One thing people never count on is all the stuff your taxes pay for, that you end up paying for in other ways. Things like trash collection, sewer, water, library services, snow plows, etc. You move away and either you pay yourself or you do without.
They’re actually assessing how much of an outcry there’ll be, so they know how sharp the inevitable slap on the wrist should look.
I wanna build a tree house and live symbiotically.
Were you doing this from the same IP address? Cause some places check for that kind of thing.
I still mask up when I go into stores or offices or whatever. Got all my boosters, too.
I can see where that’s gonna be hard. You might try local harvest.org , though that’s less helpful than it used to be - I think something happened during the pandemic and they stopped double-checking the listings were still good each year, but it’s the last site I had for finding good CSAs.
Sadly, no:
Bakers, bakeries and bakers shops were required by law only to sell their ‘national loaves’ when they were a day old because stale bread did not cut to waste like fresh bread. Source
[If you can find it, the BBC Timeshift episode ‘Bread: A Loaf Affair’ mentions this along with a surprisingly interesting modern-ish history of bread in the UK. It’s narrated by Tom Baker.]
And WWII.
Search for CSAs near you. A CSA is Community Supported Agriculture. Usually a farmer has to borrow money from the bank at the start of the season to buy seeds, service the machines, hire the hands, etc, and hope to have a good enough crop to pay back at the end of the year. In a CSA, the farmer figures out his much they need to make all that happen, plus insurance, living expenses, some money for improvements and retirement, etc, etc. They figure out how much did they think they’ll produce that year and how many people it would feed, then sell the shares at a price that brings in the money they need to keep the farm running: they’re no longer dependent on the bank.
They’re also no longer dependent on the big agriculture practice of having your crops harvested early, sent to a middleman for sorting and packaging, sent to a distributor, sent to a warehouse, before finally sitting in the back of a grocery store before it gets put out, where the under-ripe produce is sold to you and you have like a week to eat it before it goes bad.
Instead the produce is brought in the day before distribution, so it’s at or close to the peak of ripeness and has more flavor. Since it’s not spending time traveling between middlemen, it lasts longer in your fridge. Since it’s not being bounced around lots of places, you get access to a wider range of things than normally show up: my CSA plants several types of regular tomatoes, but also a bunch of heirloom tomatoes as well. We get regular basil, yes, but also twelve other types of basil - lemon, Thai, red rubin, lime, holy, etc. My CSA also grows some fruit: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, figs, watermelon, paw-paws and pumpkins.
Each week, I get a large box of pre-picked food, plus I can pick some more in the fields if I want. Thursday night, I sit in front of the tv and cut everything up, Friday I go grocery shopping, Saturday I cook 2-3 large meals then stick half the servings in the fridge and the other half in the freezer. Odds and ends will get tossed into a salad for the week; larger amounts may get frozen, or pickled or canned or dried for later on. I get enough each year that I can eat most of my meals from farm produce, and it’s all made specifically to my taste and without a ton of chemicals in it.
I should note that I also assume some risk with my share: if it’s a great harvest year, I’ll get extra, but if it’s a bad harvest – well, prices would’ve increased at the store as well, so I figure it works out. I think mine was like $700 for a full share for 26 weeks which, like I said, it feeds me for an entire year, so the rest of my weekly grocery budget is like $20-25 (and I could get by on a lot less if I needed to). That said, I get an awful lot of food for the money - you can usually sign up for smaller/partial shares (or split it with a friend), and some places have shares available on an alternate-week schedule or let you choose which weeks you want to get it (which is useful for avoiding lettuce month, lol).
Some places will deliver to your door, some you pick up at various drop-off locations or farmers markets, some you have to pick up at the farm - when you look into it, don’t just look at the farm location, look into where you can get your food from, which may be closer to you. Oh, and some include or have add-ons for other things like honey or eggs. And there are also CSA’s for things beyond veggies: there are CSAs for meat, dairy, grains, mushrooms, etc.
Anyway - search for CSAs near you, check them out for drop-off/delivery options even if the farm isn’t in your immediate area, and see what turns up!
In the UK, bakers were forbidden from selling bread on the day it was baked, in order to make it more stale and reduce demand.
Ah. So, I get a farm share every week. ‘Planning’ is looking at the list of what I’m getting and figuring out what I can make from it - although I’ve been doing this long enough that I actually have a selection of recipes that I re-use year to year, so I spend more time digging the recipe out then I do actually ‘planning’.
The weekly shopping is usually about 5 ‘missing’ ingredients that I need for my chosen dishes, plus whatever staples I’ve run out of. I usually go shortly before the store closes for the night, and it takes about 15 minutes.
Making a meal falls into three parts: prep, cook, and clean. I used to hate the ‘boring, standing on my aching feet’ prep bit, so I’d try to fit the prep into the little gaps in cooking. Of course, 8 couldn’t do it and I had to keep adjusting things - taking something off heat/down heat, whatever - to finish the prep for the next stage. The constant adjustments made the food not as good, the cooking unnecessarily stressful, and left me exhausted with a sink full of dishes at the end.
Nowadays, I sit in front of the tv. I do my prep there, all the peeling and chopping and slicing and dicing. When I cook, everything is ready for me to add to the dish, so the food tastes better and cooking itself is much less stressful. And I use the little bits of spare time during cooking to rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. When I’m done cooking, I only have the last handful of things to put in the dishwasher, plus whatever plates from the meal itself.
My life is much easier, all because I now watch TV.
The First Nations aren’t going to be happy with this
I went to a party that lasted all weekend. We weren’t drinking or anything else, so I want to emphasize I did all this to myself, completely sober:
We were tossing lightsticks back and forth in the dark; I was barefoot. I leaped up to catch a lightstick; when I came down, my right foot landed fully on some kind of spiny, prickly, thorny plant, and I got a bunch of the pointy spiny bits embedded into the sole of my foot. This was particularly ironic, as I had made a point of pointing out the plant to everyone else earlier and telling them to avoid it.
The toilet backed up and I had to clear it with a plunger that had a broken handle. I cleared the toilet, and also managed to flay about a fifth of the skin off the palm of my right hand.
I slipped on the stairs and wrenched my back pretty badly. The dog ran underfoot and I sprained my left ankle. Something else happened, I don’t even remember what, and I injured my right hip.
The worst part was that I had driven myself and a group of friends to this party, which meant I had to be the one who drove us back: my car had a manual transmission and no one else knew how to drive stick. So envision this:
My right foot, with the spikes still in it, was used for the gas and the brake. My left foot, with the sprained ankle, had to delicately balance the clutch as we drove up and down these narrow back hills. There was no way to balance my weight on my injured right hip, so every movement on the gas or clutch put some torque on the hip - as well as twisting my injured back. And I had to shift with my right hand wrapped like a mummy’s, but the shifting pressure was still on the part of my hand with the flap of skin. And the roads just kept jostling every single injury I had.
It was an incredibly, insanely painful drive home. And it was still one of the best parties I’ve ever been to.
I’ve been saying for years that the insanely heavy-handed politics of both Florida and Texas aren’t an accident nor are they a miscalculation. They’re a deliberate policy to drive out liberals, attract conservatives, and ensure that both Florida and Texas (and their precious, precious electoral college votes) remain red.
Are they looking meaningfully at you while they’re doing it?
Asking for bribes, no doubt …
The day after the ICC said they had evidence of Israel’s war crimes, including video evidence, but I’m sure that had no bearing on their decision …
Jam is mashed, preserves have chunks of fruit. With some fruits it’s hard to leave large china during processing (like raspberries, which break easily when properly ripe), at which point raspberry preserves might have less sugar then raspberry jam.