No More Shopping at Bulk Barn

Happy New Year! It’s been a while, and I have a story to share.

On Wednesday we went to Bulk Barn. It’s kind of far from home but we had to be in the area, and we were excited to take advantage of the larger selection available there than where we usually buy our bulk goods. Things were going well, we had some peanut butter, (we brought our own tub), walnut pieces, and I was filling a bag with baking soda when an employee approached and told me that I couldn’t use my own bags, I had to use their plastic bags. Apparently they’re afraid that my bags are going to contaminate their food. He actually said that I should put the food already in plastic bags provided by the store. I told him that wasn’t going to happen and I would return the food I had bagged to the bins, (obviously they didn’t want that), throw out the food in their garbage and leave, or buy the food already in my bags. He ran away and I didn’t see him again.

Since I knew we were going to have problems I found Joanie and told her what happened, so we went to the cash and paid for our purchases, in our own bags. At the cash the clerk asked us to use the bags provided by Bulk Barn on our next visit and explained a bit more about the rule. Apparently there are people who change their minds after filling bags and empty the bags they have filled back into the bins, so they want people to use new plastic bags which are supposedly sterile. I asked a bit more, but she didn’t have a lot of information, basically it’s a corporate policy to not permit customers to bring their own bags to Bulk Barn, and the people who work in the stores have to enforce the policy.

This brings up some interesting questions about buying foods at bulk stores. How clean is the food? By shopping at a bulk store I accept that there might be a bit of cross-contamination in the food I buy. In fact I bought some split yellow peas the other day that had a few lentils mixed in. It’s not the end of the world. I think that we have to trust, to some extent, that the store we buy our food from and the customers who shop there have decent enough hygiene habits to keep the food from becoming dangerous.

If I can’t bring my own containers to a bulk store, eliminating the use of packaging, what is the point of shopping there? Many items, (like flour and sugar), are more expensive than buying them in paper bags at Costco or somewhere similar, so I’m probably not saving money. Is it just for the novelty of buying in bulk?

As for Bulk Barn, if people putting food back is a concern they maybe they could create a rule along the lines of “you bag it, you buy it.” In fact, that might be a good idea for all bags, even the “sterile” plastic bags. Needless to say we won’t be returning to Bulk Barn anytime soon.

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No Garbage Bread at Home @zu

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No Garbage Thanksgiving Dinner

Last weekend was Thanksgiving, and I want to share a bit about what we were able to cook and what we learned.

We cooked two sort-of traditional Thanksgiving dinners. I say sort-of traditional because we were only feeding a few people at a time, so instead of cooking a whole turkey, we cooked a complete leg each time, and we only had three side dishes plus cranberry sauce for the turkey, so everything was scaled down a bit from the huge Thanksgiving dinners that we have cooked in the past.

Turkey legs are also easier to get without any packaging. While I’m sure it is possible to buy a whole turkey that isn’t wrapped in plastic and put it in a huge container, (like a rubbermaid storage container), when buying legs I just needed a big tupperware-type container, which is easier to carry and looks much less ridiculous at the butcher, (I went back to the butcher of Les Fermes Saint-Vincent). The vegetables, (squash, brussels sprouts, and potatoes), were relatively easy to get between our CSA basket and Jean-Talon market. Cranberries are also in season right now so we got some fresh cranberries at the market and turned them into sauce for the turkey.

Dessert, however, was a different story. We had apple crumble, which is a totally fine Thanksgiving dessert, but missed having pumpkin pie. The problem with pumpkin pie is that it takes lard to make the pastry. I have discovered that is is possible and probably quite easy to make my own lard by melting down some pork fat and letting it harden, but getting pork fat is a bit of a lottery. They don’t always have it in stock at the butcher, and when they do I have to get there before they put it in a plastic bag and freeze it or melt it down themselves then put it into little plastic tubs to be sold.

So we’ve learned that when cooking large meals for special events it pays to start getting all of our ingredients together ahead of time.

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No Garbage Thanksgiving @zu

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No Garbage French Onion Soup

Joanie loves French Onion Soup, and I think it’s pretty good too, so last week when I saw this post on how to make it at home I wanted to try it out. The only problem was that I wanted to do a really good job and we didn’t have any beef stock, and hadn’t found anywhere to get soup bones without making garbage, (we’ve been coasting using chicken bones from our freezer and vegetable stock but we didn’t have any beef bones). Also, to really do it right, we needed some good cheese – preferably Gruyère. Armed with some containers, I went to the market.

