I have no problem admitting that Husband, I, and the dog are spoiled when it comes to food. I started to subscribe to Goumet and Bon Appetit when I was in Middle School. That has certainly skewed my expectations for meals in my home ever since.
The dog is spoiled because he will only eat his kibble if we put a spoonful or so of homemade broth on it. This week it is goat broth. He is a happy boy.
Winnipeg is a foodies paradise, with every sort of ethnic restaurant and grocery store you can imagine. Six years there left me unprepared for spartan western North Dakota and only two chain grocery stores. Fargo, the nearest food mecca is 300 miles away.
We have taken to ordering on-line to obtain harder to find cooking ingredients. This Christmas, Husband found a source for all sorts of food from Spain, including wonderful serrano ham, Portuguese linguica, cheeses, chorizo, smoked beef, olives, and Galician sourdough bread partially baked in Galicia and frozen, shipped to the US, then shipped frozen to us. It is lovely bread that we tried, but failed, to reproduce at home. We also order 10 lb hunks of parmesan, olives, and pasta from an Italian importer (the parm lasts for a year and costs less than buying smaller packages in the grocery store) and beans from Rancho Gordo. I also order celeriac by the case from Oregon because we can’t grow it well here and I like to cook with it in soup stock. Daughter just visited the Rogue River Creamery in Southern Oregon and decided we needed 4 lbs of their award winning cheddar and blue cheeses. It will arrive on Wednesday. She and son have similar food attitudes as we have.
I justify all this by noting we don’t travel much, have little to no debt, rarely eat in restaurants, and don’t own a boat, camper, or a lake home. We shall see if living near to Sioux Falls after we retire allows more access to these foods, or if we will still order from afar.
If you lived in the middle of nowhere, and cost was not an issue, what would you order on-line to eat and cook with. Where do you like to find recipes?
Trail Baboon 
I used to drive by and through all sorts of places I thought would be great to live in if only you could figure out a way to make a living. Today it seems you can work from anywhere. I’d miss the cultural stuff like plays and symphonies art museums and concerts but the access to online stuff may be a band aid that would do the trick
I’m not a big food delivery guy as far as getting stuff cooked and delivered but I would order the heck out of on line supplies. Spices beans flours and fixings for cooking myself always sound good. Stuff like smoked paprika and smoked salt may be hard to come up with in remote areas but would keep in the cupboard . I shake my head when I see the offerings in the grocery store freezer these days all the veggie and specialty offerings. Remember the orange juice section of the freezer as a kid? Now it’s a multi offering with and without pulp with and without lemonade raspberries small medium and large and from multi companies. Pizza… my goodness. Hot sauce, veggie meat substitutes. Same with other things flower bulbs shirts art supplies
in todays world mail order business makes it easy. Maybe if I mover to Tibet it would be an issue but I’d miss my grandkids so I think I’ll stick around . When they prrfect the transporter and I can go from Tibet to my grandkids with a button push then I’ll be wondering about mars or the next galaxies . What’s a couple hundred light years if the button brings you back but would the eggs spoil on route?
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I’m not at all a gourmet chef or a foodie. Of course we all have to eat, and high quality, local, sustainable foods are important to me – like Ben’s eggs. I’ll go out of my way to buy from a local grower. It’s both for health and for economy. I like to spend my money locally, and keep it out of the hands of all kinds of international or big businesses.
I do confess to buying things from Amazon, but not food. I buy household goods sometimes from them, but usually not if I can find it locally. I’ve never explored the food import markets. I’ve never felt the need. I buy good quality olive oil and spices at the Co-op. I go to the farmer’s markets, or local roadside vegetable stands during the growing season. I don’t usually attempt recipes with ingredients that I know I can’t get locally. I think I’m pretty special when I come home with fancy mushrooms.
I do admire you and your husband for all the work you put into your food. You probably don’t want to, but you could open a restaurant.
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What she said, in last paragraph.
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About the only things I would order online at this point are halva, the middle eastern sesame/honey sweet, and maybe chocolate if a predicted shortage comes to pass. Like others above, and because I cook with Husband’s simple tastes in mind, I can usually find what I need at the local foodstore and co-op. I try to avoid the big box stores like HyVee, but I do check out Aldi a couple of times a month… maybe I’ll start to re-think that.
Unfortunately, I’ve been clicking on eggy recipes on FB, and now one shows up there almost every day, and I get caught. I would really rather read cookbooks…
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I subscribe to the NYT food app, and we get lots of recipes from that.
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i’m a cookbook gal. I don’t click on too many recipes online. In fact, I think of myself as a recreational cookbook reader. I have one that’s in transit right now at the library — the Alice in Wonderland cookbook. My other book club is reading Alice in Wonderland next month and I found the cookbook while I was online at the library. Can’t wait to see what it has in it. I doubt there’ll be a recipe for anything to shrink down to 4 inches or shoot me back up to 5 feet.
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mushroom quiche with psilocybin mushrooms?
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If there are a lot of recipes in a library cookbook that YA and I like (we put Post-it notes on pages) then that’s a candidate for being added to the household. But these days it has to have a lot because if we get a cookbook, we have to get rid of a cookbook. Sometimes I’ll copy two or three recipes out of a cookbook before it goes back to the library. Those going into my binder.
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Short of an apocalypse, nothing could compel me to live in the middle of nowhere, in which case ordering anything online would be off the table.
None of the things we make are particularly fussy or that ethnically authentic that we require exotic ingredients. In fact, recipes that call for ingredients not readily available don’t usually get a trial. It’s enough that I cook from scratch and use fresh, quality ingredients. I suppose if we didn’t have an Asian grocery nearby there would be a few ingredients I would have to order, but otherwise our repertoire of recipes from cookbooks and online can be provisioned at an average supermarket.
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I’m almost to the point where living on a quiet mellow estate with a 30-45 minute drive to civilization might be ok but today I hope to live downtown I can’t decide whether to look toward the river or the city . ill see how it turns out
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I will be interested to see, too…
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I, too, used to be a recreational cookbook reader, and over the years I have subscribed to a number of magazines about food, recipes, and food related topics. The trouble with many of the magazines, though, was that they were so beautiful, that I couldn’t bear to throw them away. So they accumulated, and the piles grew higher and higher. Then I discovered that I could hand them off through Freecycle to other people who shared my enthusiasm for these magazines. Wish I could hand off all of my problems to Freecycle.
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Better Late Than Never, Baboons,
OT–I am back home after a trip to Mayo Clinic today for Lou. It was, indeed, an impressive experience. Phoebe was at Doggie Day Camp all day and is sacked out on the living room floor, she is so exhausted by that milleau.
I do not ever again want to live in the middle of nowhere–so much so that I cannot even answer that question. Recipes? Anywhere — cookbooks, newspapers, make it up after I eat something new, friends who are good cooks, and on-line recipe sites. After going to Norway I wanted Norwegian Rye bread. I found an on-line recipe that I have been making ever since.
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JacAnon
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Since I cannot drive for 8 days, I will be ordering food delivery which is almost a first. I did stock up well. My daughter is here tonight and part of tomorrow to drive me to pharmacy. Nothing exotic. Going on heart diet.
Clyde
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We should coordinate an egg trip for whomever it works for.
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I would like some eggs. Jacque
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If this egg run comes together, I’d like 2 dozen.
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I can come down there – when?
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In my dream world, if cost was not an issue, I wouldn’t order in food to cook with. I’d like it already prepared. I am particularly fond of soups. Tomato and bean and butternut squash and minestrone and chicken with wild rice, to name a few.
I don’t usually go looking for recipes – I’ve grown weary of following instructions and making the shopping trips necessary to actually execute a recipe. I generally fall back on old recipes or just improvise.
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For you cookbook readers: I have a couple of “novelty” cookbooks – The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook, and Northern Exposure Ckbk. These are laced with stories and humor. I’ve spoken before about Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, for the same reason.
Also a Celtic Folklore Cookbook that’s really cool…
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Maybe you have had the experience of eating something and then wondering exactly what was in it.
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Wow!
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One of my favorite food flavorings (don’t know whether to call it a spice or an herb; I don’t think of it as either) is saffron. I have such a vivid and wonderful memory of my introduction to it, that it will be with me forever. I suppose some people would consider it exotic or fancy, but that’s not how I think of it, at all, though it is pricey.
For my own cooking, I avoid fussy recipes; by that I mean labor intensive recipes. I consider myself lucky to have access to pretty much everything I need locally. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t hesitate to order what I needed on line. I have ordered the occasional Danish delicacy online even though shipping costs were exorbitant. What are you gonna do?
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