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How much wood, would a human chuck...

This totally grosses me out...

15 Food Companies that Serve You ‘Wood’

Manufacturers use cellulose in food as an extender, providing structure and reducing breakage, said Dan Inman, director of research and development at J. Rettenmaier USA, a company that supplies “organic” cellulose fibers for use in a variety of processed foods and meats meant for human and pet consumption, as well as for plastics, cleaning detergents, welding electrodes, pet litter, automotive brake pads, glue and reinforcing compounds, construction materials, roof coating, asphalt and even emulsion paints, among many other products.

[shudder]

Garden freedom

Watch this video: Michigan Woman facing jail time for her vegetable garden

I can hear my neighbor mowing his five acre, chemically enhanced, monoculture front lawn right now, at nearly 9 pm on a Friday.

My favorite part of the video is when the government official defines "suitable." We must all be lawn-loving lemmings in America!!

Garden planted

We got a bit of a late start on the garden this year due to a prolonged monsoon season. But on Friday all the tomato seedlings went in. They are (hopefully) protected from deer by adorable chicken wire cylinders.

Pumpkins and squash were planted last week and are starting to poke up. The turkeys rather enjoy dust bathing in the tilled up garden. They made a nice hole in this pumpkin mound:

Gobs of potatoes were planted about a month ago. They need some burying. Potatoes grow from the stem of the plant, so as the plant grows you keep piling dirt around it and you get layers and layers of potatoes.

Corn just sprouting. We have hope of knee-height by Independence Day.


Cultivated black caps starting to turn purple. We also have a million billion of these in the woods. This morning we did a taste test between the two. The cultivated ones are definitely bigger and sweeter. The wild ones have a nice tartness.

This is Bill's top-bar hive. He built it himself and baited it with lemongrass oil with the hope of catching a wild swarm of bees. So far, it looks empty. Which is ok by me...


...because he put it way up in a tree. As he was struggling to get it up there, I said "are you really going to try to get that down when it is full of bees?" He said "no problem."


Since that time, however, he has started reconsidering. I would be very happy if bees didn't move in until the hive is relocated to a less acrobatic position.

Farm to Consumer Legal Defense

First off - did you know there was such a thing as the "Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund?" I'm sad to think of the circumstances that led to its creation. How uncool is it that in AMERICA we have the need of a fund to defend farmers who want to sell their products to people.

Last month they did report on something pretty cool though. Three towns in Maine have voted to adopt the Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance (pdf). I'm not a fancy lawyer or constitutional scholar that gets paid lots of money to determine the legality of the ordinance, but it basically has the groundbreaking audacity to say that farmers can sell food directly to their neighbors without having to navigate a system of rules, regulations and licenses.

In other words, farmers don't have to pay the state and conform to the arbitrary (and often costly) whims of bureaucrats to earn a living.

How novel, eh? It's like people want freedom in America. Crazy stuff.

The preamble is rather pretty:

We the People of the Town of (name of town) , (name of county) County, Maine have the right to produce, process, sell, purchase and consume local foods thus promoting self-reliance, the preservation of family farms, and local food traditions.

We have faith in our citizens’ ability to educate themselves and make informed decisions... We support food that fundamentally respects human dignity and health, nourishes individuals and the community, and sustains producers, processors and the environment.

Though I didn't ever meet them myself, I feel as if this is really one of those things the founders of this country would say is a pillar of America. Small farmers selling pumpkins to their neighbors without the state inspecting their pumpkin fields and demanding that there be an accessible toilet outside of the house and at least 50 feet from any pumpkins that is cleaned 5 times a day by a certified and licensed toilet bowl cleaner.

Eggs!

This is a chicken. A Barred Rock hen. I don't think she has a name.

She lays TONS of eggs! Today our 10 hens gave us 9 eggs. They've been laying regularly for about a month. Prior to that, they were molting - replacing their feathers and not laying eggs.

