Hello! I'm Rena Basch and on April 1, 2008 (no joke) I founded Locavorious, a locally grown frozen fruit and vegetable CSA or "community freezer." After being a materials scientist for 20 years, 15 of those in the automotive industry, I wanted to do something more fundamental to environmental sustainability — local food. I love cooking, eating, gardening and browsing at farmers markets, but what really made me a local food enthusiast was a CSA share from Garden Works, an organic farm a mere four miles from the center of Ann Arbor. My mission with Locavorious is to provide locally grown, delicious and healthy frozen fruits and vegetables in the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area, enabling people to benefit the earth and our community by eating locally in the winter.

I highly recommend everyone enjoy the delicious bounty this area offers all summer...and also put some up! Now, after preserving all this yummy food, what the heck do you do with it? That is what I will be blogging about. With the global food industry shipping fresh produce year-round all around, many of us who love to cook grew accustomed to always cooking with fresh. Let's shift gears; I'll share recipes here for cooking with frozen and preserved local food.

While not cooking, I am the Clerk in Ann Arbor Township, a small township with big success preserving farmland, and I'm on the leadership team of the Food System Economic Partnership, a nonprofit dedicated to catalyzing change in the food system of southeast Michigan. I also cook with varying degrees of success for my husband, 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter.