Food entry #2: Produce, Meat, and my Freezer

While I'm talking about produce, I'm going to throw another thing out there - did you know frozen produce is generally fresher than the "fresh" produce out in the store?  True story.  Frozen stuff is frozen when it's picked.  Other produce is picked green and ripens in transit.  They also put some kind of gas on the tomatoes to make them ripen and turn red.  Gross!!  So when Mark and I moved into our townhome in 2008, I bought a little chest freezer from Costco to store frozen food in.  It's very much worth it, except our next freezer will be one with doors, because it's obnoxious to dig stuff out of the bottom of our freezer.

Now I will move on to our freezer (oh, I'm so interesting and you know it!).  We keep frozen vegetables in there (like stir-fry blend vegetables ... it makes dinner so easy!) and frozen meat.  We bought a Food Saver vacuum sealer from Costco and when meat is on sale at the grocery store, I buy several packages and freeze 'em.  I'm a little bit depressed right now because we're to our last pound of ground beef and I didn't notice it until yesterday.  I have to think, "No making meatloaf, and if you make chili use the ground turkey, and dang, can you believe ground beef is normally like $3 or $4 a pound?!?!"  But anyway.  I love my freezer.

Speaking of meat, I'm still trying to decide what to do about that.  I know all of the junk they feed cows, but I can't bring myself to pay so much extra for grass-fed beef (darn you government and your corn subsidies!  You'll hear a lot about my disdain for corn subsidies if you talk to me, or if I get the chance to blog about it!) and I'm really afraid to BUY grass-fed beef because I hear it's so good you'll never be able to go back.

It's like how I've gotten with lunch meat.  When I started college, I bought the cheapest meat I could find that still seemed like real meat (bologna could be a Frankenfood, but super-cheap ham is just as good as fancy ham, right? right????), and then after I got married I moved up to slightly more expensive lunch meat, and now there's this REALLY GOOD deli meat they sell at Costco (because, you know, it's still cheaper per pound than the nice deli meat from your regular grocery store but it's a similar quality) and I've found I can't go back.  I bought some Oscar Meyer turkey a few weeks ago because we needed something to tide us over for a week before we went on vacation, and that was a mistake.  The meat was slimy and weird (it was perfectly fine turkey meat!) and I have been SO SPOILED by my good deli meat lately that I can't go back to what used to be palatable.  Mom introduced me to that Columbus turkey meat they sell at Costco and to me it seems so expensive but it's so good!  Darn it, Mom!  I'm a lunch meat snob now!

It's not like choosing between Chex cereal and the off-brand Chex-like cereal, because both are basically the same.  It's more like choosing between Hershey's chocolate (or that really really nasty cheapo chocolate they sell at Easter ... do you know what I'm talking about?) and the real nice chocolate from Europe (or something).  Of course Hershey's is cheaper - it's practically made of WAX.  But it's bearable.  And chocolate-flavored.  But that's what's so hard about things like meat and produce.  I really want to think it's all the same, but there's a huge difference in quality you can't see from the ingredient label.