We keep our eggs in order by dating the carton when we fill it....like so:

As you can imagine, with 5 to 9 eggs a day, we're filling cartons and adding dates pretty quickly. Until February, we the last carton we had with eggs in it was dated November. Now, we're filling a carton every two days. Our fridge looks like this:

Soon, hopefully, a few of the hens will decide to go broody and hatch out some chicks, which means a few of them will stop laying for a while. So, we're stocking up!

This is Elvis, our rooster. He doesn't lay eggs.

Ball jar geekery

Yesterday, Bill and I had a little cabin fever and decided to go on a hot date to Goodwill. I love Goodwill. A lot. Previous purchases include two lamps and an awesome dresser. This time, I just got a single Ball jar. It cost a dollar...plus 7 cents tax.


It's blue! The color comes from the Lake Michigan sand used in the glass as well as the amount of oxygen in the furnaces when it was made. Ball jars were "famously" blue until 1937, and I presume the color was an important part of their brand, as their home canning guide has been called the Blue Book since 1909, even though recent editions have not been blue.

Thanks to the help of the interwebs, we've dated our jar to 1913-1914. The Ball logo on this jar was used from 1910 to 1923:

The offset "Perfect" (due to the reworking of old molds for a new purpose) was used in 1913-1914 - it was centered in 1915.

There are markings on the bottom - 4 and H. These are mold numbers which identify the machine and mold that made the jar.

It's also round, as Ball jars were until 1942. The current rounded square shape was said to be more efficient by a WWII war board.


I am completely enamored with my old jar. Like my roman oil lamp, I could spend hours wondering about its functional history. There is something magical to me about the basic tools of the past. This old jar could have preserved the contents of a victory garden. The woman who initially filled it didn't have the right to vote. What did the jar hold during the Depression?

Bill likes to think it was squirrel brains.

I won't be using it for canning myself. It's a little grotey for food and the rim has been chipped, which means a seal would be unreliable.


I'm thinking that during its time with me, this jar will hold mostly wildflowers. Hopefully, it will be part of a little collection of neat old jars.

One of my current Ball jars is holding my second batch of homemade yogurt. It is delicious, as expected. I used this recipe with the powdered milk. Yum! We have just a tiny bit of yogurt left from a local diary and Bill refuses to eat it...I guess it will be the culture for our next batch!

What's in the tin?

We have a Charles Chips can which is filled with something yummy. Any guesses?

Want a hint?

How about a peak?

It's homemade hot chocolate mix. We've already made two batches this year. It's one of the easiest, most delightful treats to make. We use Alton Brown's recipe. Bill usually triples it and that lasts 2-3 months.

I think you should try it! The hardest part is finding cocoa, so I'll give you a hint - Penzey's. There. Now you have no excuse. This is amazing, yummy stuff. And have you read the ingredients in manufactured cocoa mix? Last I checked it included many chemicals including partially hydrogenated oils, which you don't ever need to eat.

Also - yes - put just a little bit of cayenne in the mix. You won't taste it, I promise. Cayenne just makes chocolate more chocolatey, as wine makes tomatoes more tomatoey and as balsamic vinegar makes strawberries more strawberry...y.

Up next - I'm going to make something other people tell me is easy and delightful: homemade yogurt.

I will kill a chicken, dammit!

Sometimes I think Sharon Astyk writes blogs just for me. Back in October she wrote about sentimentality (the false kind) right before our chicken harvesting weekend. It helped me put my dislike of processing chickens in context - while, naturally, no one likes killing animals, I could rest assured knowing my birds lived good lives pecking for food in the grass and would have humane deaths. My very participation in the process assures this, just as the squeemish gasps of other meat eaters equally assures that slaughterhouses and Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) are horrible places. The false feeling that you *can't* be involved in processing meat allows bad things to happen behind closed doors.

Today, as I am eating one of the birds we killed in October, Astyk posted about food taboos and how American culture over the past 70 years has influenced the food we eat. In a country most interested in efficiency, modern technology and sanitizing everything, we have moved very far away from eating the way our great-grandparents did. For a very long time it has been very uncool - a taboo - to be a farmer. Only poor people had to raise their own chickens for eggs, so why would anyone *want* to have a backyard flock. It was a stigma.

