Verdict on The Fresh Market's Webster grocery store

Answer:  One and a half thumbs up.  It's not my favorite grocery business model.  I prefer Whole Foods, which does much of my health-related headwork for me (as opposed to a grocery store which is more gourmet-focused than health-focused).  However, at this juncture, The Fresh Market has one walloping advantage over Whole Foods:

IT'S HERE.

It's not a very large store but it doesn't have to be.  Once you eliminate all the highly-processed carb- and grease-loaded crap that no self-respecting human being should be eating anyway, you don't need very much space to house a well-rounded selection of actual food.    

No stranger to leafy lamentation, late last year I published a post titled "Groceries in Clear Lake:  More ugly pictorial truth" in which I canonized a baby bok choy as the patron seasonal saint of everything that has been wrong with our local grocery market.

Screengrabbed from that post.  I was afraid that I might draw the ire of corporate attorneys if I photographed the offending produce within the stores themselves, so in the interest of public service, I purchased representative (i.e., perfectly awful) vegetable examples and brought them home for portraiture such as this.  And then I promptly threw them into my composter.  

So of course in evaluating any g-store successor, there's no question that the bok choy would have to be evaluated as the freshness flagship, the ultimate litmus test of store viability.

Bok choy in the Webster Fresh Market, Saturday June 7, 2014.  Pretty much perfect produce.  Bok choy doesn't get any better than this, at least not in the retail arena.  And this stuff is organic to boot. 

I can guess the question on every reader's mind:  "But how expensive is Fresh Market?!"

You can expect any store like this to be more expensive than the common chains because (duh) they have higher-quality stuff.  But I did not find the prices to be unreasonable.  When evaluating the overall mark-ups, it's always instructive to look at the staples.  Milk was decidedly more expensive than what lower-end chain stores offer, but inflated prices did not seem to be across the board.  For instance, you would be hard pressed to do better than this for organic whole wheat spaghetti.  

If you are a long-suffering Clear Lake foodie, welcome to your new Nirvana.

Pierogis?!  You've got to be kidding me!!  Is there anyone in Clear Lake besides myself who has even heard of pierogis??

Which brings me around to my next observation.  As promising as this store is, The Fresh Market got a couple of things wrong here, in my opinion.

The number one mistake is the floor.  Unfortunately, they installed a wood-looking porcelain tile.  What that means is that you constantly have to listen to the annoying THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK of your cart wheels pounding across the grout lines.  It kinda negates the soothing effect of the classical music that is piped throughout the store.

Remember the floor in the produce department of the Randall's at Clear Lake City Blvd. and Space Center Blvd.?  OMG, it was horrible!!! At some point in the early 1990's (??), they ripped out the original generic vinyl floor tile and installed brick-dimension ceramic tile in its place.  You couldn't even hear yourself think in there for all the bumpy noise of the cart wheels!  As soon as they made that mistake, I figured they'd come to their senses and promptly take it back out again.  But they did not - they left it in place for many years, maybe even contributing to the decline of Randall's as a chain because I, for one, would not put up with the annoyance of it - I'd shop elsewhere.  This issue didn't get resolved until they remodeled yet again just a few years ago, and re-installed a smooth, sensible quiet floor.

In this case shown above, the grout lines are not as deep so the effect is not as severe as in the Randall's case, but it's still an unnecessary annoyance. 

The number two mistake that I think The Fresh Market is making is that they've adopted a standalone store model.  If they were wise, they'd snag some of that vacant retail square footage next to them and develop cooking classes analogous to Central Market's well-known foodie fare.  Because, let's face it - of the quarter million or so greater Clear Lake residents, there are probably only five or six people who would actually know how to cook properly with ingredients such as white truffle oil (I'm not one of them).  And if people don't know how to use it, they won't buy it, and that doesn't bode well for the success of the store.  

I've always wanted to take some of Central Market's cooking classes but the time and driving distance commitments are just too great.  If someone set up shop in the Baybrook area, I'd definitely participate.

My qualified 1.5 thumbs up verdict isn't shared by everyone.

One of the early Google reviews, screengrabbed from this site.  

I mentioned in January that any new grocery entry into our market is going to have to compete with the twin juggernauts of HEB Clear Lake Market and HEB Bay Colony.  Experience-wise, I see a couple of advantages to a store like The Fresh Market:

1. Find me a bok choy in any of our other local grocery stores that looks as good as the ones shown above.  Email me a picture because I'd have to see it to believe it. 
2. While HEB sells plenty of good stuff, their stores are also chock full of the usual American avalanche of highly-processed junk food products that I would never eat.  I very often feel like I'm hunting for a needle in a haystack when I shop at HEB (and every other local chain) because I won't consider buying literally 95% of what they have for sale.  It's a pleasant experience to walk into a grocery store and not have to struggle with that kind of inefficiency.
3. Both of our local HEB stores are constantly mobbed.  I feel like I'm running a gauntlet every time I walk into one of them.  Particularly if I'm planning a special meal, I would like to walk into a grocery store and have the luxury of being able to relax and concentrate on making my selections, rather than spending all of my time negotiating for physical access to the shelves (many of which are chronically under-stocked) and jockeying for safe passage down the aisles.  

Anyway, white truffle oil notwithstanding, I'm looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish recipe-wise with this new local resource. 

Besides bok choy, the other good litmus test for any higher-end grocery store is the quality of the in-store bakery.  This product above is called "old world sprouted grain bread".  In my opinion, while it is not as good as Whole Foods bread, it's not bad.  I've had much worse.

Disclaimer:  As always, this is a noncommercial blog expressing personal opinions only.  I accept no compensation from any source.  

Rain barrels, Part 3: Epic fail

In the spring of 2011, I published a post titled "Rain barrels:  What's hype and what's helpful".  In that post, I cited the main drawbacks to using barrels.  By simple mathematics, they are highly unlikely to "save you money on your water bill", as many vendors and municipalities claim in their promotional language.  Furthermore, they are not very "green" for the simple reason that many brands leak so badly that they quickly become useless and must be tossed out with the trash.

I got my first rain barrel, a Systern model, during a City of Houston distribution campaign a few years ago (I lived in Houston before moving to League City).  It appeared to be well-made, but it quickly developed this huge stress fracture in the front of it.  The City of Houston actually replaced it for me free of charge (and did so for other folks whose barrels had also failed), but my replacement began leaking even more quickly than the first one had.

So rather than conserving water, many of these barrels instead waste peoples' money and proceed to take up space in landfills.  In so doing, they tend to serve as an overall public deterrent to water conservation in accordance with the "once bitten, twice shy" principle.  Any consumer who has gone to the expense and trouble to install a rain barrel only to have it leak like a sieve is not going to be very open to future conservation measures-in-kind.  And I don't blame them one bit.  

The City of League City recently undertook its own rain barrel campaign which saw about 200 takers, according to Galveston County Daily News (paywalled).  I am not familiar with this brand but I sure hope that those 200 buyers have better luck with their barrels than I've had with mine.  

In my original hype vs. helpful post, I also enumerated the positives to owning a rain barrel.  They can be convenient for spot-watering in certain scenarios and, as long as you can somehow keep them from leaking for a number of years, consistent use will at least allow you to recoup your expenditure on the barrel itself, even if you don't see a positive impact on your water bill.

But that's a really, really big "IF".  What I'm going to do below is show you a series of photos that tell a brand new rain barrel story with a surprise ending.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, you must think that my entire life is one endless procession of rainbows and butterflies because every home improvement project that I lay my hands to magically turns out to yield a benefit that is ten times worth the effort I put into it.  Well, I'm here to tell you that ain't true, and this story will illustrate it in spades.

I was inspired to install a new rain barrel in this central alcove of our front yard for the sake of convenience.  Because we have a four-car lateral attached garage (three spaces across and two spaces deep in the middle), our house is a full 60 feet wide.  While we had the foresight to order the builder to install garden hose faucets on each of the front corners (east and west), we didn't think to order one for the middle. Therefore, I must unroll 30 feet of hose in order to water my front-bed flowers.  And when I'm finished, I must roll 30 feet of hose back up again.  I spend more time unrolling and rolling hose than I spend watering the flowers.  It's a ridiculous waste of time and energy that could be avoided by keeping a barrel of water right here where it's needed.  

However this is our front yard I'm talking about, and so whatever I install here has to have maximum attractiveness.  I fell in love with this Sam's Club offering (left side of photo).  It has a nice textured surface, the color coordinates perfectly with our brick, and there's a planter in the top of it so that you can put plants that will grow and cascade over the side and disguise the fact that the rain barrel is even present.  

Tap to expand.  Basically this is a reference to the fact that POAs and HOAs cannot prohibit residential rainwater harvesting in Texas.  However, it is within their authority to place limits on how homeowners design their systems, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're going to want to see installations that are as attractive as possible.  And I can't blame them for that.

Screengrabbed from this Texas Water Development Board site.  

Dry fit, before I created a stable base.  With screening plantings and whatnot, you can see that this barrel could be made to be inconspicuous.  

Let me walk you through creation of the base and downspout diversion.  Most people don't realize how heavy rain barrels are (including manufacturers who under-engineer them for the stress loads they must bear).  When full of water, this barrel will weigh almost 500 pounds!!  (65 gallons x 7.5 lbs/gallon).  That requires a stable base or it could become a safety hazard (what if it tipped over and fell on a child?).

I started by removing one of our foundation shrubs.  

Then I scraped off the mulch to expose the sand layer emplaced by the builder.  I used a tamper to compact it.  

Soil compaction is good exercise for the core and arms.  

Addition of limestone gravel to help with under-drainage.  Also compacted.  

On top of the limestone, a layer of decomposed granite and then cinder blocks on top of that, making sure to keep everything absolutely level.  

12" x 12" caps on top of the cinder blocks.  

This basically creates a robust 2' x 2' pad.  And the open sides of the cinder blocks can serve as toad houses.  

Except in my case, I blocked off the toad-house holes so that the surrounding soil and mulch would not spill into them.  

Now for the barrel preparation.  This one needed an overflow hole to be drilled.  Very important because excess water needs to be conveyed away from your slab.  

A rain barrel is, indeed, a good idea - but only if it is properly designed, constructed, and installed.  

Overflow port successfully drilled.  

Some simple fittings from the hardware store for the overflow tube.    

You can pick up these white plastic flex pieces for about a buck and a half at hardware store.  Here you can see the top planter in the barrel.  

We simply re-routed the existing downspout. If I were keeping this assemblage, I would paint the white plastic piece to match the downspout so that it looks cohesive and inconspicuous. 

And then the blue overflow hose is tucked into the existing flex tube that the downspout had originally been placed in.

It's not too ugly, is it??  You can tell that, when re-mulched and when trimmed out with screening vegetation, it would not be an eyesore.  

Now for the fatal flaw in this otherwise-exemplary home improvement story.

In order to test the final configuration, we (sigh) unrolled 30 feet of garden hose and ran the water into the rain gutter to simulate rainwater run-off.  

And guess what happened next??  

No rainbows and butterflies today!!!

It was only upon testing in situ that we discovered that this barrel is badly defective.  The side seams were not welded properly.  An uncountable number of pin-hole leaks down the sides immediately made themselves apparent.  

OMG, somebody shoot me - it never occurred to me that this barrel might leak badly right from the moment that it rolled off the assembly line.  It never occurred to me to test the barrel for water-tightness even before I took the store labels off.  I'm used to rain barrels failing 3 to 12 months into their operation.  This doesn't even rise to the level of infant mortality - this damned thing was stillborn.

Wikipedia's explanation of the bathtub curve, which describes the nature of engineering failures. Apparently many would beg to differ with me on my essential distinction between "infant mortality" and "stillborn".  

Sigh.  My bad, obviously.  And obviously, I do not recommend that you purchase this particular rain barrel.

Out of stock?  Really?  And how many other hapless would-be-greenie consumers in our local area have experienced what I've shown above??

Screengrabbed  on June 8, 2014 from this site. 

So I am now the proud owner of three (count 'em) non-working rain barrels.  I've begun to turn my attention to ways in which I might somehow retrofit or otherwise adapt one or more of them in order to recoup some measure of functionality (liners? structural supports? internal coatings?  some combination of the above?).  If I figure out what these things are good for other than disposal in a landfill, I'll publish a follow-up post.

