I know I wrote a while back that the babies had stolen my taste for coffee. Well, I’m happy to report, I got my love of coffee back, and thank goodness, because not only am I sleep deprived, but we’ve found an awesome local (to Little Rock) source for awesome Guatemalan coffee that comes with a little something extra. Leiva’s Coffee is to coffee and philanthropy what Toms Shoes is to shoes and philanthropy, only instead of just giving away shoes (or I guess they’d be giving away coffee?), they invest in Guatemalan communities. The coffee itself is farmer-direct, and they use their profits to fund housing, schools, and health clinics. If you already drink coffee anyway, why not choose a product that gives you great farmer-direct coffee that makes the world a better place?
Full disclosure: while my husband is acquainted with Geovanni Leiva from his work with YoungLife, I have never met anyone from Leiva’s Coffee, and they have no idea I’m writing this post. I wasn’t compensated in any way, and in fact, we buy 2 pounds of their bold roast coffee per month through their coffee club subscription. It’s delicious in our French Press.
One of my only cravings so far: Wendy's Spicy Chicken.
So, big news yesterday, huh? I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. Jon and I just look at each other and laugh. I keep saying to him, “TWINS?!” The word must always be typed in all caps, with extra punctuation. Everyone around us is so super excited, but as Jon says, “Everyone’s excited about twins…so long as someone else is having them.” Our entire world has been turned upside down, and it’s going to take a while for it all to feel real, I’m sure.
One of the things Jon said to me, in between all of the TWINS!? talk was: we’re gonna have to revise your estimated wait gain. And: “you’re gonna be SO BIG!” I’m having a hard time imagining myself getting SO BIG, because I’m having a hard time eating at all.
It’s not that I’m puking my guts out and unable to eat. (I’m knocking on wood, but I haven’t puked yet!) It’s not that I have weird food aversions (my friend who is having a baby any day now has had to avoid chicken for her entire pregnancy because it makes her want to puke). It’s that absolutely no food sounds good to me in the slightest. I can’t even picture myself eating anything, let alone working up the energy to figure out something that sounds appetizing and prepare myself something to eat. A complete and total lack of energy has been my major symptom so far, and I’ve been getting plenty of sleep at night, as well as regularly taking 3 hour naps. I have no energy to think about food, which is weird, because I’m kind of a foodie. See that whole tab up there, dedicated to food?
I will say that I finally understand this whole pregnancy craving thing. It never made any sense to me before, because hey, don’t we all crave foods sometimes? But it’s not like we’re going to die if we don’t get them, and why are pregnant women allowed to pretend their cravings are just UNSTOPPABLE? I still don’t feel like my cravings are any stronger than the cravings I got when I wasn’t pregnant, but when my default state is now total apathy to feeding myself, actually wanting and being excited about eating a particular food is a considerable improvement over the status quo. So, if I crave a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich, that’s what I’m having, dammit, because it’s something I’m willing to eat, and that’s better than nothing.
Supposedly I’m supposed to be consuming an extra 1,000 600 calories per day. So far, I’m positive that’s not happening. I’m eating about as much as I did before. I’m making a real effort not to be a nervous nellie about all things pregnancy, so I figure for now, unless my doctor or the doctor I live with tell me differently, I will attempt to listen to my body, like always, and eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full. So I finally went to the store and bought a bunch of stuff that I don’t have to cook. Things like pad thai noodle bowls and frozen pizza and whatnot. It solves the problem of having no energy to think about or make food, and it works out fine because I’m not actually opposed to any foods at this point. So, food in boxes is where I’m at. Because eating is better than not eating, even though I’m usually Little Miss All Natural Sustainable Foods.
Last Saturday I actually made it to the Farmer’s Market. This was my haul:
Don’t you love how I subconsciously arranged everything in ROYGBIV order? I swear it wasn’t intentional.
