Hummusgirl's Blog

I like to buy my food from local sources.  I have hand-picked strawberries, black berries, green beans, and cherries at local farms.  At my local dairy farm, I buy milk, eggs, butter, and ice cream straight from the source.  Now some may say that they are vegan, but I say I can’t afford to eat veggies, fruit, and other extreme vegan products all the time and I really don’t have the stomach to cook with them a whole lot either.  Some people are on the Atkins diet, but meat is expensive so I eat it sparingly because everything in moderation.

I buy my tahini and pita bread from my neighborhood Middle Eastern store, Oasis and my dried chickpeas, walnuts, almonds, produce, and the occasional samosa from a Patel’s Indian grocery store on the freeway.  I have even ventured the 5 miles away to an elite farm to buy grass fed milk, nitrate free bacon, and other gourmet groceries.  But then they closed, probably due to their elitism and I now shop at less expensive places.

But the food experience that is by far the richest for me is Arnold’s Way.  Arnold’s Way is a hippie commune of a place that makes and sells raw food products.  They make banana whips and green smoothies (with pureed kale, dates, bananas and apples), but mostly I just buy their raw food like bananas, apples, avocados, kale, spinach, dried mango, sunflower seeds, olive oil, honey, dates, and many other pure foods.  Every time I go there I always feel like I’ve traveled back to the 1960s and am at some folk rock concert.  Everyone there is celebrating peace and love and food it’s a place that feels so separate from corporate America.

But every food store has its place and I find that Whole Foods is good for things that I can never find anywhere else like cheeses, incredible produce, and bread that I could pay 10 dollars a loaf for and still not feel guilty about eating that many carbs.  One time, I was making my way around my local supermarkets looking for pumpkin because I found out there was this big freeze on pumpkin.  At Whole Foods, they were out, but the clerk suggested I try making sweet potato cookies instead and I made some for him.  Ah, food and flirting, what a perfect combination.