Finding Natural Food

Today was a gorgeous day. The temps hit the mid 40′s, and the sky was blue and clear. And it’s February 16. Can’t complain about that kind of winter!

It seems as if we spent the day going and coming.

We got the weekly shopping done today.  Shopping in retirement is turning into a interesting exercise in discipline.  I have never bothered with lists, for anything. I have always been proud of my memory, and the challenge of not using lists  is something I always attributed to having a better memory.  It’s the use it or lose it idea.  However, to use that expression that I have heard so often from seniors and have hated myself, now that I’m on a “Fixed Income” we are looking at shopping trips differently than we used to.  It’s a crazy concept, “Fixed Income” — everyone I know is on a fixed income.  If you work for wages you’re on a fixed income.  If you are self-employed, you are on a fixed income.  We take in the amount that we work for and we all have to live within our budget.

The house my grand mother lived in

What is different now, is that Peggy and I have more time to shop. It would be easy to pop out every day and get a little of this and a little of that. That was actually the way my grandmother lived her entire immigrant life in Milwaukee. She lived for the longest part of her life on South 7th Street, it is the “family homestead” that I remember even though she and my grand father were also multiple property owners and during the depression they moved from one house to another as various of them ended up being repossessed.  But, from this home she walked the two blocks to Mitchell Street every day, spring, summer, fall and winter. She had a route from 7th street to about 14th street that she walked up and down buying her food for the day and looking for bargains, or fabric, or any of the miscellany that fill one’s life. It was for her a comfortable way to live.  She did not have a large refrigerator – no one did in those days.  All of the refrigerators were small, and in the early days she had an Ice Box — like most people did.  You cooled a few items using ice delivered by an iceman.

But grocery shopping without a list, when done too often, ends up with a packed pantry.  So we decided to start making a list.  I’m still not sure how keen I am on the list idea, but we are giving it a try.

We made a side trip to The Outpost Natural Foods.  This is a store we have patronized almost as long as we have lived in Milwaukee and we love it.  Today I needed yeast. I buy dry bulk refrigerated yeast and use it regularly.  I bake a lot of bread, and make pizza dough quite often. So, our trip to the Outpost picked up some yeast, and sesame seeds (to be added to bread), and raw oats.

I got to thinking about how wonderful it is to have a source for healthy ingredients, and fresh organics,  and then got to thinking about what we might face when RV’ing.  Hopefully we’re only a few months away from that new chapter in our lives…. so it’s time to think about those details.  I have tried on various occasions to search online for natural food stores and the results have not been that great.  There is of course Whole Paycheck Market (oops….. that’s Whole Food Market), they have a goodly number of stores around the country.  But our plans are not to spend a lot of time around large population centers and it has me wondering how we are going to find the sort of food sources we are accustomed to.  I’m sure there will be great sources ahead of us.  I’m familiar with Central Market in the NW.  We’ve visited a few H.E.B. stores  in Texas with good results.  Albertsons and Safeway have enough stores too.  But they are not really focussed on healthy alternatives…. so we’ll have to look further.

I found an interesting source today.  It’s called Organic Foods Store Locator They list some retail sources in almost all the states.  So that goes on my list of resources for the future.  It’s going to be interesting and challenging learning to shop all over again. Not just the things we buy but the stores we buy from and the layouts of the different branches of each store.   Merchandising people have had their way with most large groceries; the order of discovery as you walk through many stores is very similar, but each store has it’s own little idiosyncrasies.  Here we regularly use 3 different Pick N Save stores — depending on where we are, and happen to be going — but they all have their unique excellencies, and they all have their drawbacks.

On another topic, I’ve been wanting to have lunch at The Comet — on Farwell. It was recently featured by Guy Fieri on Drive In’s, Diners, and Dives and the food looked great.  We bopped over ther after a long walk along the lakefront for a late lunch.

We had just sat down, and started looking at the menu when I took a call from someone interested in buying our 6 rolls of Alcoa aluminum trim (leftover from when we had the gutters and downspouts done on the school). The guy had money, and time, and wanted to pick up the aluminum.

Well, who am I to say that making a couple hundred bucks is less important than spending money.  So we put aside the menus and hustled back home to make the deal. By the time we returned home he was there. Dave Somebody now has the aluminum and I’m a happy camper.

We’ll make another trip over there one of these days.  There’s an item on the menu called “A.J.’s Compact Turkey Dinner” — which is described as being served in “ball” form, and is battered and deep-fried.  Does not sound natural, nor does it sound healthy.  What it does sound like is delicious!