A few things before bed

[mousme]

I went shopping at Loblaws yesterday.

1- Food is becoming stupidly expensive. I categorically refuse to spend $6.00 on American broccoli. Broccoli is not worth $6.00. I am going to go to my local fruit & veggies store and see if theirs is cheaper (and hopefully locally-grown!).

I am looking at the food I eat lately, in terms of how far it's had to travel to get to me, and it makes the mind boggle. Does anyone out there know of a good book which can tell me what kind of fruits (apart from apples) are grown locally? What the hell did people do before oranges and lemons were consistently available in cold climates?

Anyway.

2- I brought my two eco-bags with me, and am pleased to report that all my shopping fit in them, apart from potatoes, cat litter and cat food, for which I didn't use bags at all. Normally that would have taken at least six or seven plastic bags (and if I'd put the big stuff in bags too, it'd be more like twenty bags!).

More on this later. I am working out a plan in my head to get my grocery shopping done entirely without the use of a gasoline-dependent machine. However, I'm not there yet.

3- People are, fundamentally, pretty okay. I was trying to get the cat litter off a high shelf, and since it was almost all gone, the containers were wedged way at the back of the shelf. I am not short (5'7" which is the national average for women my age), but my fingers didn't *quite* reach that far. So I asked a woman taller than I if she could bring down a container for me, and she complied, although she looked a bit bemused. It was nice. :)

4- I bought a pot roast. They were on sale for something like $1.99 a pound. Tomorrow I shall stick it in my slow-cooker, or something like that, and have a lovely meal. Several lovely meals, more like.

Now I am off to bed. I've been getting to sleep far too late, these days.

Comments

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Really? Cool. Must learn to make sauerkraut. Is it the sauerkraut specifically, or the cabbage itself?

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Ah, gotcha. Sorry.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

I just dumped mine in the slow-cooker a few minutes ago. I am looking forward to tonight.

Would you be willing to post your recipe to recipe_trade? I found a slow-cooker recipe online, and if it turns out well I'll post it too. Oh, wait. Unless yours is already in response to toughlovemuse's post on pot roast? *goes to check*

[ai731.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. I was livid one time in November when oranges and lemons and limes from California and Africa were on sale and I couldn't find a single bag of local cranberries; which should have been in season, dammit.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we weren't thrilled with the cranberry pot roast recipe, though you might like it better than we did. I think I'm going to do this one just with onions & potatoes & turnips & maybe even some kind of bean.

[curtana.livejournal.com]

No offence taken :)

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Both. Cabbage is generally very good, and fermenting is generally very good, so fermented cabbage is excellent. KimChi (Japanese/Korean spicy fermented cabbage with extra fish sauce) is up at the top of the list of anti-cancer foods. There's a good book by a local doctor who has done a ton of research into food: "Les Aliments Contre Le Cancer" I keep meaning to look for it in Chapters or Indigo.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Good to know. Mine is a much more basic recipe involving mushroom soup mix and a lot of onions. ;)

[mousme.livejournal.com]

If I see a copy anywhere, I'll be sure to let you know.

Chapters and Indigo have a disheartening dearth of John Seymour books, except a $50 hardcover version of "The Self-Sufficient Life." Would you be willing to lend me your copy until such time as I can get my hands on one which won't bankrupt me? :)

[ai731.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised they don't carry many of his books. A) they're very UK-focussed, and B) except the most recent edition of The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency, I wouldn't be surprised it they are all out of print. You're welcome to borrow the afore-mentioned recent edition, since I have one each of the most recent edition and the edition prior.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Brilliant, thank you! :)

I am sad that they're likely out of print. Some of them look really interesting, especially the "Lost Arts & Crafts" ones.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Really? Not even cranberries? Argh!

How hard is it to grow cranberries, do you suppose?

[mellybean71.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I only skimmed the comments so I don't know if this has been covered but there's a store in NDG that is organic and supposedly very well priced. They have a lot of local stuff.

You could try contacting the Maison Vert co-op and asking them if they could reccomend places with local stuff. They also have a lot of good eco-friendly stuff.

I'll ask around at my Church too.