Fortunately, I think this is changing. When the NY Times publishes an article about a 36 hour meal based on a single goat, when Chiptole advertises the methods farmers use for raising their meat, when insanely cool, beautiful, fantastic chicks like me say "I will kill a chicken," the taboo gets worn away.

My Cochin soup, by the way, is amazingly delicious. It has homemade noodles and it is by far the best chicken soup I've ever had. Bill (my husband, a professional white male) made it all.

Waffle blogging...

This is a little bit of a stretch on "local," but it's still a fine breakfast. The waffle mix is New Hope Mills (so, it's Previously Local) with homegrown eggs - the first of our pullets from this June are laying their first eggs. We can tell they are the younger birds because the eggs are tiny - as is custom for individual chicken's first eggs. They are 27ish weeks old, which is a lot later than our Barred Rocks started laying.

The waffles were made on our wood stove - so, they're, like cooked by Local Fuel. That counts for something, right?

The strawberries are local! They've been waiting in our freezer to bring us a bit of summer in the snow. Jam would be equally delicious, I'm sure.

We also enjoyed tea from a new tea shop we found when an internet order with another company went awry. The tea comes from Germany, apparently, but the shop is locally owned.

Bill bought me a cast iron tea pot (from Japan...) for Yule. We've been using it every weekend.

An argument in favor of less government for better food...

The post is about the causes of perceived elitism in locally-produced small scale food, and adds to this outlook I have that the government will always favor the big guys at the expense of individual citizens. Food "safety" laws are far less about safety and far more about providing an advantage to the industry.

Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?

I [an individual farmer] can produce a gallon of milk from my barn for about $2.40 in hay, grain, amortized goat costs, and a tiny chunk of my mortgage payment....That's not too bad - my local Stewarts is advertising milk for 3.80 per gallon, so I could sell a few gallons to my neighbors and offset some feed costs, without costing them more, maybe even save them some pennies.

My friend Judy, who runs a dairy, observes that it costs $9 for her to produce a gallon of goat's milk. Now why the difference? Why does it cost her $9, which isn't even remotely competetive and me $2.40? Well the main difference is that she had to get set up to sell her goat's milk. She had to put in a bulk tank, build a barn to specifications, put in the second septic system between the milk room and the barn septic, add restroom facilities (even though her house bathroom is three steps away), and pay 16,000 dollars for pasteurizer.

As I'm adding up my costs, I don't have to count any of those things.

Of course, the big difference is that Judy *can* legally sell her milk, and I can't. In order to sell milk, I'd have to build the milking parlor, get the bulk tank, run power to the barn, and buy the 16K pasteurizer. Nevermind that for someone milking 6 does, this is ridiculous overkill - them's the rules. And look, my organic milk now costs $9 gallon - and gee, isn't that elitist, to think that ordinary people can afford organic *milk!?!*

The local food system is elitist in large part because it is forced to be. Others have documented the ways in which small producers are discriminated against - the way subsidies favor large producers, the way externalization of pollutants favors people who don't actually live where they produce their food. Joel Salatin in _Everything I Want to Do is Illegal_ carefully documents ways in which beaurocratic regulations have nothing to do with food safety - and indeed, the system that produces the 1,000 cow hamburger can't be said to be primarily focused on keeping eaters safe.

Chicken Weekend Approaches

I've been having an internal debate on how to start this post. I considered including a "Please Note" (but definitely not a "warning") that the post would include blunt talk about processing chickens and some readers might want to skip it. But I really think that all eaters (all consumers, really) should have an awareness of where their products come from. So, there is no disclaimer - I'm not giving you an easy excuse to ignore this post. If choose not to read any further, it's got to be your decision.

Perhaps a more appropriate warning would be that this post is a bit preachy. While it strongly conveys my views, I don't want it mistaken for a lecture or condemnation of anyone who disagrees with me. As I hope you understand after reading the post - it takes pretty strong feelings about food and the environment to raise your own meat. I just want to explain why we've decided to follow through with a seemingly radical food choice.

This weekend is Chicken Weekend. I'm not going to lie - I've been dreading it for months. We've got 20 chickens (mostly Dark Cornish) to butcher, which is twice as many as we did on our last Chicken Day.


It is a crappy, crappy day, and knowing that it will be twice as long as last year is not adding to my enthusiasm. But at the end of the weekend, we'll have one less flock to feed and worry about becoming hawk food (we've caught a Cooper’s Hawk feasting on our chickens three times in the last month).

More importantly, and the real reason we do this is the satisfaction of living our convictions of supporting sustainable, natural food and relieving some of the burden of outsourcing crappy jobs to other people.

These are the two biggies of why we endure Chicken Day. And for me, it’s "barely endure." Last year, I was on the verge of tears. My job is plucking, which compared to Bill's work is easy. But it's still hard work combined with the emotional toil of partaking in the direct killing of an animal…multiple animals. I've made a personal commitment to be present for the killing of all our livestock. Though I don't actually *do* anything, I don't want Bill to do it alone, and I think it's important to fully appreciate the sacrifice.


There was recently an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. He participated in a 36-Hour meal based heavily on a single goat, a cob oven, and a good community.

Ten days ago, Mike and I drove to the ranch to choose our animal and watch an itinerant butcher slaughter and dress it; Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.

I don't know if it's possible to overemphasize that point. When you are involved in butchering, waste becomes intolerable.

As much as I am still dreading it, my resolve for Chicken Weekend has been bolstered by that article and blog posts, which were kind enough to have the excellent timing of being published this week.

One is from Sharon Astyk who farms and writes in upstate NY. Her post "On Sentiment...And Against Sentimentality" is about many aspects of farming and the attitude needed to be successful. She believes there is a difference between sentiment - "the logical emotions of love and attachment that emerge from knowing something well" - and sentimentality - "cheap emotion, the substitution of a weak thing for something deeper.”

Sentiment, Astyk argues, is essential for good farmers. You need to pay very close attention to your animals in order to care for them well. This attention naturally leads to feelings of love, appreciation and attachment. I understand this completely. I am jarred by the heartbreak that accompanies the inevitable loss of an animal to a predator or illness. It sucks. And not just for the loss of time, money and energy that went into growing something that is now gone. It is a feeling of failure (no matter how unjustified) in not protecting an animal who depends on me - an animal I care for physically and emotionally.

Sentiment - love, anger, attachment, affection - real emotions - these derive from knowledge, and they can't be faked.

Sentimentality, on the other hand, is the “cheap” emotion based on…well, nothing really. I think of it as manufactured – the stuff of Hallmark commercials and reality TV. This, here, is the bit of Astyk’s post that will be helping me get through Chicken Weekend:

I do want to stand up for sentiment in agriculture because I would argue that our industrial society discourages real sentiment, the emotion that emerges from knowing things, and exchanges it for sentimentality. This is an exchange that runs deeply to our detriment, in part because it enables us not to know things.

Sentimentality creates the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) farm - the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed.

In this instance, giving in to sentimentality and not wanting to know things (or read this blog post) creates the real evil. How evil?

something on the order of 98% of our meat in America comes from factory farms that raise thousands upon thousands of animals at a time. To satisfy our ever-increasing demand for cheap meat, the places where animals are raised for slaughter have changed so radically that it’s not even really fair to call them farms. (The Unappetizing Realities of Factory-Farmed Meat)

Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. … To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. (Time)

You know these places. They give you salmonella. They are the target of news reports and documentaries. They are really gross. Horrible for the animals and the people that work there. Horrible for the farmers. Great for the big company and the bottom line.

According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. (Time)

This weekend, as much as I won't like the work, I am satisfied knowing that I am not supporting a system with which I disagree and believe is unduly harmful to the environment, the "farm" animals, the workers, and ultimately the people who eat the product.

Mexican Midgets

Horrible name.

Ridiculously yummy tomato.

Today, I ate...

garden tomatoes with local goat cheese:

...vanilla ice cream with bourbon peaches (both homemade, natch)

...and meat on a stick.

At least the dough was homemade...

Peach seconds

This is the second 1/2 bushel of peaches we've purchased this summer. They are seconds, which means they look ugly, but are half price - perfect for jams.

Some of the bushels were pretty gross - moldy peaches or lots of fruit flies. But this one was good. It takes a little longer to inspect seconds, but it's worth the time. In this 1/2 bushel there were only 4 peaches that were questionable for human consumption and they went to the chickens. These don't look too bad after being blanched, eh?

They became jam. All of them! A few recipes below.

This is my summer jam set up. Far too hot to cook in the brick house, so we have a cast iron propane stove with three burners.


I try to keep the amount of exposed fruit and sugar low to keep the bugs down. Typically I do all the combining of ingredients in the kitchen and just bring the pot outside. That way fruit-covered utensils and sugar coated measuring cups stay inside, near the sink.

My Ball Blue Books (the blue one is from the 40s - I love it!) and a piece of paper to write down recipes as I go. This year I've been experimenting more, but it's helpful to have info on fruit to sugar ratios from the good folks at Ball.


The far blue pot is sterilizing my jars. The close pot is boiling some jam. See the steam! The poor middle burner never gets used.


Important utensils: wooden spoon for constant siring and a skimmer on the spoon rest (which gets washed about 80 times a day during jam season), and my teaspoon on a cup contraption. I scoop a little jam on the spoon and let it sit on the cup to cool a little to assist in finding the gelling point. This is more for the coarse testing - finer testing is done with a freezer plate - but the spoon lets me know when I'm close.

And a cookie sheet (which also gets washed 80 times a day) to help tote everything from the sink to the picnic table.


24 jars of jam! From farthest to closest:

1. plain jam with pectin
2. peach rum jam
3. jalapeno peach jam (below)
4. peach honey lavender jam (same recipe as the strawberry honey lavender)
5. vanilla bourbon peach syrup (below)

Many of these are only soft set, which means they are a bit runny. Because the flavors aren't really what we're looking for on toast, I've left them thinner for ice cream, pancakes and yogurt.

Yum.

Jalapeno Peach Jam
4 cups peaches
3 cups sugar
1.5 teaspoons jalapeno pepper flakes
juice of 1/2 lemon

Put it all in the pot and boil until gelling point (or a little thinner). Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

We're thinking this will go great with goat cheese or brie. Or maybe to accompany smoked chicken/turkey.

Vanilla Bourbon Peach Syrup
4 cups peaches
3 cups sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
1.5 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup bourbon

Toss everything but the bourbon in the pot and boil close to gelling point. When you've only got a few minutes left of boiling, add the bourbon. It's going to thin out a lot - boil until it thickens to your liking. Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

If you add the bourbon early, a lot of the flavor cooks out. Adding it at the end preserves the flavor, but makes the jam thinner. Because this isn't really a flavor I crave on toast, I'm cool with that. Most of this is destined for ice cream or maybe shortcake (if I don't eat it all with a spoon, first.)

Fast Food Fix

From BBC News

Give out statins with junk food

Fast food outlets should consider handing out cholesterol-lowering drugs to combat the effects of fatty food, say UK researchers.

According to the article, we could save so many lives for the cost of a packet of ketchup. And no one has to change their eating habits!! Brilliant solution, yeah?

Berries Blue

We got 10 pounds of Indiana blueberries last weekend.

Ten.

Pounds.

Bill made some dutch oven blueberry cobbler over a fire (pictured with homemade vanilla ice cream):

I made jam, natch. One is blueberry lime from the Ball Blue Book. It is my first pectin jam of the season, and the first jam to set. I still need a bit of practice on finding the gelling point. Up till now, I've made a lot of really yummy syrup that will slide right off of toast. The other is blueberry peach (recipe below). It also hit the gelling point. I don't know if that's because blueberries and/or peaches are naturally high in pectin and therefore better at setting, or if I've learned patience.

