HomeChef Review: Week 1

Home Chef is a delivery food service, much like the better known Blue Apron. After reading many online reviews of similar services, we decided to try Home Chef because of its greater variety of options in meals (generally 9-11 [depending on if you count breakfast as a meal for a dinner service] compared to Blue Apron's six) and more exciting choices.

I held out on writing this review until we received our second shipment so that I felt like I was giving a truly informed opinion, rather than just a first impression.

The trial phase is currently $30 off a standard order (usually $60, but it depends what you pick, so $30 out of pocket the first time) If you'd like to use my referral link, it gives me rewards for doing so : ) Once you have six deliveries, you can send people free trials for a week too. Currently also, your second shipment is $10 off (essentially $50 out of pocket). Skip to the bottom if you want a cost-breakdown example.

Disclosure: I was not paid or reimbursed in any way to write this review.

Home Chef has a lot of options to choose from each week, but for our trial we decided on:
1. Umami Burger with Miso Marinated Beef
2. Steelhead Trout in Shallot Butter Sauce
3. Roasted Beet, Goat Cheese, and Smoked Almond Tartine (Not pictured)

The box itself is a standard cube and, for us, arrives on Wednesdays. It has a lot of insulation, but (after inquiry about waste) all of it is recyclable or biodegradable. The packing of each meal is separated out, but is not really any more wasteful than buying veggies and putting them in those plastic bags at the grocery store.

Here's how each meal is typically packaged:

The instruction cards for each meal are generally very clear and have lots of pictures of each direction's step. They do anticipate you to know basic culinary tasks (ex: dice this, mince that, know when meats are cooked given general time ranges), so it's not for complete beginners, but if you watched your mama, you should be fine.

We executed all the meals with no real problems. My trout stuck to the pan (because I don't own non-stick pans), and the beet tart had entirely too much beet for my liking, but wasn't bad.

I went online, filled out my reviews for each meal (mostly involving them being a bit on the salty side), and set up our second week.


The next day, I was very surprised to see an e-mail from an actual human related human things about my reviews! Wow! I wish Amazon would do this. A+ on customer support! This further validated my thought to continue trying the service.



Sorry about the lack of tart pictures!

My fish is at the bottom as it was not my prettiest cooking day ever...

Next week, we have coming:
Italian Sausage Stromboli, Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps, and Seared Flat Iron Steak and roasted sweet potatoes...and there were a lot of other good options to choose from too!




A word about cost: Yes, these services are more expensive than buying the individual ingredients. No, it's not as ridiculously different as you would think, and it's exciting to make things I wouldn't normally, to the point that we've eaten out less often (and $20 for two people is cheaper than dinner at our local Mexican joint or ordering Chinese!).

Here's the cost break-down for the Umami Burger from Aldi (which is generally where I shop), with partial items estimated (est).

$0.60           10 oz. sweet potato
$0.70           red onion
$2.50           3 oz. cremini mushrooms
$0.20 (est)   3 mayonaise packets (1 1/8 oz)
$0.26 (est)   1 1/2 Tbsp. Miso paste
$0.19 (est)   1 Tbsp. sun dried tomato pesto ($4.50 for 8.1 oz on amazon)
$5.87          10 oz. ground beef
$0.50 (est)   1 oz. grated parmesan cheese ($3.98 for 8 oz)
$2.20           2 Brioche Buns
$0.75           2 white cheddar slices ($3.00 for 8 slices)

Total to make-it yourself (with a lot of leftover stuff since you'd have to buy whole canisters/bags of things: $13.77

But at the end of the week, I didn't have four jars of half-used stuff or wilt-y unexciting things I was tired of using in my frig. We have a very small frig.

Bottom line: If you live alone and hate leftovers or are two people and are short on storage space, this might be something for you to try. I don't know that we'll do it forever, but so far, I like it.

ASMR Favorites

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Basically, its that thing that makes you go all tingly and relaxed when someone brushes your hair or rubs your back or whispers to you or...well, there are lots of things that make people experience this. Not all of them work for everyone all of the time.

For me, it seems to particularly strike me when watching slow, methodical movements in a soft or whispered voice. Just the whispering can sometimes do it, but for some reason, the slow movements seem to be especially effective when there is some tapping/clicking like nails on a polished table while folding or playing with beads on a necklace. I can't stand chewing videos (if that's your thing, bully for you.) and crinkling of papers and other objects irritate me too. Finding videos that don't include these can be really hard.

I thought I'd share a few of my favorites today that aren't the typical GentleWhispering (Maria) or other "major" ASMR-tist. All of these people have fewer than 15,000 subscribers. While that's a lot of people, I think YouTube only acknowledges you at 50,000 subscribers or something ridiculous, and the bigger-name ones have something like 200,000 or more.

1. Elizabeth ASMR--she's in Denmark now, I believe, but is from Iceland and has a very unusual accent. I love her voice and her honesty about the things she shares. I don't like that she occasionally curses. However she uses her space more like a blog than anything else, which makes her channel feel a little more purposeful than just making sounds. She's been kinda AWOL lately, but has quite a few videos up. Check her our in this video:

2. Little Watermellon Based mostly in Barcelona, she mostly posts about drawing (often without whispering) and daily life. She is one of those people who is naturally gorgeous and rarely focuses on huge quantities of makeup--good. There are too many of those. My favorite of her videos is sharing this children's book in Catalan about Gaudi:

3. SouthernASMR Sounds This lady films from rural South Carolina mostly about her thrift store finds (something I readily identify with). Occasionally, she does sounds videos or roleplay videos (which I am not so into), but usually its thrift related. I think its her descriptive language that does it for me. 

Let me know what you think about these ASMR-tists and if you have found any lesser-known ones that give you tingles!

Thrift Finds: July 2016

I go shopping at either GoodWill, thrift store(s), or yard sales at least once a week. 90% of the time, I don't find a whole lot, but there is always something interesting, like leopard print tube dresses in size XXXL or soviet-era children's books with communist propaganda (Why, yes! I did buy that one!). There are a couple tricks to doing this and not getting carried away.

Lately, mostly I've been shopping at Good Will.
My rules at GoodWill are:

1. Only buy children's clothes if they are $3 or less (you can almost always find items size newborn to 5T new at Kohls for $3 and change, so there's that)
2. Only buy things that are part of the "Color Of The Week" (this means 50%) unless its something really special AND really cheap (again, I like my $3 rule)
3. Bring your Club GoodWill card
4. Check the GoodWill Facebook Page for any additional deals (this one is for our local ones)
5. Buy any and all books you want or think others would want

These rules have served me solidly in getting even more excellent deals.

Recently at Good Will, I have had really good luck finding nice quality games. I intend to use these for our family's "Thriftmas" exchange with a family my sister and I grew up with.I know you're saying "BUT IT IS JULY!" Yes, it is. It can also be really hard to find the right thing for the right people when you're pressured, so when I see something that works for $3, it goes in our big closet. (Sidenote: we also give "normal" presents of new things, the thriftmas thing is just because we all thrift as a hobby).

the larger games were $1.80 each on color sale, the smaller game was 76 cents! All three games have all the pieces/cards and we tested the gameplay out and (especially the vampire one) they were pretty fun!

I also bought these scissors at "full price" (wow, $1 each, how racey!) because my pinking shears met an Unfortunate and Unspeakable Accident related to unapproved Man Job use "because they were on the coffee table." Right...anyway, these will work for awhile anyway.

These retail for about $2 a piece, but I don't think they were ever used. Yes, I needed both pairs.

I also bought some clothes that have already been put away, but next time I'll keep them handy and take pictures. Happy Hunting!

Yogurting

Ever since watching Yang Haiying make her own yogurt (over and over and over again) on her YouTube channel in her calming, accented voice, I had wanted to try it. However, at the time, we had an insanely tiny kitchen where a warm-water bath on the stove meant no other food could be prepared on said stove. So I coped out and continued to buy my yogurt for upwards of $1.10 per cup (I like Siggi's best--I liked Chobani until they started to add ridiculous amounts of sugar to it). Then, I read Jenifer Reese's Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, and we were in our new (1978) house with a HUGE kitchen.

She explains the process and shows very well how to make it with normal kitchen stuff in this video. (If you are into ASMR, my favorite ones she has created are the ones of her in museums talking about art...but ASMR isn't everybody's thing.)

 The cost-benefit analysis of making yogurt yourself is really clear. If you don't believe me, check out the US Labor Bureau's website for current cost of milk and compare that to whatever you spent on yogurt lately. I buy grassfed organic milk for around $4 a half-gallon, so for me this was even more cost-effective. If you triple my recipe the second go-round (As I intend to) with your own yogurt as a starter, you'll end up with about 6 cups of yogurt from your half-gallon, or 67 cents per-cup, probably closer to 75 cents considering honey and vanilla...WAY less than what I pay for Siggis and marginally less than what I would pay for Chobani.

Supposedly, this process is pretty idiot proof, so I invented my own small-batch recipe to use as a trial:

500 ml whole milk (a pint is good, if you are buying milk just for this)
1/4 cup Siggis coconut yogurt (it's what I had on hand)
1 Tbsp. honey
1 Tbsp. vanilla

I boiled the milk and added what I wanted, as Haiying describes, but then I filled a pot with water and put my liquid back in the measuring pitcher I used to measure the milk over low heat for eight-ish hours (Basically, until I was finished cleaning up supper for the night and ready to close down the kitchen). Because I left the milk uncovered, I did have to add water to the pot (not the cup with the yogurt) a few times. While I have a cooler, I'm not super keen on putting boiling water in anything plastic. Next time, I'll try doing the water bath in the crok pot on warm overnight, I think. That seems a bit less of a hassle than using the stove, and doesn't seem like it would require water-level monitoring; I just didn't have it out at the time.

After two hours: Still as liquidy as standard milk
After four hours:
After six hours: 

Now, I like my yogurt pretty thick (okay, REALLY thick), so the next morning, it didn't resemble anything I would normally eat. 

The following day it was all curdled-looking, but tasted okay and was thicker.

Then, I went to the store and Siggis was on sale for less than what making this mess cost. 

Bottom Line: just buy the yogurt you cheapskate.

Pokmemon Go! ...er, Yield.

Undoubtedly, by now you have seen the hoards of twenty- to thirty-somethings running around your local shops, malls, and neighborhood looking for digitized pocket monsters. This rant is about my experiences with the game so far with many links that explain things about it/how to play it.

Pokemon Go is a Augmented Reality (AR) game based on the cartoon of days of yore (see: late 90s). If you're not sure what that means, stop now because you won't get into this--Pokemon Go is all about the brand, Pokemon. If you didn't like it when you were ten, you won't like it now.

If you decide to play it, register first on the Pokemon Website. DO NOT LINK IT TO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT (there's all sorts of scary tracking stuff in the fine print if you do that). Look at the left side-bar thing to "Join." Once you've done that, on your phone, the game is a free app for both apple and android users.

I held out for the first two weeks in playing this game as I assumed it was designed for children--Not so! Again, whether it was intended to be or not (probably it was), this game has mostly appealed to my age demographic. So, when literally all of my friends began to get ahead, I felt the squashing ranks of peer-pressure and downloaded the damned game.

The following day, the "Three Step Glitch" as it is now known to be called began. Basically, it makes it so that instead of being able to track specific types of Pokemon, now any Pokemon you run into (and hopefully catch) are completely random. (Side note on that link: I wanna be paid Forbes salary to play games and write about them...) This is when the game got much less exciting.

Since then, I've pretty much lucked my way into 28 Pokemon in the Pokedex and reached level 8 yesterday. I'm in no way a "hardcore" player--I turn the app on when I'm in stores with free wifi and when I walk my dog (Yes, I ask the Poke-dog if he'd like to go on a Poke-walk...every time.) One would assume if I lived not out in farm areas, that this would go a lot faster. However, with no Pokestops in (safe) walking distance (there is one four "blocks" down, but there is no sidewalk, I have to walk in people's lawns and did it once and was hollered at).

This Saturday, there was a rather large update and now there are no steps at all for tracking...not that it really made a difference to the problem anyway. What made it more frustrating currently was that I had just figured out where in the vicinity of my neighborhood different "spawn" points were for certain pokemon...and with the update, most of them have changed to different types, and all of them are not spawning as frequently.

It also is very frustrating to see the local Gyms with Pokemon levels (CP) of like 1700 when they highest Pokemon I have at level 8 is about 200, and it would appear I'll need at least five more levels to get that far. Clearly the people that are holding these gyms either ar fanatical walkers, or have no lives and drive around to all the pokestops to get more balls (the main problem in my very rural setting).

I do find that my neighborhood has quite a variety of different Pokemon compared to more urban areas. However, we have zero water ones and most of the streams and lakes nearby don't show up on the maps. Those that do, I haven't ever run into water pokemon near anyway.

So, for now, Pokemon is slow-going. I'm not going to stop playing (again, peer-pressure), but I do hope in the next update they'll have the tracking sorted out and I'll make greater progress rather than finding 200 Nicoran. 

Book Review: "Make the Butter, Buy the Bread"

I was recently shopping in Daedalus Books in Columbia (a great store, which I often refer to as having "Amazon prices without the shipping") and bought all the things, as I tend to do there. Hubs picked up a copy of Jennifer Reese's Make the Butter, Buy the Bread --a book about what you should and should not be making yourself to eat in order to save money.

