Coffee heat rising

At the Farmer’s Market

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Yesterday morning a friend drove into town from the far-flung suburbs so we could visit the downtown farmer’s market together. People say this is the best farmer’s market in the city. The ones I’ve seen in other parts of town have been a bit lackluster, more crafts fair than produce market, so I was curious to see what “the best” means, particularly since other bloggers say they get good deals on local produce at these operations.

Getting there was a challenge: you have to navigate the new train tracks and a labyrinth of one-way streets—the City has kindly made a nightmare of driving downtown. Parking, at least, was free: in a graveled lot with no markings, overrun by people scrambling to get space between cars left sitting cattywampus, higgledy-piggledy and willy-nilly. My friend found a paved lot, where she parked in an end space; when we went back to leave some of her purchases in the car while we walked to a restaurant, someone had parked a pickup with an extra-long truck bed at right angles to her vehicle, blocking her exit. Fortunately, the space next to her was empty, so she wriggled her car out and reparked it in that spot. While she was backing out, two drivers came along and tried to grab the empty space; if I hadn’t been standing in it, they would have blocked her from getting her car out.

We enjoyed walking around. It was a stunningly beautiful day, cool and clear. The downtown area is gentrifying apace—or it was, until the Bush economy collapsed. Strips of old, formerly abandoned 1940s stores have been renovated and repopulated with new shops, and great blocks of so-called “lofts” fill former empty lots and the sites of demolished flophouses. In downtown Phoenix, a “loft” is an overpriced condominium apartment, less overpriced now that no one can or will buy them but still out of most buyers’ reach. Sadly, the area is still populated with homeless mentally ill people living on the streets, the first and worst symptom of America’s ailing healthcare system. As I was leaving, a particularly desperate panhandler came after me and would not stop pestering me even after I got into the car and locked the door.

The farmer’s market offered more produce and preserves per square yard than others here in Arizona, but about half the booths were occupied by people selling tie-dyed shirts, crocheted scarves, wood carvings, pottery, handmade soap, lost-wax metalwork, bead jewelry, and on and on. Prices didn’t strike me as much of a bargain, considering that a raft of middlemen supposedly are cut out of the marketing process.

I bought 2.5 pounds of tomatoes—a handful of vine tomatoes, two heirlooms, and two green tomatoes that I intend to fry for breakfast this morning—for $7.39. That was not a bad price: $2.95 a pound; unclear whether these were organic, but they didn’t appear to be. Potatoes and sweet potatoes were a dollar a pound. We came across a lady selling some exceptionally delicious hummus; I proposed to buy a container of that for $3.00 and a bag of pita chips for $6.00. On second thought, though, after the vendor mentioned that the stuff didn’t contain any tahini but really was just puréed chickpeas, garlic, and olive oil, I decided nine bucks was a little much for a can of beans and a bag of chips, especially since I have a perfectly fine food processor sitting in my kitchen.

After my friend and I parted, I wondered idly how some of the prices we’d encountered would compare with with grocery-store prices. So, on the way home I stopped by AJ’s (my favorite gourmet emporium and home of the Elegantly Overpriced Commodity) and Safeway (itself no bargain corner).

At AJ’s, vine tomatoes were selling for $2.99 a pound; green tomatoes, a rarity in stores here, were offered for $3.99. Campari tomatoes, the variety I buy because they are the only tomatoes with anything resembling flavor available in this part of the country, were $4.99. Pita snacks ran from $6 to $20 for a package. AJ’s carries our vendor’s hummus: $4.99, two bucks more than buying it directly from its maker at the farmer’s market. Potatoes were $1.49 a pound.

At Safeway, I couldn’t find pita chips, but a package of pita bread sold for $2.19 for ten pieces; easy enough to paint it with olive oil, cut it into triangles, and crisp in the oven. A can of chickpeas cost all of $1.39 for organic and $1.00 for nonorganic. Campari tomatoes were selling for the same price as AJ’s; vine tomatoes were $2.69 a pound. Neither store had any heirloom tomatoes. Sweet potatoes were $1.29 a pound, but regular Idaho potatoes went for 5 pounds for 99 cents—about 25 cents a pound.