Since they deal in organic meat I thought that Les Fermes Saint-Vincent would be a good place to try to get a soup bone, and I was right. They didn’t have any soup bones that weren’t already wrapped and frozen so they sold me a good chunk of beef shank and were completely willing to put it in my container. Also, the meat that was on the bone was super deep red. I don’t know if that’s just the colour of the shank or if it’s because the meat is better, but it sure looks good.

Next I went to get some cheese. I went to Fromagerie Hamel, because it was close to where I was standing. They said that they couldn’t touch my container because it’s already contaminated, (to be clear, I didn’t bring a dirty container, but I guess anything that they haven’t sterilized is considered contaminated). I’m not sure if this is their company policy or if it’s the law. I’ll have to do some more research to find out. However, they were willing to cut some cheese and just hand it to me, then I could put the cheese in my container. This works for me. Unfortunately, they do wrap their blocks of cheese in saran wrap, and throw out and replace the old sheet of saran wrap every time they cut some cheese, or at least that’s what happened when they cut my cheese.

With meat and cheese, I bought a whole wheat baguette and headed home, where Joanie had cut a huge batch of onions.

At home I took the meat off of the beef shank and saved it and used the bone and membrane to start making a beef stock. Then we started caramelizing the onions. We pretty much followed the recipe. However, I kind of took the whole caramelization thing too far and we ended up with an extremely sweet soup. Next time, there will be less caramelization and more onion flavour.

Our super caramelized onions in a pot.

Super Caramelized - I got a bit carried away. This pot was full when we started.

However, with some good bread, good cheese, and yes, a ton of flavour the soup came out pretty well, especially since it was our first attempt ever at French Onion Soup. Next time it’ll be even better.

A photo of our French Onion Soup

The last of the soup, in my bowl, ready for eating.

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No Garbage French Onion Soup @zu

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Our Menu is Coasting

A couple of weeks ago Joanie & I watched the entire season of The 100 Mile Challenge online. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a TV show that challenged families in Mission, BC, to eat only food from within 100 miles of their home for 100 days, (based on the book, The 100 Mile Diet). One of the things that happened on the show was that people figured out how to meet their basic food needs and then stopped exploring their options. We realized that we have done the same thing. There are a few things that we like eating and can eat easily without making any garbage, and that’s what we eat. BORING.

This isn’t exclusively a no-garbage problem, it happened to us before we stopped making garbage, and I’m sure it happens to other people as well. However, when you’re not making garbage it’s not quite as easy break up the boredom – you can’t easily grab takeout.

So, from here on in, we’re going to explore new frontiers of no-garbage eating. There are things we haven’t really figured out that we need to figure out. One such thing is meat – the only no-garbage meat we bought up until yesterday is sausage, and we can’t, (or shouldn’t), live exclusively on vegetarian food and sausage, so yesterday for the first time I bought a chunk of meat in a container. We want to find more sources of meat. Also fish. We haven’t had great success buying seafood so far. Also oil. We thought we had a place to buy olive oil in bulk lined up but they have stopped selling it, and the only other place we know of costs four times the price. There’s tons more to explore, so let the exploration begin!

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Coasting @zu

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Buying In Season Means Cheap Applesauce

At the market on Saturday we saw apples for a dollar a basket, and the basket was pretty large. We also had some apples at home already from our weekly vegetable basket, and since we’ve been getting a lot of apple recently we are tired of Apple Crisp. By combining $1 of apples from the market and the apples we had at home we had enough to make and can a good batch of applesauce that we can use later this winter.

A photo of our applesauce, canned in jars.

Ready for storage.

This applesauce, which cost us all of a dollar, and the tomatoes we just canned, really show the advantages of buying in season and preserving food. We realized yesterday that we should buy & preserve some cranberries right now as they’re in season, and if we want some around Christmas they’ll be really tough to get without packaging, so that will likely be next on the preservation list, well, cranberries or pumpkin.

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Dumpster, or, Recycling Bag, Diving

The other day when Joanie went out to work she called me almost as soon as she left to tell me the neighbour had put out a bunch of books in the recycling. I went and checked and there were thirty-six books, and most of them are worth reading! I collected them and will read the ones I’m interested in and don’t have already, and the rest will be sold, given to a used book store, or something.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure was true last week. We’ll keep keeping our eyes open and maybe we can remove some more stuff from the waste stream.

The books we found in the recycling.

We got all of this for free.

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