I figured it might be fun to turn my Farmer’s Market trips into posts about how we eat for a week on our delicious local produce.
The cukes and the yellow squash immediately became pickles, the squash joining some zucchinis we had grown to become summer squash bread and butter pickles (seriously, such a good recipe, though I skip the whole ice bath part and they still turn out just dandy), and the cukes becoming my absolute favorite, I swear they’re as good as Claussen’s, dill refrigerator pickles.
pickles in progress
The gorgeous heirloom tomatoes and the Japanese eggplant joined some mozzarella and some home-grown basil to become a delicious margherita pizza.
Look at that tomato flesh. So red, it's almost black.
The pattypan squash was sauteed in olive oil with home-grown herbs and served alongside a red lentil salad with heirloom tomatoes, and some tilapia.
And the remainder of the squash, eggplant, and tomato were turned into a sort of ratatouille which we ate with goat cheese over pearl couscous:
This was eaten alongside some tomato and onion focaccia I made using some tomatoes we grew in our community garden:
Truly the most beautiful bread I have ever baked, and also one of the tastiest.
Finally, the blackberries were mixed with honey, lemon zest, and corn starch and topped with a few pats of butter and a cornmeal crust to become personal-pan cobblers:
All in all, a delicious week of largely local food!
So, food blogging. It’s something I have definitely fallen down on, what with being busy with learning about literature and generally falling out of regular blogging in the post-a-day way I used to do. But, I’m still a total foodie, and have been meaning to get back into geeking out about food.
Add to that, I was recently chatting with a friend about our less-meatarian diet, and she was asking me questions about what our meals actually look like. It’s definitely hard, when first transitioning to a less-meat diet, to figure out what to put on a plate that isn’t a meat and two sides. Mark Bittman addresses this in his book (an AMAZING resource) How to Cook Everything Vegetarian:
Even those people who do cook at home reckon that the easiest way to anchor a meal is to throw a steak or a chicken breast on the grill or under the broiler and scatter a few nominal vegetables around it…But a vegetarian meal is more commonly a table with a few dishes on it, all of them of equal importance…The grain is not less valuable than the cooked vegetable, the salad, or the bread: they’re all there to compliment one another. Pickles you made yourself, a nice piece of cheese, or a bowl of nuts–all are valid courses in the vegetarian meal.
Now, Bittman is certainly not a vegan (note the cheese reference), and neither am I. I choose to eat much less meat than the average American for environmental, humanitarian, and health reasons. I try to follow the dictates of Michael Pollan’s famous maxim: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. I try to eat food, by which he means whole ingredients, rather than food products or processed foods. And I try to eat more plant-based foods. But I still eat fish, eggs, and cheese, and the occasional ethically-raised meat when I can afford it.
Anyway, I figured that a weekly roundup of what we actually eat might help friends looking to transition to a less-meat diet get some ideas about what less-meat meals actually look like. These posts will be characterized by most-likely iPhone photography of our meals, which, I confess, more often than not are eaten on TV trays in our living room while we watch something from our DVR. I’ll share links to recipes when I can, or share which cookbooks the recipes came from. My two most frequently used cookbooks are both by Bittman– the aforementioned How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and The Food Matters Cookbook.
So, what did our meals this week look like?
This meal was definitely the most veggie-licious of our week. I tossed a bunch of sliced veggies (red bell pepper, zucchini, squash, onion, grape tomatoes) with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, garlic, and some Herbes de Provence. I broiled them for about 15 minutes while I made some pearl couscous and cooked a couple of pieces of fish in a skillet. Such a tasty and colorful meal. The fish was really not even necessary. Might have poached an egg and served it on top or just tossed in some chickpeas for a fish-free version.
This is a common meal for us. Cuban-style black beans (I skip the radishes) over coconut rice (the idea for the rice came from this recipe). Almost always eaten with a Cuba Libre (rum and Coke with a lime).
