Eat Local offers regionally sourced food that's dinner-ready

So it's time to go to another primary-night potluck party, and you can't show up with the usual chips and dip. Those chips were probably made with bioengineered, pesticide-drenched corn, and the milk used to make the cream-cheese dip most likely came from totally hormonal cows.

Forget about ordering a pineapple pizza. It's bad enough that the pineapple was trucked in from Mexico (where it was no doubt picked by workers paid tragically low wages), but now the delivery kid's gas-guzzling car is going to spew all sorts of crud into the air getting it to you. Neither Barack nor Hillary would approve.

With the gospel of locally produced food winning more adherents by the day -- not just at the farmers market, but among your favorite restaurants and chefs who want to do the right thing -- it's only natural that the premade-meal market would follow suit. Eat Local in Queen Anne specializes in frozen take-home dinners crafted with ingredients sourced from organic and sustainable farms within a few hundred miles of Seattle.

The bright, light-filled shop is lined with freezers stocked with all sorts of choices, from party platters to family dinners, cheesecakes and brunch quiches. Tomato-confit-and-hazelnut canapes ($13.98 for 12) are made with Washington hazelnuts on a puff pastry. Dips ($7/$15 for 16 or 32 ounces) like carrot-mint; walnut and red pepper; or chickpea and saffron can be paired with handmade sesame, butter or flaxseed crackers.

Whole-wheat crust pizzas ($10.98) are topped with Mutschli alpine-style cheese and handcrafted Italian sausage. The menu of more than 40 items, from single- to family-size servings, with entrees, starters, sides and dessert, is staggering, and the staff is great at helping you design the right meal.

Free-range chicken breast with roasted apricots goes great with the roasted root vegetable side. Or perhaps you'd like a Manny's Shepherd's Pie, local grass-fed beef and lamb simmered in the Georgetown brewery's Chopper Red beer.

Vegetarian and gluten-free options are, of course, in the mix as well. And you can even pair your meal with a private-label wine from Mount Baker Vineyards ($15-$25) and serve it on an exclusive collection of pottery made for Eat Local by Port Townsend artist Lorna Smith.

The year-old shop is the project of Greg Connor, a former sustainability consultant who made a living telling people how to do food the right way but couldn't find a locally produced meal to feed himself.

He has made Eat Local a model of environmental consciousness, with eco-friendly reusable glass or plastic containers, Zipcars in the parking lot and a bike rack for the car-sharing members to lock their wheels to. You can even have Connor's goods delivered right to your door through his partnership with the organic grocery service Spud.com.

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