I'm so unsettled, it feels like I hardly have a stomach. Not in a bad way, I don't think. As of yesterday, I've had to face the very real possibility I have no nemesis. It may radically change my world view. If he isn't evil incarnate, maybe Hannah Arendt was even righter than I thought she was about that banality thing, and the evil comes facelessly in the social and institutional machine.
Next, I'm going to promote a specific brand. Harmony Milk. Probably only available in Ontario. It's organic, but since it comes in cute little bottles that you can return for a substantial refund it works out to be slightly cheaper than normal milk. It reminds me of the milk my grandparents used to get delivered to their door every morning - in the pint bottles, fresh and unpasteurized so the fatty creamy stuff floats to the top and makes your cereal or even a cunt of a Nescafe into a little piece of heaven. Mmmmm. Anyways, as long as Ontario retains its absurd pasteurization laws, Harmony is the tastiest cow milk out there and underprices goat milk by $1.57. After refund.
Figaro and I have been trying to eat organic food, which isn't the easiest thing to do because we're broke. I dropped out of the Food Share programme because our drop-off point, at least, was plagued by incompetence and only delivers every other week, if that. That made things harder because they're cheap. There are other organic food-share programmes but in all honesty I like food shopping too much to pay that little extra for them.
I love food shopping. I could do it professionally. And not just in chi-chi places full of pretty things like Pusateri's, either. I'll get a thrill from the lousiest, grimiest No Frills in the city, which is good because that's the one across the road from us. Probably because of my starving peasant background, it's so damn exciting to see all that food from all over the province and the world. And then deciding which bits of it I'm going to buy, prepare and eat - sheer joy. Not to mention the shelving choices that face you with surreal little surprises. I thought I had to go seven or eight blocks to buy Marmite, for example, but it turns out No Frills stocks it in the baking section next to the bread-yeast products.
Now that the organic farmer's market is gone for the winter (it was an exercise in country hippies ripping city hippes off, but I wanted to encourage the brand) organic food shopping is slightly more difficult than normal food shopping because the pricing patterns are absurd. At the organic shop just up the street, some food items are well cheaper than in the shop in Kensington that has other items well cheaper. Produce is especially expensive at the shop here, which sucks because we eat alot of it. And then Dominion underprices them both on organic bananas, which, however, tend to be too green for me. Not to mention they're almost the only organic stock that Dominion carries, besides a carrots-and-kale corner I visit more out of duty than love.
12 commenti:
Don't even get me started on Ontario's pasturization laws! Grr..
This might sound very silly, but I didn't even really know what organic meant until recently. I didn't realize that practically the first 20 years of my life was raised about 75 - 80% organic! Who knew...I thought it was some bizarre hippie thing. Turns out you just have to live on a farm in the boondocks. :)
We've just bought Tink his first carton of homo milk and I'm trying not to drink it all myself. I forgot how yummy 3.25% milk tasted. I've been trying to exist on 1%...
I know alot of farm-types who were raised on a diet us city-folk pay through the nose for. As for me, I'm lucky enough to have an Italian father with a gardening fixation.
I'm contenting myself with 2%. The Harmony milk tastes richer at 2% than the normal brands taste at homo. Try it.
You are my shopping opposite. If it wasn't such a banal thing I might call you my shopping nemesis - but then again, I also buy a lot of organic produce and had participated in that whole farmer drop off thing that was so poorly organized (different farmer - similar frustrations except they did show up every week). I guess the only difference is that I hate shopping in grocery stores because I feel like their bitch when they overcharge me for low quality produce from California but I'm too lazy to go elsewhere (I have been trying to buy local more than organic - when they intercept that is a good thing). It's not so easy here when the farmer's market is gone.
Maybe because we're further south and closer to the produce farmers, it's pretty easy to buy Ontario produce; local and organic generally intercept here, besides the obvious like pomegranates and bananas. I buy so many bananas I might as well be a monkey.
My shopping is a little more compressed than yours maybe - I live right on the arterial road of my neighbourhood so the shitty No Frills and the organic store are both a stone's throw from my front door. When the farmer's market was on, it was even closer to me than yours was to you. So shopping is easy for me.
That doesn't explain the shopping opposites, though, because I'm willing to cross town to get what I want. I'm guessing more people starved in my ethnic ancestry than did in yours so the commercial availability of food in all its forms is more beautiful to me now. Clever Finns.
Yes, we just hoarded food in our basements or some other shed. Just like I am doing with squash and pumpkins now in my back room. Well, it isn't easy to deny what is built into us.
Why should we deny it? Especially when it comes to yummy yummy food. We have some squash that needs cooking, maybe I'll make a nice soup tonight.
Sounds like you're going to have a lovely dinner. I need the dude to make squash soup. He has the patience to chop and peel. I cut in half and bake. Much faster and less chopping.
You know you can peel squash with a good veggie-peeler? Try it. It works and it's damn quick.
Another way to do it is to boil the squash first and then peel it. The skin comes off easily enough. Then you can cut it in cubes and put them in a blender. Anyway, this works with Japanese kabocha pumpkins, but it should work with squash too. The kabocha soup is pretty good too even when you leave the skin on, except that it turns green rather than yellow.
My aunt does that with butternut squash. Or she bombs them skin on in the microwave, which was so weird and interesting to me because I thought microwaves were only for heating my lunch at work on rainy days.
I got it wrong... you boil the kabocha and then scoop the flesh into the blender. Microwaves are also good for science experiments.
Maybe butternut has a more tender skin because you can just pull it right off. The skin is surprisingly thin, it just seems awkward because the uncooked flesh of the squash is so hard.
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