Do those veggies look familiar? They’re leftover from meal #1. I cut them into bite sized pieces, sauteed them til warm, and then added some eggs and gruyere cheese to the mix, for a sort of veggie scramble. I do some variation of this a lot when I have leftover veggies that need to be used up.
Our other meals this week: cheese dip and margaritas and guacamole at a fave Mexican restaurant. Cheese dip and salsa another night too. Chicken and veggie pizza from another fave place. And Mexican night at our church. Might be avoiding anything with a Mexican flavor for this next week!
Anthony Bourdain: the face of immorality in America?
I’m a foodie. To ask B.R. Meyers of The Atlantic, this apparently makes me an immoral hedonist, whose insatiable appetite for food and pleasure and elitism will be the downfall of our civilization (seriously, he references the fall of the Roman empire and manages to blame it on food).
Meyers’ piece reads like a particularly strident sermon against what he sees as gluttony, and he lumps a wide variety of people together in order to make his case against the immorality of people who dare to enjoy their food. What do Anthony Bourdain and Michael Pollan have in common? I like both, and both think people should cook more and enjoy food more, but they have pretty different food philosophies. Bourdain probably does fall closest to Meyers’ hedonist vision of a foodie, being a big fan of pork products of all sorts, and unafraid to eat even the nastiest bits of an animal in his worldwide quest for good food on his Travel Channel show. He’s sort of like the Dr. House of food: abrasive, provocative, selfish–he’s doing it on purpose to get a rise out of people like Meyers. But as a longtime fan of Bourdain’s, I think he’s really a softie. He gets off on the kindness and similarities of people all over the world as much as he does a greasy pile of pork, and he’s so very genuinely warm with even the poorest folks who share meals with him on his travels. Sure, he’s known for his profanity-filled bestsellers about the food industry, but he’s a secret softie.
Pollan, on the other hand, comes at foodie-ism from an environmentalist point of view. His mantra, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” is about a more sustainable way of eating, not dependent on industrial farming and emissions-causing shipping of food around the world. The “not too much” part flies directly in the face of Meyers’ anti-glutton arguments. Pollan does a lot of advocacy work for things like organic and small farms, and he’s educated a lot of people through his involvement with the movie “Food Inc.,” which personally changed my life and my relationship with food. I’d put him in a category with someone like Mark Bittman, New York Times food writer and author of some of my favorite cookbooks (the Food Matters Cookbook and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian), who advocates a “less meat-arian” diet that is better for our health and for the planet. I wouldn’t put either of them in a category with Anthony Bourdain.
Meyers also seems to think that people who really care about and enjoy their food are simply elitists pursuing physical pleasure rather than people trying to live out deeply held convictions in their daily lives. For one thing, I’m not so sure there’s anything wrong with flat out enjoying food. Being able to taste is a miracle and a gift. That we can take pleasure as we must take sustenance is a wonderful thing. Enjoying the blessings of food is a way of being thankful for it. I’m personally a “foodie” because I care deeply about my impact on the environment, the treatment of animals and workers, the way my eating affects global hunger, and the way my eating affects the health of my community’s economy and my own body. I try to eat less meat, more local organic produce, and to avoid all processed foods. And I love every bite.
Supposedly Meyers is a vegan and has a problem with meat eating in general, and that’s part of his issue with Bourdain. I can respect that. But while I may in fact be drawn toward vegetarianism myself, you aren’t going to win me, or many people, to veganism by suggesting that it’s immoral to really enjoy food. Come to our side! We don’t enjoy our food! Come not enjoy it with us! Why not illustrate that there is pleasure to be had in a deliciously prepared vegetarian dish? What would be wrong with enjoying a perfectly prepared piece of produce?
Are there foodie elitists? Sure. I’m not sure Bourdain is one of them– he’s as likely to eat at a street cart as he is at Le Bernadin. I’m not sure Pollan is either, since one of his major areas of activism is getting people access to fresh, healthy, whole food. And my food hero, Mark Bittman, points out that 90% of Americans own a car and spend an average of 30+ hours a week watching television, so acquiring healthy food and cooking it at home is actually achievable for a large chunk of us.