Okay. Given that you’d have to make your own hummus (a process that would take all of about 5 minutes) and substitute bread, toast, or tortilla chips if you didn’t want to dork with cutting up and toasting pita bread, let us compare the costs:

Hummus:

Farmer’s market: 3.00
Gourmet market: $4.99
Safeway DIY ingredients: $1.00 plus a few drops of olive oil and lemon juice

Tomatoes:

Farmer’s market: 2.95 a pound
Gourmet market: $2.99 to $3.99 a pound
Safeway: $2.69 a pound

Potatoes:

Farmer’s market: $1.00 a pound
Gourmet market: $1.49 a pound
Safeway: 25 cents a pound

Pretty consistently, the Safeway underpriced the farmer’s market and the AJ’s on the goods I was prepared to purchase this weekend.

Even where the farmer’s market was a few cents cheaper, one has to question the cost of the hassle factor: shopping there requires a significant investment of time. The site was so crowded and so cluttered with sellers of kitsch that it was hard to make your way to the food stands. To buy something, you were supposed to get a slip of paper on which each of your desired purchases was marked, go to a central cash collection site to pay, and then take the receipts back to each of the vendors you’d visited. This would entail elbowing your way to the desired vendors and standing in line not once, not twice, but three times for each purchase you made!

Fortunately, some of the vendors would take cash and credit cards. Just as fortunately, the hummus vendor did not, and the prospect of dorking around in two more lines deflected me from making that impulse buy. In terms of gasoline expended, the Safeway is a third as far from my house as is downtown; the AJ’s is half as far. And no panhandlers harassed me in either grocer’s parking lot.

For a special outing, it was fun. But day by day, it’s not a venue I would add to my regular round of places to buy groceries.

w00t! Tax refund

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The tax lawyer just sent my completed tax returns. What with last spring’s teaching gig, the small but steady income The Copyeditor’s Desk has been generating, and the drawdowns I’ve been making from my IRA to pay my share of the Investment House mortgage (which of course are treated as regular income), my gross this year was pretty startling. And when GDU switched to biweekly pay, I cut the amount being withheld from my paychecks to mitigate the $220 cut in net monthly pay that change inflicted. I really was worried that I would owe a ton of money in April.

But nay! We’re asking for refunds of $4,734 from state and federal gummints!

Meanwhile, in 2008 I set aside $2,563 to cover that year’s taxes on freelance income. By golly: that’s a windfall (as I see it) of $7,297.

Of course, I’ll have to pay the lawyer, whose fees are not in the H&R Block range. On the other hand, H&R Block wouldn’t be extracting almost five grand from the state and the feds for me, either. My lawyer charges significantly less than my accountant used to charge, back when I was incorporated. Argh! That woman used to present me with a tax prep bill that was more than my taxes! And believe me, she never came up with a refund.

Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again…
🙂

Automatic payment vs. EFT bill paying

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In the conversation about automatic bill-paying a few days ago, some commenters remarked on the preferability of setting up your accounts so that you can go online to transfer money to creditors electronically. This is different, of course, from allowing a creditor to engross money directly from your account according to what it thinks you owe.

The credit union would far rather have customers use this EFT strategy for payments, especially (so they tell me) where insurance companies are concerned—the CUs rep said that insurance companies are egregious about ripping off customers and that it’s difficult to disconnect them from an automatic payment plan. They just ignore requests to quit grabbing cash out of the customer’s account. And I will say that toward the end there, Qwest went amok with stealing money out of my account that was not owed…and that indeed, they eventually refunded. The refunds didn’t help my cash flow, though, when I needed it.

I knew better than to pay Qwest automatically but was lulled into a false sense of confidence after several years of decent service and straight dealing (those latter must have been unintentional on the company’s part). And there’s not a chance on God’s Green Earth I would let The Hartford or any other homeowner’s or auto insurer have access to my bank account.