Meanwhile, best wishes to the 200 of you who recently purchased rain barrels from the City of League City.  May you have better luck with your barrels than I have had with all of mine.

The north Clear Lake wetlands

Last August when I was researching for this post which describes the HEB (originally postulated as a Central Market) to be built in north Clear Lake, I noticed something mighty peculiar.

August 2013 screengrab from Googlemaps, which I retained because I knew I'd need it one day:  Someone had drawn a very large line in the not-so-sandy sand:  Six wetland areas defined on Googlemaps.  Named.  Designated.  And with obvious intelligence, foresight, and purpose - someone knew what they were doing here.  

Googlemaps is participatory - anyone can upload any tagging information that they want, and unless it is inappropriate or challenged by others, it seems to persist.  But that fact alone doesn't necessarily make it easy to track the backstory or the instigators in a case like this, so I just left this issue alone figuring that the makers would make themselves apparent sooner or later.

I figured it might be someone connected to the existing developments, because additional wetland set-asides are evident within the older neighborhoods just south of the undeveloped area shown above.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.  

June 6 2014 screengrab from Googlemaps:  Hmmmm, isn't that curious??  Compare with the first screengrab shown above, the one I retained from August 2013.  Someone appears to have gone into Google and deleted the labels for the Northfork Wetlands, Clear Lake City Wetlands, and Middlebrook Wetlands.  

And so it has come to pass that the group with particular focus in this area has manifested.   Galveston County Daily News (paywalled) reports that the local special interest group Galveston Baykeeper has sued Trendmaker Homes in federal court to challenge wetlands designations in the area, with the apparent goal of restricting development (or perhaps compelling mitigation... I haven't read the full GCDN article yet because my subscription discontinued due to an online glitch).

You'll notice that they use the phrase "significant nexus" in that last line.  Ordinarily that might mean pretty much everything from a regulatory standpoint, but we are not currently living in strictly ordinary times as the following Wikipedia grab suggests.

Screengrabbed from the Galveston Baykeeper website.  

A discussion of the particulars is way, waaay beyond the scope of this blog (some would argue that it's so complicated that it's beyond the scope of any blog).  Suffice it to say that both the regulatory and the biological issues are not clear and not necessarily as settled as some might claim or hope.

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia.  

It turns out that FOX Houston had covered the beginnings of this story back in January of this year, but I don't read every single news outlet every day, and so it's easy to miss stuff like that.  As I have complained bitterly before, the League City - Friendswood - Clear Lake area with its combined population of about a quarter of a million people doesn't have its own newspaper.  At this point, we don't even have a viable blogosphere.  Mostly what we've got is a hodge-podge of about a half dozen unrelated regional commercial news outlets, none of which are particularly invested in Clear Lake (or if they are, they're not well-funded), and which may or may not cover any given issue in a systematic or predictable manner.  For crying out loud, murders happen in Clear Lake and don't even get reported because of the abysmal news coverage that characterizes our area.  

I'm digressing obviously, but the current bottom line on this court case is that it will be interesting to watch what happens here.  I myself wouldn't count any given outcome as a done deal just yet.

In this September 2013 post, I joked about owning a piece of "the original" Space Center Blvd. extension above CLC Blvd.  A $2 million grade-related construction mistake forced the developers to rip out a large section of the original paving because it was built at too low an elevation.  Many of us who lived in north Clear Lake at the time took full recreational advantage of the fact that the right of way lay abandoned for months and months, making it wonderful for biking, hiking, sports, etc.  I remember quite clearly the construction area being peppered with wetland delineation signs on either side of the faulty right-of-way.  Those signs suggested that at least some of the wetlands in that area are, in fact, jurisdictional, but I don't have any information on the extent of it.

DISCLAIMER:  As usual, this blog presents personal observations and editorializing only.  I have no personal or professional connections to either of the parties named in the litigation referenced above.  Neither am I a wetlands expert - and I wouldn't want to be, because that area of regulatory administration is too complicated, too mercurial, and too intensely politicized for my taste.  I just know from casual reading that it is unsettled and constantly evolving. 

So you think you can't garden...

