hot (boring) date
Jun. 6th, 2018 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2sOGaMO
Last time I was out of town, Dude got bored. See, when I’m not around, he doesn’t really cook. He tends to just eat take-out. But I’m not around kind of a lot. So eventually he decided he can’t live like that.
Instead of just pulling up his big boy pants and going to the grocery store, he started experimenting with the local grocery options. I know, I know, I– don’t know. Anyway.
He joined the local organic foods co-op, which is $80 for a lifetime membership, so, not a ton. Anyway.
He went once, and bought some weird stuff, and that was that.
But I’m going to be in town for a whole two weeks now, and we need groceries, so I said, ok, take me to this co-op. I know it’s just a grocery store but we can make it a date.
It’s not a date, but it was fun. So anyway– Farmsister belongs to a co-op in Albany, and it’s like, 50% bulk foods. She shows up with a milk crate full of empty jars, and you go inside and get your jars weighed and marked with their tare weight, and then you go fill up your shit. She’s got all kinds of random containers she uses for various things– and this system means, like, if you’re low on vanilla extract but not out of it, you can just bring your bottle of vanilla extract, and have it weighed with the old vanilla still in it, and then go top it off from their dispenser and only be charged for what you bought. For example.
It’s great fun, and she’s got all these weird-ass jars she uses all the time. You also can buy stuff by the case, and when you’re cooking a crew lunch for 8 every single day, that makes a lot of sense. So she buys flour in 25-lb bags, buys the giant pail the peanut butter comes in, and so on.
The Lexington co-op in Buffalo is not like this. There’s no weigh station, and you just dispense the bulk foods into plastic bags, and there’s no liquids to dispense. (Albany’s Honest Weight has things like almond oil and coconut oil and soy sauce you can just pour into jars from the dispenser.) But I know you can buy stuff by the case from them, I just think you have to arrange it ahead of time.
Farmsister goes one better, though– she belongs to a local independent co-op, which is just a collection of people who order straight from the wholesaler. They do one order from a grocery wholesaler and one order from Frontier, which does herbs and spices and cosmetics and such. And once a month, those come in, and you have to meet in a church basement when the truck arrives, and unload the truck and divide up the goods. My mom used to belong to one that worked the same way, it’s a venerable old tradition.
Anyway– I met the truck for her last month and brought home a box of 24 full-size bags of tortilla chips, and 12 1-lb bags of frozen raspberries, and 5 lbs of dry black beans.
But last night we went to the co-op, and I bought a bunch of little tubs of Icelandic yogurt, which means I don’t have to fry myself an egg this morning because I’ve been out of yogurt for weeks and haven’t been able to do my usual breakfast in forever. This still isn’t my usual breakfast but I’ll be interested to try it anyway. I guess Greek yogurt is out and Icelandic is in because I couldn’t find any Greek yogurt.
We also bought a quart of local (ish, Ithaca) pasture-fed Jersey milk for the price of a regular half-gallon. It tastes only subtly different from normal milk but it’s very yellow, which is interesting.
I don’t think anything else was particularly interesting but it turns out I don’t know how to shelve plastic bags full of bulk foods, all my cabinets work best with jars, so I’m going to have to transfer the plastic baggie stuff into jars. If only they’d let me dispense into jars in the first place…. oh well!
(Your picture was not posted)
Last time I was out of town, Dude got bored. See, when I’m not around, he doesn’t really cook. He tends to just eat take-out. But I’m not around kind of a lot. So eventually he decided he can’t live like that.
Instead of just pulling up his big boy pants and going to the grocery store, he started experimenting with the local grocery options. I know, I know, I– don’t know. Anyway.
He joined the local organic foods co-op, which is $80 for a lifetime membership, so, not a ton. Anyway.
He went once, and bought some weird stuff, and that was that.
But I’m going to be in town for a whole two weeks now, and we need groceries, so I said, ok, take me to this co-op. I know it’s just a grocery store but we can make it a date.
It’s not a date, but it was fun. So anyway– Farmsister belongs to a co-op in Albany, and it’s like, 50% bulk foods. She shows up with a milk crate full of empty jars, and you go inside and get your jars weighed and marked with their tare weight, and then you go fill up your shit. She’s got all kinds of random containers she uses for various things– and this system means, like, if you’re low on vanilla extract but not out of it, you can just bring your bottle of vanilla extract, and have it weighed with the old vanilla still in it, and then go top it off from their dispenser and only be charged for what you bought. For example.
It’s great fun, and she’s got all these weird-ass jars she uses all the time. You also can buy stuff by the case, and when you’re cooking a crew lunch for 8 every single day, that makes a lot of sense. So she buys flour in 25-lb bags, buys the giant pail the peanut butter comes in, and so on.
The Lexington co-op in Buffalo is not like this. There’s no weigh station, and you just dispense the bulk foods into plastic bags, and there’s no liquids to dispense. (Albany’s Honest Weight has things like almond oil and coconut oil and soy sauce you can just pour into jars from the dispenser.) But I know you can buy stuff by the case from them, I just think you have to arrange it ahead of time.
Farmsister goes one better, though– she belongs to a local independent co-op, which is just a collection of people who order straight from the wholesaler. They do one order from a grocery wholesaler and one order from Frontier, which does herbs and spices and cosmetics and such. And once a month, those come in, and you have to meet in a church basement when the truck arrives, and unload the truck and divide up the goods. My mom used to belong to one that worked the same way, it’s a venerable old tradition.
Anyway– I met the truck for her last month and brought home a box of 24 full-size bags of tortilla chips, and 12 1-lb bags of frozen raspberries, and 5 lbs of dry black beans.
But last night we went to the co-op, and I bought a bunch of little tubs of Icelandic yogurt, which means I don’t have to fry myself an egg this morning because I’ve been out of yogurt for weeks and haven’t been able to do my usual breakfast in forever. This still isn’t my usual breakfast but I’ll be interested to try it anyway. I guess Greek yogurt is out and Icelandic is in because I couldn’t find any Greek yogurt.
We also bought a quart of local (ish, Ithaca) pasture-fed Jersey milk for the price of a regular half-gallon. It tastes only subtly different from normal milk but it’s very yellow, which is interesting.
I don’t think anything else was particularly interesting but it turns out I don’t know how to shelve plastic bags full of bulk foods, all my cabinets work best with jars, so I’m going to have to transfer the plastic baggie stuff into jars. If only they’d let me dispense into jars in the first place…. oh well!
(Your picture was not posted)
