What a weird day so far! Today was shopping day, so we went to two different health food stores and a farm market/supermarket. (Yes, we go to health food stores other than the one my sister works in. Is that weird?) The funny thing is, we never shop in our town. We go to other towns like, 30 miles away. We sure get around. LOL. We sure get a lot of free stuff, too. (Here comes the subject of freegans again.) For those not in the know about freeganism, click here and here. So anyway, we went to the first health food store and the farm market/supermarket. (We only buy produce at the farm market and stay away from the supermarket part of the store.) Then off to the second health food store. Now, we've been going to the second health food store for quite a few years now. Besides Rachel bringing home food from work, we get all the expired or unsellable (is that even a word? It is now. Hehe.) food from health food store number two. We never know what to expect! About three or four months ago, we got a huge box of expired rice noodles. We kept some (in fact, there in our pantry waiting to be eaten) and gave a lot away. Well, guess what? Today we got another huge box! The expiration date says 3/11/03, but these things never go bad. Here's a picture of them.

Well, I thought I was going to post a picture but it won't upload. Maybe tomorrow?.....

In the past we've gotten vitamins/minerals, body products like hand cream and such, different kinds of flours, celery root juice that had expired the year before we got it (we never did muster up the courage to try it), apricot lavendar jam, dairy milk, dairy yogurt, soy yogurt, tofu, seitan, etc. Once their freezer even broke down and we got all the defrosted items, which we're still eating off of, thank you very much. So you pretty much get the idea of what we get, right? Well, what we got today (besides the rice noodles) pretty much takes the cake for the weirdest thing yet. Try to guess! Think Camille (to refresh your memory about Camille click here. Okay, I'll tell you. We got a crockpot! What the heck! In all the years of going and getting free stuff, we've only gotten free food or body care related things. Not that I'm complaining or anything, I'm as thrilled as can be. Now we have two crockpots that we didn't pay for. :O

Life is good.

Tonight we're going to Upstate Films again (yes, that's two night in a row. There's a lot of good movies out there!) to see The Beauty Academy of Kabul. We were going to go to the Bearsville Theater to see Tony Levin but decided against it.

I made a creamy vegetable chowder with carrots, cauliflower*, broccoli*, kale* and zucchini* today (from The Ultimate Uncheese Book), and I was going to post a picture, but as I said before, the pictures won't upload.

If anyone was wondering about my screen name, the description of a primary consumer is this: an organism that gets its energy from producers (plants). Also known as Herbivores, but I like primary consumer much better, don't you?

Here's what this primary consumer had so far today:
(breakfast was spaced out over a period of time because I made the soup this morning)

a banana (while I thought about what I wanted to eat)
brown rice with flax oil, braggs, and nutritional yeast (I know this doesn't sound very good but it was delicious)
ricemilk
almond butter from the jar :O

lots of faux chicken salad over lettuce and grated carrot
corn tortillas

another banana

some chocolate chips (yum!)

I ate lunch around 1:30 (I ate a lot) so I probably won't be hungry for dinner tonight.

Not the healthiest day today (this is coming from someone who is very interested in nutrition), but what are you gonna do? Those chocolate chips are very addicting!

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! Rachel just got home with more produce. Here's what she brought home today:
kale, always so much kale, collard greens, swiss chard, potatoes, sprouts, turnips? (I can't tell if their turnips or rutabagas. I think their kind of old. LOL.) curly and flat leaf parsley, an apple (on top of the 4 lbs of apples she brought home yesterday. Poor little apple, it must have been so lonesome.), some bananas, and something else that I forget. *Sigh* I love getting all this free stuff, but sometimes it's just to overwhelming and I have little meltdowns. How would you like it if your brain got overloaded with things coming at you? Besides, sometimes there's so much of a backlog (of food) that we don't have any room in our two (yes, two) fridges. (In case your wondering about our fridge situation, we have a fridge in our house, and a fridge in the little apartment connected to our house.)

All this talk of produce reminds me that our rhubarb is coming up. Yay! I've never made anything with rhubarb, so if anyone has ideas or recipes let me know.

Peace,
The original primary consumer