If that's the case, you should take a look at this photo:

Tomato plant growing in a concrete seam on our back patio.  Vegetables that decide to grow of their own accord are called "volunteers".  

Tomato volunteers growing in a bucket of compost that I forgot to spread around.  No effort was made to germinate them and no care or water was given.  

Tomatoes growing in one of our rear mulch beds, 45-lb. dog for scale to the left of the tallest plant.  The tallest one was an intentional planting that I placed in this bed because I ran out of space in my regular gardens, but the rest of the plants in this bed (to the right of the Italian cypress and surrounding the main plant) are volunteers.  

Yesterday I harvested 5.5 pounds of tomatoes, after harvesting 3.5 lbs. two days previously.  Shown here are Sweet Million and Yellow Jellybean hybrids.  The yellow is an intentional color, not a sign that the tomatoes are unripe.  

I've come to prefer the spontaneous volunteer tomatoes over the pure hybrids.  The volunteers represent mixed lineages that arise from composting of kitchen scraps and expired tomato plants from previous years.  Volunteer tomatoes are generally smaller (which makes for better whole freezing) and not as sweet, which makes them more suitable for certain types of cooking.  (I only grow grape and cherry varieties because I don't want my volunteers to get polluted by large-variety genes).

Tomatoes are the single most invasive vegetable that I've ever seen, but they are by no means the only edible that can be grown literally with no effort.

None of the dill that I grow is intentional. They don't call it "dill weed" for nothing.  It grows where it wants to grow. 

I scatter the seeds around the yard, let them come up naturally, and then retain only those that come up in convenient locations.  

By this time, all of my mint and most of my sweet potato crops are also volunteer (the sweet potatoes because root scraps of the previous years' plants get accidentally left in the ground and regenerate in situ).  Almost all of my sweet basil also consists of volunteers.

Sweet basil growing near our front door.  I don't know why it decided to come up here, because I hadn't planted any of this type in the vicinity.  In the upper left hand corner, you can see a volunteer sweet potato.  

Anyway, my point is, gardening need not be elaborate or difficult.  Once established, a lot of useful edibles can simply be encouraged to grow themselves.

Update June 13, 2014:  In Part 2 of this post, I provide ideas on how to successfully manage all that can be harvested from a back yard garden, whether hybrid or volunteer.

Best stainless steel mixing bowl set

Answer:  In my opinion, it's the "Bakers and Chefs" set of 3 + 1 at Sam's Club, of all places.

They are sold in a conventional set of three but then you can buy the fourth, which is the 13-quart, separately if you want that.  Obviously to look at them nested like this, all four were really intended to go together.  Less than $30, all-in.  

As with many consumer endeavors, what seems like it should be a very straightforward purchase often turns out not to be.  When I set out to search for these things, I assumed I had a very simple and reasonable wish list of characteristics:

1. It had to be a set of at least four bowls (many consumer sets only have three).
2. The largest one had to be at least 12 quarts (I'll reveal why below).
3. They had to be commercial grade or close to it (no flimsy steel).
4. They had to have an efficient aspect ratio.

Those sound like four easy criteria, but it took me months to find a set that met them.

By efficient aspect ratio, I mean that the bowls had to be deep relative to their width.  Many mixing bowl sets are very shallow.  

In terms of aspect ratio, I was also taking into account the need for a stable base.  This is IKEA's current stainless bowl (Blanda).  It's very hip and stylish, but look at that tiny flat bottom in the center!  I feared the bowls in this set would be too unstable, roly-poly like.    

Prior to buying this set, I owned a few mixing bowls that were too shallow, and one that was too flimsy, to the point where it would expand so much upon washing in hot water that it would later sit unattended in the drain board and go "SPROING!!!!" when the bottom of it cooled down and contracted enough to snap back into its original shape.  This would happen at entirely unpredictable times and would routinely scare the crap out of me.  And life is simply too short for mixing bowls that make random obnoxious noises and scare the crap out of you.

Happy mixin'.

This is why I need a lot of mixing bowls, and large deep ones at that.  During this time of year, there's a daily haul of fruits and vegetables from our back yard gardens, and that stuff tends to fill up every kitchen container in sight.