I'm busy doing my laundry today. How we manage to dirty so many clothes is beyond my comprehension!!!
I also finished up the Lemon Sherbert today. Last night I had everything sitting out and ready to go this morning. The milk, sugar and lemon zest were mixed together last night and were in the refrigerator getting nice and cold. All I had to do today was get it out, put it together with the lemon juice and freeze it!! That's one down!
I got into the freezer this morning and pulled out a pound of hamburger for spaghetti and meatsauce for dinner this evening, along with some chicken and pork loins. Those 2 meats along with what leftover turkey I have should see us through until Monday. I'd like to make some Turkey Tettrazini, bake the chicken and fix the pork in the crockpot but we will see. Talking about baking chicken reminds me that I used some of the carrots and parsnips for Thanksgiving that we had stashed in the refrigerator crisper drawer this Fall. I can't believe it but the vegetables were crisp and in great shape! I'm excited knowing that now I have a way of keeping fresh carrots through the Winter. All the information I found said they would keep this way but until I saw it for myself I remained skeptical. No more!!
I came across some information in my studies that said our traditional grocery stores actually were not being used by the ordinary family in the midwest until around 1946. Hey, that was just 6 years before I was born!! Here is a link to the history of groceries. Just click on groceries (in red). I guess what really got me was the fact that my generation never knew life without a grocery store. I do vaguely remember the Meadow Gold milk truck delivering milk in glass bottles. He would deliver them to our door and put them in a metal container and Mom would get up in the morning and go outside the kitchen door and bring the milk in. I don't remember how often he came but that much I do remember. My great-great grandfather was a huckster. He drove around in his truck and delivered just about anything you can think of. But I wasn't born quite yet. If you watch Little House on the Prairie you see a General Store but nothing like what we have available to us, places where you can get bread, meat, vegetables and just about anything else you want all under one roof. We don't have to go to the mill for flour, the meat shop for meat, raise our own dairy cow for milk, butter, etc., raise or hunt our own meat, raise chickens for eggs or plant a garden. We can just drive a few miles and get it all. Of course, there were some diseases they had back then that we don't have now and to be fair we probably didn't live as long . . . but with the advent of farming with chemicals, foods loaded with preservatives, food coloring, fluoride in the water system, the list is unbelievably long, and let's not dismiss the whole GMO problem that seems to be drawing everyone's attention, we have managed to somehow or the other come up with a whole new slew of medical problems. I don't ever remember cancer being as prevalent as today or for that matter Alzheimers. This got me to thinking. What would you do without a grocery store? Could you survive? Do you know how to preserve anything? How to forage in the wild? Here's another question that really upsets me. Will your City or County regulations even allow you to grow a vegetable garden? We won't even discuss raising animals. Goodness, how the world has changed!!
These are the crazy things I get to thinking about; but you know, it probably would behoove many more people than just me to give a little thought to what's going on in the world around them, instead of mindlessly doing it because "that's the way it's always been done."