Random Bites: Tax Day Edition

Tax season bites. Looks like I withheld too little last year because I owed for the first time ever. Wow. I also made more in all of my part time work than I realized, which is great - though it did push me into a higher tax bracket. I'm not complaining about being taxed per se. I'm just kicking myself for not having changed my W4's sooner. Now I'm withholding nothing. Hopefully I'll get something back next year?

Just a few more bites as I recover from tax season.

1. The drive to cut back on my soda consumption has taken a slightly bumpy road, but I'm still on it. I now drink, on average, about two cans of soda a day. That said, I have gotten much more used to using that press-n-seal wrap on the half-empty can and putting it back in the fridge. I've also been a little generous in my definition of what counts as "soda". I haven't been counting it if it's normally caffeine-free, like ginger ale, or "all-natural", like one of those sugary sodas you might find in some of the more upscale natural food stores. The iced tea I keep brewing (thank you, Luzianne) has definitely cut down my soda consumption, that much is certain.

2. About those "upscale natural food stores": I don't have the cash to do all, or even much, of my shopping at places like the Good Life Organic Market in Severna Park or David's Natural Market in Columbia. I do love roaming around them to see the merchandise and hopefully pick up one or two things without breaking the bank. Good Life has hot soups (a small Senegalese Peanut Soup will cost $4), chocolates that I cannot avoid (a quarter pound for about $4.50) and more of those natural sodas. They also sell eggs individually - 35¢ per egg. David's is also a lovely store, and I have become addicted to the individually wrapped Dan's Chocolates that are conveniently located right by the checkout (50¢ each).

3. The Haute Dog Carte has a second location! It's at the Colonnade at Hopkins.

4. Speaking of businesses in Mt. Warshnin', Bansky's is just awesome, a beautiful group of people with awesome food.

5. I'm trying to find some huckleberries in the area! This is for an upcoming Snacking State-by-State post about food from Idaho. Rachel (Coconut & Lime) gave me the head's up that Atwater's at Belvedere Square sometimes sells huckleberry jam, but they have none at the moment. Will probably need to break down and mail order it online, like I almost did with poi for my upcoming Hawaii post.

6. If you didn't know this already: RuPaul's Drag Race (one of my guilty gay pleasures) is on every Monday night at The Hippo. Now I don't have to wait until it's posted online the next day!

Milk & Honey

While in Mount Vernon running errands yesterday morning, I had the chance to finally stop into Milk & Honey, the new small storefront on Cathedral Street that bills itself as a "neighborhood grocery/café/deli". You won't find a wide variety of products here - that's not Milk & Honey's modus operandi. What you will find is a small but high-quality selection of organic groceries and higher quality goods, many from around the area. Not just local milk and honey, of course (though they do have those), but cheeses from around the world, sodas, butter (including the high-quality European butter Plugrá for a little over $6 per pound) and organic produce (very locally grown fingerling sweet potatoes for $4 per pound, for example) among other things.

They have some unique and almost impossible to find groceries that not even most health food stores carry. For example, I found a box of Lundberg gluten-free vegan brown rice couscous ($3.99). Back when I was really investigating gluten-free products, I had seen a wide variety of gluten-free flours, pastas, breads, rolls, cereals and so on, but no gluten-free couscous (yes, technically a type of pasta). No area health food stores carry it (some hadn't even heard of it), but Milk & Honey does. I bought a box, though I have yet to try it (watch for that post soon).

When you enter the big, sunny Milk & Honey, your attention will not immediately go to the groceries, though those are the first things you will encounter to either side of you. What you will first encounter is the big glass deli case in front of you, which holds a small variety of baked goods and sandwiches (looks like Milk & Honey is definitely going for quality over quantity). I was quite lucky to have gotten there when a few free samples of their ham and cheese biscuit were sitting out for the taking, as that helped me (and the two women in front of me) make my purchasing decision. Though out of that variety of biscuit, they did have an equally luscious bacon & chipotle biscuit. I don't throw around words like "luscious" very often, but underlying that crumbly outer surface is a moist, savory and I dare say luscious little biscuit. It's also a large (for me) and filling biscuit and I do recommend it. You will need something to go with that biscuit, by the way. I bought a half-chocolate-dipped sandwich cookie for $1.25, which was simple and tasty. On the beverage front, order anything from soda to coffee to hot chocolate. Sit there in their little café, or head outside. I wish I had. Hot chocolate will be a very nice choice this upcoming week.

James and the Giant-Priced Peach

James McWilliams discusses the notion of expensive farmers' market, organic food and whether junk food is actually cheaper than non-junk food - in a sense, "fair-price" (for the growers, anyway) in the food section today's Atlantic Magazine website. Michael Pollan and Alice Waters have spoken passionately about expensive food that you just don't buy as much of, like a $3.90 peach or an $8 dozen of eggs. Famous and not-so-famous food writers (Can I still call them foodies? Ooooh please let me call them foodies!) have taken them to the woodshed. I mean, really called for their heads. From McWilliams' article:

Anthony Bourdain, who dedicates a full chapter of his latest book, Medium Raw, to attacking Waters's airy idealism, scoffs at the idea that people should be willing to spend more on food: "She annoys the living shit out of me. We're all in the middle of a recession, like we're all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market." Jason Sheehan, author of Cooking Dirty, is even less restrained in his assessment of Pollan. Admitting that Pollan is "damnably right about a lot of things," he can't quite stomach that pricy peach. "When you've been too broke to buy soup," he writes, "some iconoclastic dickhead trying to tell you that paying $4 for a peach is a good idea because it is a really good peach can be the kind of thing that makes you want to buy a rifle and a map to the homes of famous food writers." (Dude, it's just a peach ...)

So, yeah, folks are angry.

That rifle thing is just disturbing.

Granted, a Bourdain rant is a lot more common than that $4 peach, just as juicy, and a bit more tiring. But McWilliams actually speaks up for Pollan and Waters. Mind you, he disagrees with much of what they say. But here he suggests they have a point: namely that cheap crap food is lamentable and yet seen all too often. But McWilliams points out something even more surprising: it isn't just crap food that has gotten cheaper over the past 30 years - it's also the healthy stuff. But people are still choosing the Tastykakes over the apples. Hmmm...

Check out the comments. Those are particularly interesting.

Cheap Organic Food? Impossible.

Shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's makes me wince, because I eventually pass by the fresh produce and check out the prices. This is why I do not buy much fresh organic produce. So I was interested in this article about how and where to find cheap organic produce! Check it out. Some quick tips (the article goes into further detail):

• beef, spinach and apples are better organic than most, because the non-organic alternatives are the most laden with pesticides and additives; also there are few if any organic standards for cosmetics, seafood and cleaning supplies
• it's cheaper to buy hormone-free but not totally "organic"
• wait for sales
• buy at farmer's markets (which are often, though not always, "organic" by default; check this article out for more info)
  
• try national supermarket organic lines - yep, most of 'em have them now!