To me, food is sort of the opposite of elitism, because it’s about sharing. Meals bring people around a table together. They facilitate conversation and understanding and connection. People who are really excited about food want to share those experiences with others–to say “you have GOT to try this,” rather than keeping the experience locked away for only a privileged few. Real foodies have a curiosity about other food cultures, and an interest in reaching out and having new experiences, even if it’s just trying some new and weird looking vegetable that suddenly showed up in a CSA box.
Finally: who is the real elitist? Someone who cares passionately about food (much like others who care passionately about their hobbies and interests), or Meyers himself? Many times in the article, he suggests that people who care a lot about food don’t devote much time to what he believes are higher pursuits, for example:
Needless to say, no one shows much interest in literature or the arts—the real arts. When Marcel Proust’s name pops up, you know you’re just going to hear about that damned madeleine again.
I mean, the guy in the effing Atlantic quoting Roman historians and referencing Proust can hardly be calling OTHERS out on their elitism, for one thing. For another: you don’t have to choose between the stomach and the mind. Mr. Meyers: I’m a budding foodie and a home-cooking hobbyist. I’m also pursuing a graduate degree in English Literature and hope to be a professor one day. I’m just sayin’, one can love both food and the great thinkers and their great thoughts.
Ultimately, Meyers’ piece comes off as a particularly whiny rant about some people he seems to just not like. He seems particularly bothered by some of the foodies’ use of the f-word and likes to quote them using it, I guess in an attempt to point out that these hedonists use appallingly coarse language and further underline their supposed amorality. And yet, Meyers doesn’t offer an alternative. I can see how he might criticize Bourdain’s meat-fest gluttony, but I really don’t get what his issue with Pollan is. How DOES he think Americans should eat? What exactly is the problem with trying to eat in a way that corresponds to one’s values (Meyers seems to have no problem with people who keep kosher, for example) and enjoying it along the way? What’s so immoral about caring about how my chicken was raised, and how the farmer who raised it was compensated, and how the workers who slaughtered and packaged it were treated, and how much gas was used to get it to me?
Friday I spent the entire day in the kitchen preparing food to serve to our homeless neighbors under the Broadway Bridge. While I was cooking, Jon picked up McKinley and took him to get his CDL renewed, FINALLY! Glory, hallelujah, what a hassle, but now he can finally find a job.
That night we served delicious Italian food to a robust crowd, and I also contributed cupcakes as it was our friend John’s birthday. I discovered (by way of the blogosphere), the best way ever to top a cupcake: toasted marshmallows. Way less hassle than frosting. Just pop a marshmallow on top of each of your baked cupcakes and put them back in the 350 degree oven for about 5 minutes. Then pull them out and gently smoosh each marshmallow down over the cupcakes. If you really want the toasty marshmallow flavor, broil them, but keep an eye out not to burn them.
Saturday was GLORIOUS. We went for a little bike ride around the neighborhood to enjoy the cloudless, 70 degree day. It was my first ride with the new panniers I got for my birthday. I call them my “bike trunk.”
I’m not a vegan, but I’m very interested in eating less meat and animal products, for ethical, environmental, and humanitarian reasons. As I strive to eat more and more meat free meals each week, I’ve been perusing vegan cooking blogs and have been inspired to try my hand at vegan baking. I’ll probably never end up a vegan, but I can see myself going mostly vegetarian– I’ll never give up eggs or dairy completely, though. (Seriously, there is almost nothing in life that isn’t improved by cheese.)
This weekend, I decided to give the whole vegan baking thing a go, and I started with pumpkin muffins. True fact: there are a few things I hoard like the apocalypse is coming. It’s not anything practical, like toilet paper or something– no, I hoard butter, which I buy every time I go to the store, and canned pumpkin. You may remember a few years ago when there was a canned pumpkin shortage? Anyway, at that time, I wanted to make something pumpkin-y, but there was no pumpkin to be had. When I finally got my hands on a can of pumpkin, I held it to the sky like Scarlett O’Hara with her turnip and swore that as God is my witness, I’d never go without pumpkin again. Look in my pantry and you’ll find probably six cans of the stuff. I like pumpkin, and, though many think of it as just an October/November treat, I enjoy it as long as the weather is cold.
I looked at a few different pumpkin muffin recipes, and this is what I cobbled together.
Vegan Pumpkin Muffins
(This recipe was supposed to make 24 muffins. Mine made more like 28. Magic!)
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2cups sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 15 oz. can pureed pumpkin (Make sure it’s not pumpkin pie mix)
1 cup soy milk (almond milk would work too)
1 cup vegetable oil
3 tablespoons maple syrup
+ a few tablespoons sugar and a bit of cinnamon (I used 3 T sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon) for sprinkling on top of the muffins
Feel free to fold 2 cups of chopped nuts into the finished batter if you’d like.
Preheat the oven to 400. Lightly spray muffin tins with cooking spray. Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Whisk the pumpkin, soy milk, oil, and maple syrup together in a smaller bowl. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Fill the muffin cups 3/4 of the way full with the batter, then sprinkle each with the cinnamon/sugar mixture. Bake at 400 for 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.
Verdict: These muffins have great flavor, and I’d totally make them again. I took them to church on Sunday, and everyone loved them. They were a particular hit with the kids, even my friends’ kids who are extremely picky. My only complaint is that they’re a little denser than non-vegan muffins. If I decide to fiddle around with the recipe some more, I might add a little baking soda to see if I can get more fluffiness.
Image: day 212: over the shoulder, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
When we lived in Charleston, I hosted the annual Thanksgiving potluck for all the pediatrics residency folks, most of whom didn’t get the holiday off and couldn’t go home and celebrate with their families. We’d cram people into our little house, folks perched wherever they could, my dogs hoping someone would drop some turkey. The first year, I made my Memaw’s Russian Tea, and by the end of the party, people were DEMANDING the recipe. Every year after that, when I’d send out invites to the Thanksgiving Potluck, people would ask, “Will there be Russian Tea?” Of course! It’s not Thanksgiving without it!
It should be said that there is absolutely nothing Russian about Russian Tea, or my family, which, as best as I can tell, is mostly British and Irish. Russian Tea is really a citrusy spiced tea, best when spiked with booze like bourbon or dark rum. I like to make a giant batch in my stock pot, keep it in the crock pot during the party (Memaw keeps hers in an old percolator thing that keeps it SCALDING hot), and then put leftovers in pitchers in the fridge for heating up a cup at a time later. So, here’s the recipe for my favorite holiday tradition:
Russian Tea
4 cups water, plus 8 additional cups
4 tea bags (plain tea, like Lipton)
1.5 cups sugar
2.5 cups pineapple juice
1.5 cups frozen orange juice concentrate
6 tsp. fresh lemon juice
8 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
Dark rum or bourbon
Boil 4 cups water and steep 4 regular-sized tea bags. Add to that mixture in a large stock pot 1½ cups sugar, 2½ cups pineapple juice, 1½ cups orange juice (frozen concentrate, not diluted), 6 Tsp. fresh lemon juice, 8 whole cloves, 2 cinnamon sticks, and 8 cups water. Bring to a boil, serve warm, add dark rum or bourbon as desired. I recommend adding the booze to each cup individually, so the buzz-inducing properties don’t get cooked out.
Easy double batch:
Boil 8 cups water with 8 tea bags, add 1 large can pineapple juice, 1 family size frozen OJ, 12 Tsp. lemon juice, 2 cups sugar, 16 whole cloves, 4 cinnamon sticks, and 16 cups water.
See, when I was in school, I had a crazy person for a mom. She made me re-use the same brown paper bag to carry my lunch every day for a week, because it would be wasteful for me to throw a bag away every single day, when they could be re-used. She probably would have made me carry a lunchbox, but I threw a wailing hissyfit about how UNCOOL lunchboxes were and BUT ALL THE COOL KIDS CARRY THEIR LUNCHES IN BROWN PAPER BAAAAGGGGGGSSSSSS. As if the cool kids gave two shits about what my lunch was carried in, but these things strangely matter in high school. So, I carried my lunch in brown paper bags, which I carefully folded and tucked into my pocket to take home and use again the next day. Because clearly, my mom wanted me to be unpopular.
Beyond the bags, there was what I carried in them. Always, always a turkey sandwich with ranch dressing. But the bread, well… it wasn’t NORMAL. It didn’t come in a nice little sleeve all sliced up from the store. Nope. It was the uncoolest bread ever. It was made by my mom in her breadmaker, and the last slice was always wonky because it had a hole in it from the machine’s little kneading paddle. The slices were always slightly uneven and often too thick, and I was, for some bizarre reason, convinced the other kids would think I was like, poor or something because I didn’t have normal store-bought bread. Yep. I looked gift bread in the mouth and basically acted like a brat over BREAD. What can I say? I went to a “rich kid” high school where even bread and lunchbags could be status symbols.
Fast forward to today and my high school self is rolling her eyes at me as I proof dough and shape loaves. It’s possible that in the new locavore, DIY, Etsy world we live in, homemade bread is now actually more of a status symbol than I thought store-bought bread was in high school. But it’s also possible that homemade bread just tastes better, especially warm from the oven and slathered in butter. I love the way my house smells all yeasty and delicious. I love the satisfaction of making something with my own hands. I love knowing exactly what is in my food. And I love my mom for lovingly baking bread and packing lunches and taking such good care of me, even when I was such an ungrateful brat. I’ll have to bake her a loaf sometime…
*the title of this post comes from what Jon always says about my homemade bread: “It’s the best thing since sliced bread!”
Full disclosure: I was recently contacted by a PR person from the Kroger company, who had found my blog and wondered if I might like to join some other Little Rock bloggers in a tour of their new Kroger Marketplace store which opens tonight in West Little Rock. Since manyofmylocalbloggyfriends were going, I said sure! So, today, I went on a guided tour of the nicest, newest grocery store I’ve ever seen, and I ate free samples of delicious food, and I had a fabulous time. Honestly, it’s not hard to have a fabulous time when surrounded by ladies who will giggle with you over the pussy willows in the floral department and laugh at your quips about dog popsicles being FOR dogs, not MADE FROM dogs and make jokes about how a bunch of bloggers around a sushi sample tray is a lot like Shark Week. And I admit, I’m just plain interested in grocery stores, so I thought I’d share what I learned (I was not required to write about this event).
You see, though I’m a super proponent of local, sustainable food (see my “we might starve without a CSA” post for proof, or check out this post for a rundown of my “food rules”), most of my food still comes from my local grocery store. In Charleston, I was rather spoiled in my last year there, because a brand-spankin’ new Harris Teeter opened up less than a mile from my house and an awesome Earth Fare natural supermarket was located just down a greenway from us. I could bike to both. And y’all, the Teet, as I liked to call it, was FAN-CY. It had the largest produce section I’d ever seen, and, upon first visit, I noticed the fanciest thing of all– like a Methodist, I felt “strangely warmed” in the frozen foods section. I looked up to see that they were piping in hot air to cut down on the chills when the freezer doors were opened! It’s not very eco-friendly, I’ll admit, but it sure is fancy! We got most of our produce from our CSA, most of our other groceries from the Teet, and I hit up the Earth Fare once in a while to shop the bulk bins.
