turbo-1 said:
Is that a Catholic thing?physics girl phd said:
Nope, new to meYonoz said:
If you're from a large family and your parents grew up during the depression, you take modest portions of food, and perhaps have seconds once you have finished that. You don't leave food on your plate - left-overs go to the fridge for later. Wasting food is a cardinal sin to people raised in such situations.Yonoz said:
I have shopped there for a lot of years. They are both in NY and MI as well.Anttech said:
I don't know where you are, but things like cukes and beans and a lot of other produce people grow in their backyards. It is not difficult to get real fresh produce.mbrmbrg said:
mbrmbrg said:
Hand raised! We always had a garden when I was growing up and I worked it about every day when I was a kid. We grew tart crisp pickling cucumbers (not the big straight 8s) so we could preserve them and eat them all year long. For the last 20 years or so, my wife and I lived in a development so that I could be close to work and I truly missed the garden. Now, we live in a cozy log cabin on 10 acres, and we have a good garden spot that I am amending with manure, peat, compost and organic fertilizer. Our crop this year (despite horrible weather) was very good and our freezers are full. I miss the fresh produce from the garden, but the produce from the freezer (mostly blanched and fast-frozen) is superior to much of the "fresh" stuff in the stores, and we don't have to reach into our wallets every time we want Swiss chard, green beans, etc. I also froze over 20 gallons of blackberries, and we have strawberries, blueberries, etc frozen. It's great to haul some of these out of the freezer, feed them to the juicer and drink them, sometimes with a little seltzer.mbrmbrg said:
It's worst with some holocaust survivors. A lot of them are obsessed with food, but some collect all sorts of stuff. After http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon" I was collecting used toys and garments with the rest of the kids in the Kibbutz for Ethiopian immigrants. In one of the houses we entered there were rooms filled with all sorts of containers. The old guy who lived there never threw anything out, there were stacks and stacks of food containers - mostly useless disposable dairy product packs. We took as much as we could carry and threw it in the rubbish when we were out of sight.mbrmbrg said:
My girlfriend works in an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy" . I've attended two lunches there, and must confess I loved everything I ate.mbrmbrg said:
Yonoz said:
Yes, those are usually known as Lebanese cucumbers. The more you water them, the larger they grow. The smaller ones are tastier (the skin is gives most of the flavour, I believe), and whenever I'm overseas I notice the cucumbers, as well as other fruit and vegetables, are much bigger - perhaps it's due to the farmers wanting to get more vegetable mass per area, or ill-informed consumer preferences.mbrmbrg said:
Rach3 said:
mbrmbrg said:
Rach3 said:
turbo-1 said:
They are wonderful in pancakes and muffins (they mush when you cook them, too) and since we pick wild berries, they are very flavorful and they make great fruit juice. My wife and I have a commercial-grade juicer, and juice the berries regularly. In fact instead of a sandwich, chile, etc for lunch today, I had a big glass of blackberry/blueberry/strawberry juice. Another good reason (and my parents grew up in the depression, so this was a way of life) is that wild berries are free - you just have to invest the time to pick them and freeze them. I have done this since I was a little kid, and we always had berries in our freezer. Check the price of a pint of blackberries in the supermarket, then multiply that by 8 to get the price of a gallon. That's the amount that I can pick on my property in about 3 hours (every other day or so). They have a lot richer flavor than cultivated berries, with no chemicals and no fertilizers, and they are frozen when they are absolutely ripe and fresh, so the flavors and nutrients are preserved.ShawnD said:
Evo said:I've never been fond of wax fruits or vegetables, my mother always kept a bowl of wax fruit on the coffee table.
My grandmother did the same. I always wondered why. 
Berry season goes from May until July, maybe into August in the NE US, although some berry bushes may have shorter seasons. During berry season, we pick fresh berries for pancakes, or serial, or eat them right of the bush. But if we want berries in the winter time, i.e. out of season, we have to freeze them like turbo mentioned.ShawnD said:
If you think back to when fruit was not always available locally except in season, it might have seemed quite an extravagance to have a bowl brimming with fruit on your table. Wax fruit probably seemed like a bit of opulence to people who had lived through the Depression and had experienced times of want. My grandmother kept real fruits and berries around, in a time when such things were so expensive that you bought them one orange at a time, one grapefruit at a time. The food in today's produce departments may not be the tastiest or the freshest, but 45-50 years ago, it would have shocked you to see such variety at the grocer's.Astronuc said:
Berries start with strawberries in about June followed by blueberries and raspberries (they overlap), during which time the blackberries start ripening - and the wild blackberries here last right into late September, early October. They are cheap healthy food, and we freeze them because other methods (making preserves, ect) involve using extra sugar, pectin, jars, etc. It we want berries for cereal, we go to the freezer, open a big zip-lock bag of berries and crumble them into a bowl. We freeze them dry and they don't harden into a block. The blackberries are a bit soft when they thaw, but are not mushy like they had been cooked, and they are great on cereal.Astronuc said:
IIRC, my strawberries came in during the later part of May. Down in the Carolinas, I think they are available by April. My blackberries were gone by September. I lost 7 canes to a deerturbo-1 said:
so I surrounded the blackberries with mesh and was able to salvage a decent amount - but then a rabbit found a way in and got a bunch of berries. The rabbit then started to hang out in the raspberry patch (but he'd leave when the dog was around). I'll be re-doing the beds in the spring to make them more secure.Yonoz said:
Evo said:I've never been fond of wax fruits or vegetables, my mother always kept a bowl of wax fruit on the coffee table.
Rach3 said:
mbrmbrg said:Good Lord, Rach, no wonder you complain about American cuisine!
Moonbear said:
Rach3 said:
I was just saying that when you see this, it's not likely just related to having survived the holocaust or depression as a child.http://www.la4seniors.com/hoarding.htm" is compulsive behaviour, a symptom of anxiety disorders. It has many causes, including stressful life events.Moonbear said:
