It doesn't get much more local than this...

So the Huffington Post is issuing a challenge for the last week of February: can you avoid eating out for an entire week?

This will actually be pretty easy for us, as we came to the conclusion last year that eating out—even if you stick to "cheap" restaurants and fast food—costs a lot, and makes us all feel queasy after a while.

It's seductive, the lure of the drive-through. It promises the zipless snack: order a Number Three, tell 'em what size, pick a drink, and pay at the window. But for us at least, too many days of greasy food left us feeling thick and full of grease ourselves.

And a number of things started changing. First of all, it was rejuvenating to get back in touch with the creative side of cooking. I've always enjoyed the act of changing ingredients into a meal, the subtle alchemy of spices and seasonings, the application of heat to turn raw eggs into an omelette, to turn white onions into brown soup. It can be a challenge to make something, day in and day out, that all four of us like; one doesn't like spice, the other doesn't like cheese, so we eat a lot of Asian food because everybody likes rice and soy sauce. (We must be one of the few non-Asian families in North America who keep a vase full of chopsticks in the middle of the kitchen table, just like at a pho restaurant. Which is where we got the idea.)

Even on my own for a week or so last summer, as Kim took the kids down to visit a fair subset of the grandparents and cousins, I made a point of making something extraordinary. One of my Flickr sets includes a photo essay of how to get those perfect diamond-shaped grill marks on a steak, just the way they do at a restaurant.

So with the Week of Eating In just around the corner, I'll be updating this blog with our menus, and of course with an emphasis on locally available produce, meat, and naturally, beer and wine. That's one of the great advantages of living in suburban Portland, Oregon: getting really great local beer here is like asking for a nice sparkling wine in Epernay. You're soaking in it!