In truth, I picked up the book, glanced through the pages and went "this looks like fun, but she lives in California, and the book was published five years ago, so are the prices still true?" and set it down. Then, my friend Allison picked it up and said the same thing. When Andrew picked it up, I decided $4.98 for three people to read the book was a decidedly fair price.

Her writing style is personal without becoming a source of over-share and very positive and witty. However, she does make a lot of references to how her mother's death made it hard for her to continue making a variety of different things...which, having lost several children, I can identify with, but felt was kinda debbie-downer-ish to mention in the book, which otherwise is primarily upbeat. This is the kind of book I like to read (See also: Consider The Fork, or to a lesser degree, The Omnivore's Dilemma).

The layout is a little hap-hazard. Each "Chapter" is broken down by a key ingredient or idea, but this is not always consistent. The first half of the book ends up mostly being about absurd things that happened with her chickens and why they're not such a great idea. Mostly, it left me wondering who fenced her yard for $3,500 (our lowest estimate for a fence was $9000! But, probably we have a larger swath of land than most people in California).

She breaks down (often a bit too simply), the hassle level of making the item and the cost, and whether or not you should make it (or even just try making it to see if you like it better). I don't always agree with her assessment, and clearly she doesn't crank out biscuits all the time as my family does.

The recipes that accompany most of her suggestions of "Make It"s are from a variety of sources, many of which she has added or changed ingredients. We haven't tried any of the suggestions (yet!), but among the items she suggests:
Make it: Bread, oatmeal, yogurt, hash browns, pancakes, buttermilk, eggs benedict, English muffins, hollandaise, hot cocoa, pumpkin choco. chip muffins, flourless chocolate cake, onion rings, doughnuts, and marshmallows
Buy it: butter, eggs, chips, onion dip, fried chicken

Making a 1/4 sized batch of yogurt (and tea) using a recipe from online. Seems pretty simple, I'll let you know how it tastes later.

These are all suggestions from the first half of the book--I was keeping notes on an envelope and stopped tracking them when I ran out of space.

I really enjoyed this book as a narrative, and intend to try some of the recipes in the future. You can find it at Daedalus Books online store here
or
Amazon here 

Even with shipping, it's cheaper at Daedalus.

You can also find out more about Jenifer Reese on her website, The Tipsy Baker

Happy Reading!

Kohls (is) Trip(ping)

Kohls is having one of their save x dollars if you have a Kohls charge card sale presently.
My experience with these in the past has been less than enthusiastic. However, my rule is: If I can buy it new for the same price I could get it at GoodWill, I'm game.

Generally, I only go to these sales if I already have a 30% off coupon. However, our Kohls is so badly organized, that any day I go, I tend to find something nice for crazy cheap...I just have to put in some serious time hunting for said deals. Today, that meant about an hour and a half.

I ended up spending $27.03 on four dress shirts and a (SUPER CUTE) wool dog-themed bowtie for Hubbs as well as an American flag, all on ultra-clearance. Supposedly, my "Total Saved" was $207.25 which got me thinking about prices at Kohls over the last several years. This tie actually cost more than one of the shirts I bought:

This bow tie has listed on the original tag that it costs $40. Kohls was selling it for $36. I got it today for $3.05!   Wow! Price inflation, anyone?

If you frequent Kohls as I do, you probably have noticed that their prices have risen substantially and their weird sale cycling continues. I rarely ever buy anything there for full price/on normal racks (except that one time when I ripped my pants, but that was an emergency, or if I need an in-season special occasion dress), because 95% of their items are "on sale" at any given time. I stumbled upon an article about a May 2016 settlement of $6.15 MILLION that Kohls had to make in California.

Basically, some guy in California claimed consumer fraud because he observed that the things he bought at a sale price had, for three months earlier, consistently been sold for that "sale" price, and therefore this wasn't a sale, but should be considered a regular price. He filed this in something like 2011 and it's taken this long to settle, but if you are a resident of California, you can see Kohl's special page about it here:
  KohlsSettlement California 

If you are part of that settlement you have until August to file your claim.

I don't think I'll ever stop shopping there (unless by some horrific accident they stop marking things down to nothing), but it would be nice to know that the slave labor in the product that I am buying is accurately represented in the price of the item, rather than assuming an enormous profit and fraudently saying people are getting a "good deal" when it's on sale.

I'll just be sticking to clearance, thanks!