We don't eat out.

Not that we don't appreciate good cuisine: French, Italian, Thai, Mexican or good pizza, or the best place to get breakfast -- eggs, home fries, toast, strong coffee -- or good fast food. We do, very much.

That's why we eat at home.

Michele's famous line when we sit down to a good breakfast or lunch (dinner is a small or non-event at Long Meadow Farm) is, "Do you know how much you would pay for this?"

A lot.

Or, more likely, you wouldn't be able to buy the great food we eat at home in a restaurant or the ingredients in a supermarket.

Not to brag, but here are some examples:

* Pizza on Friday: Crust made from flour from nearby Webb Family Farm, Pittston; spinach and (frozen) green peppers from our farm; tomato sauce (our own canned tomatoes); garlic scape pesto topping (frozen since last July); mozzarella from Hannaford's. Jaymie, our new apprentice with pizza restaurant experience, announced, "This is the best pizza I've ever had."

We did not solicit this response.

* Sunday breakfast: Our own organic potato home fries; free range eggs from the backyard chickens and toast made from local wheat flour (Webb Family Farm, again). OK, the coffee and orange juice are "from away," but they are real and unadulterated.

Our dim memories of past restaurant breakfasts (usually on the road) were of mushy home fries, pale, tasteless eggs and nutritionally worthless white bread toast, or possibly rye of unknown origin.

* Then there is the salad. When you pick the lettuce and spinach greens that you are going to eat for lunch as you are on the way into the house at noontime, the difference between that and supermarket salad is astonishing. As Mark Twain might say, it is "the difference between lightning and the lightning bug" -- and it feels very healthy going down.

The word "elitist" is thrown about when some think about organic, locally grown food. But it is not elitist to grow your own food. My own heritage is Irish and German, definitely pointing toward peasant forebears, with possibly a dash of Genghis Khan as he spread his genes across northern Europe and Asia a millennium ago. That explains my father's Mongolian eyes, which I did not inherit.

My upbringing was mainline suburban in the 1950s and '60s when the "miracle" of frozen, processed and fast food enthralled everyone. TV dinners meant we ate pre-heated frozen food in front of the television; fish on Friday (for Catholics like us) meant fish sticks or macaroni and cheese. I can remember lunches of Campbell soups and evening meals of Chef Boyardee ravioli or canned spaghetti.

It's too late for me to sue my parents for nutritional neglect.

I had to move to Maine (in 1976) to understand the spectacular taste of really fresh fish, especially the lowly mackerel and the princely halibut. Same-day mackerel, split and lightly broiled, is about the best-tasting fish dish around. Two-day-old mackerel is another story, however, and should be avoided. When I was fishing for a living, an occasional grouping of mackerel would be seined with the herring we were after, so we knew how fresh they were. Otherwise, it's not easy.

And for me, the remembrance of freshly caught halibut is a distant, but still vivid, memory. My last halibut was in 1983, fresh off the boat, with a flavor and texture both exquisitely delicate and sensuous.

Fast food? For breakfast, organic oatmeal from the Belfast Co-op (bought in 50-pound bags), with some cut-up Maine apples and our own maple syrup for a sweetener, only takes five minutes to fix -- about as long as you might wait on a Dunkin' Donuts take-out line. And for lunch, leftovers from the night before are about as fast as you can get.

For those of us who complain about "not having enough time" to prepare good food from scratch -- aside from the few who have high-stress 14-hour-a-day jobs, there are the many who spend five hours a day in front of the TV or computer (you choose). Just stealing two of those hours each day would be enough to grow your own food and cook it, too.

Or as Yogi Berra might have said, "growing and eating great food is 90 percent mental and 40 percent physical."

Denis Thoet, with his partner Michele Roy, own and manage Long Meadow Farm in West Gardiner, longmeadowfarm@roadrunner. com