Can you tell which is lime and which is peach? No? Me either. Which is why we always label jams.

I also made blueberry pie ice cream. It's vanilla ice cream with graham crackers layered with blueberry sauce. Yum. I'd make this again, but I would modify the blueberry sauce a bit to cook more water out of the berries. After only 7-10 minutes of boiling, most of the berries are still intact and freeze into little berry ice cubes. I think a longer cook, or even using some jam, would mitigate this.

Also, I might have to make my own graham crackers. We have a "no transfats in the house" rule, and it turns out nearly all graham crackers are made with partially hydrogenated oils. Except the organic ones. Which taste like cardboard.

After all this, plus freezing a bunch of berries and tons of munching, we've still got some left in the fridge.

10 pounds is a lot of blueberries....

Blueberry Peach Jam
3 peaches, skinned and cut into small pieces (~2 cups)
3 cups blueberries
3.25 cups of sugar
squeeze of lemon juice

Combine into pot, boil to jelling point. Fill hot jars, process 15 minutes in boiling water bath.

Variations on Strawberry Jam

Over the past two weeks we purchased three flats of local strawberries at the Farmers Market. That's 24 quarts or 6 gallons! We ate some, made some strawberry bread, froze a bunch and made some ice cream.

But, of course, I had to make jam too!

The first flat of strawberries was a bit under-ripe. It was the first week of the farmers market and I think the strawberries were rushed. They weren't real flavorful on their own, so I chose jam recipes that included a lot of other flavor: Strawberry Lemon Marmalade (with thyme) and Strawberry Balsamic Black Pepper Jam (recipes below).

The following week the strawberries were much better and became jam with a greater emphasis on fruit and less on accouterments. In addition to plain ole strawberry, we made some Strawberry Honey Lavender and Plum-Kissed Strawberry (recipes also below).

Strawberry Lemon Marmalade (with Thyme) - adapted from Ball Blue Book.
1/4 cup lemon peel
4 cups strawberries
2 lemons - juice and pulp
5 scant cups of sugar
3 sprigs of thyme

Boil the lemon peel for 5 minutes and drain.
Crush strawberries
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Strawberry Balsamic Black Pepper - adapted from Canadian Living
4 cups strawberries
approx 1.5 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3 cups sugar

Crush strawberries
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Strawberry Honey Lavender - adapted from here
4 overflowing cups of strawberries
1.5 cups of honey
1.25 cups sugar
1.5 tsp dried lavender

Crush strawberries
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Plum-Kissed Strawberry Jam
4 plums (canned last fall)
2 cups strawberries
1.5 cups sugar

Crush strawberries and plums
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Plain Old Strawberry - from 1944 Ball Blue Book
Measure all leftover strawberries. Add 3/4 as much sugar as strawberries. Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point. Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Pickled Radishes...yum?

In less than a week, we've picked over 11.5 pounds of radishes. It'sa lot of damn radishes. They are totally yum...but really. Eleven pounds is a lot of radishes.

This happened mostly because Bill planted the radish seeds all at once, rather than in two week intervals as recommended on the seed packet. But what does a seed packet know anyway?

There aren't many recipes for preserving radishes. Perhaps because most people read the seed packet and spread out their planting. We did find one old timey canning recipe for pickled radishes. The garden forum where we found it said the recipe is from Colonial times.

2 dozen radishes
1 cup sugar
1 cup cider vinegar
1 tbls mustard seed
1/2 tsp celery seed
2 tsp dill weed

Stem radishes.

Mix all other ingredients in a saucepan. Heat until sugar is melted and mixture is clear. Add radishes to jars, fill with hot liquid mixture.

Keep in fridge, or can in a boiling water bath 20 minutes.

We haven't tried them yet, but the jars sure are pretty. 7 uncut pounds of radishes filled 6 and 1/2 pint jars. I quintupled the recipe above to have enough juice to fill up the jars.

We're going to let them pickle for a week or so and report back on how they taste!