunch, and like to have crackers with them a few times a week, and I am looking forward to their return. For dinners, the change is only noticeable in the reduced variety of the starch dishes. I have been eating more honey to make up for the sugar, so that's not that big of a deal either. I excepted olive oil and have homemade butter and lard, so I haven't had to alter my regular cooking methods to deal with any fat substitutions.

The main components of my local diet:
Milk and homemade yogurt, cheese, butter and kefir from Oake Knoll
Eggs
Honey
Meat from Houde Family Farm and Stillmans
Local fish from New Deal Fish Market
a TON of produce from our CSA and farmer's market
Cornmeal from Gray's Grist Mill

A typical day looks like:
Egg poached in milk
Fish stew with home-canned local tomatoes, garlic, kale, whiting and scup
Roasted eggplant and yogurt
Lamb steak with mashed celeriac potatoes, honeyed carrots and salad greens
Apple with honey and fresh cheese

The only exceptions I've taken so far were dinner date out on Saturday, and a late night snack of sausage and crackers on Sunday night at a friends house, when an evening project ran much later than planned and sustenance became necessary. So far, so good!

As much as I love talking publicly about food, I hate talking publicly about diets. And not just restrictive weight-loss diets, but any pattern or habit of eating. If you are happy with your diet, you sound self-satisfied and condescending. If you are unhappy with it, you sound powerless and weak-willed. Either way, the discussion betrays your closest-held beliefs about the value, importance and role of food. And it can be just as divisive as discussing religion, politics or child-rearing. Everyone has an idea of the right way to do things... and it probably isn't the same as yours. Are they judging you for your dietary beliefs? Do they feel judged?

As someone who has struggled with my weight, and gone through many diet revisions over the course of my life, I feel like I've experienced all sides of this interaction, from people looking at my body and my plate and making negative judgments, to people thinking that the time, effort and money I put into my diet is absurd and pretentious. My enthusiasm for food and my passion about its political aspects means that I have almost certainly made others feel awkward or annoyed in the face of my convictions.

And I also know, particularly in today's economic climate, proudly touting that you eat only unprocessed local foods&mdash well, it's nothing short of bragging. Although I think that switching from a Whole Foods/Yuppie Chow diet to a mostly unprocessed local diet based on CSAs and farmers' markets, as we have over the past couple years, has actually saved us money, it can't be denied that it is still a privileged diet. But the more I learn about the state of food and agriculture, the more compelled I feel to vote with my wallet. And then there is the cost in my time&mdash while most nights, we have a simple 20-minute dinner, it takes a lot of time to prepare a few of the foods we enjoy, and I just happen to be borderline obsessive enough to put in that time. So I am in a unique position when it comes to choosing and defining my diet.

When I sat down to write about the Eat Local Challenge, it was going to be a straightforward description of the changes I've made for the month of October, and how I've implemented them in the past week. But I found myself paralyzed. I've come to a strong belief in the value of eating unprocessed foods, naturally raised meats, and lots of produce, as well as the political need to patronize smaller farms. I am proud of the changes I've been making in my diet, and I want people to be more aware of the political issues that I've come to care so much about. I want people to be more informed about food safety and regulation, and about the problems with industrialized food systems, processed foods and corn subsidies. But I find it hard to write about these things for fear of sounding judgmental and preachy.

I'm not a locovore or any sort of -arian or -gan. I eat what I think is delicious and healthy and think you should too. This blog isn't meant to be about politics (there are other great blogs for that), but about the joy of food. I can't help a little politics seeping in here and there, but what I really want to share is that joy.

The joy of eating local is knowing your farms and farmers, and that means knowing your food. Farmers, rather than agribusinesses, know how to make a marbled steak, a rich bright egg yolk, and sweet flavorful milk. Farmers, not agribusinesses, care not just about the technical safety of their product, but about its quality. The range of flavors in local food is broader. I can taste the seasons in the meat and the milk and see them in the comings and goings of produce. Conventional meat, dairy and eggs taste flat in comparison. Having a relationship with my meat farmer, my fish broker, my dairy, and my produce farms has given me access to great advice, excellent recipes, special cuts of meat, cultures for fermented foods like kefir, bulk produce for canning, and introductions to new kinds of seafood.

On the other hand, local farms can't provide me with the grapefruits that I'll certainly become addicted to later in the year or the avocados I miss from my childhood. Local sources can't give me imported spices, refined baking products, most pre-made food, or any number of other delicacies that I plan to enjoy in abundance starting on November 1st. Because I love food, I'll spend November reveling in my flour and sugar and imported products. And because I love food, local meat, produce and dairy will remain the backbone of my diet.

It's October, and that means it's time for pumpkins, apples, and the Eat Local Challenge! For the month of October, I'll be eating almost entirely local, according to the following guidelines:

1. My definition of local: 100 miles OR distributed locally by a CSA.

2. Exemptions: Tea, olive oil, and dried spices, and, on a couple social occasions, wine and restaurant meals. And... flour&mdash I haven't had any luck finding local flour, and for me it is the biggest impediment to eating local. The other exemptions are practically luxuries. Giving up, say, oranges, for a month is doable, but bread, noodles and crackers?! So I'll see how long I can make it before reaching for the flour bucket, but I'll say now that if I need to, I'll use my non-local flour and yeast.

3. My goals for the month: I've been eating mostly local for a while now, and I feel like this month will be akin to a final exam. While I know I'll never be 100% local (even if I could find local flour, I love ethnic restaurants, wine and exotic ingredients toooo much!), I want to see how close I can get with the local resources I've found.

By the way, I have a backlog of entries to post, so if you see some non-local stuff, just know that I'm not cheating, I made it in September!

This month's Daring Baker's challenge turned to the vegan and gluten-free community for a recipe. I am about as far from vegan as one could be, but I respect the huge amount of work that goes into modifying recipes for these diets, and it was great to see a little of that work first hand. By "see," I mean "read the recipe," because, not having any gluten-free flour, I lazily opted to make the non-gluten-free version.

Gluten A Go Go and Musings from the Fishbowl were our hosts for this month's challenge, and you can find the recipe for the lavash crackers on their sites. This is the kind of recipe you can easily commit to memory, make in the background of other kitchen projects, easily change up with different toppings, and pull out whenever the slightest need for crackers arises. Considering how much I loved these things, I see myself doing just that. I used a white whole wheat flour that gave the crackers an addictive nutty sweetness, and topped them with sea salt, sesame seeds and rosemary.

The only requirement for the accompanying dip was that it be gluten-free and vegan, and so I went with a very simple roasted eggplant dip. We've been getting some really fantastic eggplant from the CSA and the farmers market, with a variety of breeds with different flavors and textures. For the dip I used a mix of sweet little fairy tale eggplants, long skinny chinese eggplants, and a few mystery varieties&mdash I find that the mixture makes for a rounded, extra-eggplanty flavor. I chopped the eggplant, seasoned it with cumin, garlic and salt, and cooked it in a baking dish covered with foil at 350 degrees until it was tender. I just puréed the cooked eggplant in the food processor and served it. It was great warm and cold, and an excellent compliment to the crisp cracker.

I liked these crackers so much that I made a double batch a few days later. Freed of the vegan restraints of the challenge, I used an egg wash to adhere the cracker toppings and served it with my homemade pâté.