[fruity-spikey.livejournal.com]

www.marmiton.org

is the website i was telling you about , in french and very good recipes !

[joane.livejournal.com]

I think you need a bog for cranberries; I don't know if they can be cultivated at the backyard level with any real efficacy.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

They have them again now, frozen rather than fresh (which is fine, because I was just going to throw them in the freezer anyway for our weekly muffins); but I was really annoyed at the time that all this out-of-season imported stuff was cheap and I couldn't buy the local in-season fruit that I wanted.

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

What the hell did people do before oranges and lemons were consistently available in cold climates?

Cannot resist the family anecdote: My grandmother was a homesteader in rural Manitoba and she had at least one childhood winter where frost came before the harvest, and she ate nothing - NOTHING - but pickled fish and potatoes for eight months. She lived to 95 so I guess it didn't hurt her, but... **shudder**
On the other hand, she got all her vitamin C needs met via those potatoes. And by the time my mother was born, the family ate homegrown, home-canned tomatoes, rhubarb and high-bush cranberries all winter long. It made for some funny food combinations; to this day, many Manitobans whose ancestors were Polish homesteaders douse their perogies with jam. But if jam is the only fruit you have, you're going to come up with some funny culinary traditions to reflect that.

Much as I love eating locally, I know what that means if you are strict about it, and it just isn't for me. The occasional orange or avocado will not kill the environment - the biggest environmental concern is packaged food, where the ingredients have been around the world several times being processed and assembled. I think it is possible to go a long, long way to minimising your footprint without being rigid about it. Packaged food, home heating, and cars are the biggies to keep low.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not planning on Eliminating All Citrus F0r3v4h ZOMG! or anything like that. ;)

It just occurred to me that, supposing it was The End Of The World As We Know It, and all transportation broke down, that I would likely never see an orange or a lemon again, except under very rare circumstances.

And then I wondered just what people did for Vitamin C when there was no citrus around.

Pickled fish and potatoes, eh? I suppose it builds character. :P

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Also, I owe you a debt of gratitude: I shamelessly raided your userinfo for nifty-looking communities, and am now a member of two or three. :)

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't mean to suggest you *personally* were planning to eliminate all citrus, but there are a lot of people who think everyone should eat exclusively locally all the time, and just thinking about them makes me feel all refute-y. I think they mostly live in California, so it's easy for *them* to say! I am generally on board with the locavore movement, but I don't think it's necessary to make a religion of it, which unfortunately many people currently seem to be doing. I blame Alice Waters. :)

I am always happy and impressed to find another non-B.C. Canadian who is even trying to eat locally, though, which is what prompted me to answer. I eat 95% locally and even that sometimes feels a bit sacrificial.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Dude, you should meet my friends: lots of them are getting more and more hardcore into eating locally. (Love the term "locavore" btw: is it one of your invention?) I am trying to find local stuff as much as I can, but since I'm just starting out in this, I'm finding it a little difficult to locate the places that sell local food.

I've been reading your posts (I just realized yesterday that LJ never accepted my request to add you to my flist for whatever reason), and I am very interested by that hot-pot thing you have in one of your entries (the one in which you made that delicious-looking bread). What is that, and where can I get one? :)

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'm so glad you like my pot! I am absurdly fond of it. It's a Le Creuset goose pot that is older than I am - it was my mother's. Le Creuset still makes them, but they are not as shapely as they used to be, plus they now have plastic knobs. I bet you can get one from Caplan-Duval.

I wish I could claim the word "locavore", which is a truly great word, but I believe it was actually coined by the California foodies at locavore.com. I don't think I could be manage to eat as locally as I do if I bought my produce at grocery stores; I rely on organic co-operatives and CSAs.

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

er, make that, www.locavores.com.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Oh, Le Creuset! Say no more. :)

Too bad about the plastic knob. Why would one put that in an oven, anyway? Maybe (one day, when I have money), I'll find an older one on eBay. I don't know what Caplan-Duval is, but I shall keep an eye open.

So, if I understand rightly, it's kind of like a pot that keeps the heat long enough that one can cook an entire goose in it?

Also, what's a CSA?

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Thanks!