No grocery store I’ve visited in Little Rock has come close to being as nice as the Teet. Until today.
Have you ever seen a grocery store produce section with every veggie in a perfect little pile, not disheveled by a hundred shoppers’ grubby little hands? It’s glorious. The WLR Kroger Marketplace has the largest produce selection I’ve ever seen, and they said they make an effort to acquire local (within 400 miles) produce as much as possible. Anything you see labeled local is within 400 miles of the store. Sure, it’s not hydroponically grown in your neighbor’s back yard, but I will applaud any step in the right direction– when a company like Kroger, the largest grocery store chain in the world, tries to cut down on the amount of petroleum used in the shipping of our food, it makes a difference.
nice selection of organic produce.perfect piles of produce.
In addition to an awesome produce department, this Kroger had BULK BINS. I could have hugged them. I’m a big bread baker, and a big baker in general, and having a place to buy organic flour and raw sugar in bulk? Well, it makes my little heart happy. There was also a large selection of natural/organic products, and even a large selection of gluten-free products. Right now I have to make separate trips to a Kroger store for my groceries and a Whole Foods for the bulk bins. After this store opens, I’ll just be hauling my little hiney out to Chenal and hitting up the fancy Kroger Marketplace. (Though my usual grocery store, the Kroger in Hillcrest, will be reopening after renovations this October, and I’ll still shop there for most of my day-to-day food.)
Bulk Bins!
I was also very happy to hear from the guys in charge of the meat and seafood departments. Kroger apparently is very big on voluntarily labeling country of origin and wild-caught/farmed on its seafood, which is really helpful for me as I try to eat sustainably when I consume seafood (for a consumer’s guide to sustainable seafood, check this site out). We also learned that Kroger goes above and beyond national standards and employs its own inspectors to make sure its seafood and meat is of the freshest quality. And when it comes to meat, I was happy to see that they had a number of all natural, hormone/antibiotic/nitrite free, vegetarian-fed, sustainably raised meat to choose from, including pork products. I have cut down a lot on my meat production in order to afford to eat natural/sustainable/ethical meat when I do consume meat. Beyond the products that made me happy because they fit into my food values, I have to say that the folks working the meat and seafood area obviously take a lot of pride in what they do and have a passion for their jobs. That’s fun to see!
The seafood selection, which will be labeled as to country of origin and wild caught vs. farmed, which will make choosing sustainable seafood easier.So happy to be able to get natural, more ethical meat in a major grocery chain.Linda from the bakery had a theatrical flair and a love for her job.
Overall, yes, this is a conventional grocery store and it’s still full of rows of foods I wish didn’t exist– heavily processed, full of corn syrup, empty calories in boxes and bags. BUT, this store is also making it easier for people to get fresh, more local produce and fresh, more sustainable meat and seafood, and that’s a step in the right direction that I totally applaud. The store also has a commitment to helping shoppers create more meals at home by demonstrating cooking techniques, suggesting pairings, giving samples, and having well-trained employees who can answer shoppers’ questions. All of that on top of bulk bins? Well, my only complaint is that it’s way too far away from my house for me to shop there on a regular basis. Now to begin the countdown until my neighborhood Kroger reopens!
I know I wrote a while back that the babies had stolen my taste for coffee. Well, I’m happy to report, I got my love of coffee back, and thank goodness, because not only am I sleep deprived, but we’ve found an awesome local (to Little Rock) source for awesome Guatemalan coffee that comes with a little something extra. Leiva’s Coffee is to coffee and philanthropy what Toms Shoes is to shoes and philanthropy, only instead of just giving away shoes (or I guess they’d be giving away coffee?), they invest in Guatemalan communities. The coffee itself is farmer-direct, and they use their profits to fund housing, schools, and health clinics. If you already drink coffee anyway, why not choose a product that gives you great farmer-direct coffee that makes the world a better place?
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 