But I do use this arrangement for the utility companies, for my long-term care insurance (only because GDU kept screwing up the payroll deductions), and for a whole life policy whose premium has not changed in 30 years. Except for the long-term care insurer (which I would not pay this way except that there’s no other choice), all the other creditors have proved that they do not systematically cheat customers (except to the extent that our defanged regulators allow), and so I don’t feel the system poses much risk.

And it does have a single, sterling advantage for an aging single woman: if anything happens to me, the bills will be paid until I can get out of the hospital to deal with them or until my son can get a grip on things.

It’s an advantage, too, in a household where one person handles all the finances and the other person hasn’t a clue. One of my friends learned this when her mother, who lived in another state, had a stroke. Her father had never so much as opened their checkbook and was utterly naive about their money situation. He didn’t even know how to pay the bills! Fortunately, the mother had put all their utilities on automatic bill-pay (they came due right about the time she fell ill), and so my friend was spared the hassle of figuring out how to keep the lights, gas, and water running from halfway across the country.

That advantage alone, I think, outweighs the possible risks. You have to be careful, of course…never let a telecom company extract funds from your checking account, because they are in the business of ripping off customers. But utility bills, at least for the time being, can be safely paid this way, so that your lights will stay on if you’re temporarily put out of commission.

Cheap Eats: Impromptu Swiss chard toss-together

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Nothing that tastes this wonderful can possibly be good for you.

Grazing from the chard patch this evening, I accidentally created the following chef d’oeuvre:

You need:
-A handful or two or three (depending on the number of diners ) of Swiss or red chard
-A fistful of walnuts
-Olive oil
-Frying pan with lid

Cut the any tough stems from the chard. Wash the chard leaves in cold water. With no overly enthusiastic effort to dry the leaves, slice them crosswise into half-inch strips (or so). Set aside.

Skim the bottom of the frying pan with some olive oil. Place the pan over medium to medium-high heat. Toss in the walnuts. Allow these to toast in the oil, stirring occasionally.

When the walnuts are toasted, place the cut-up chard leaves in the pan. This will cause some spattering, so pay attention lest you get zinged with hot oil. Cover the pan immediately and turn the heat down to medium low. When the spattering dies down, lift the lid and stir the leaves around a bit.

Stir one or two more times over the next few minutes as the chard cooks down nicely and softens a bit. Cook until done to your taste.

Season with pepper and salt, if desired.

Turns out that chard and walnuts make an amazing combination. Enjoy!

No Crash Here: Riches in the Department of What Matters

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Spring has sprung in these parts. The weather—never bad this winter, really—has been spectacular for the past several weeks. Everything is in blossom. At this time of year, the citrus perfumes the air like frangipani in the South Pacific islands. It reminds us that our strange, abstract human constructs of “wealth” are so silly as to be meaningless. Does losing a quarter million bucks in real estate and the stock market really matter when far more believable riches surround us?

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Wonderful as flowers are, I’m planting a lot more vegetables in the garden. That chard borders the pool, and probably will grow there through the summer. Soon its neighbors, the beets and carrots, will be ready to harvest. Meanwhile, yesterday in a part of the yard that gets more sun I put in some cantaloupe and some butternut squash, which I hope will grow from grocery-scavenged seeds.As times grow even harder, food is going to be more expensive; possibly even scarce. So, the flowers will have to make way for things that can be eaten.

The yard already has plenty of that: I’ve been scarfing tree-ripened oranges for the past two and a half months, and now the oranges, lemon, and lime are all covered with new blossoms. Next winter will see another bumper crop of citrus, I think.

Those oranges are sweet as candy. Eat your heart out, Warren Buffett!

Snail-mail vs. electronic payment

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Are there bills that you refuse to pay electronically, or am I the only maverick running loose across the range?

These days, I pay all monthly bills by EFTs, except the phone bill. I never trusted Qwest, which in the past was prone to sending incorrect statements full of phantom charges. But because they had been OK for several years and because I no longer make many long-distance calls, I opted to let them engross money from my checking account. That was a mistake—it added even more aggravation to the late, great Qwest saga. So, when I switched to Cox, which after all is just another giant squid of a telecom corporation, I decided to keep its tentacles out of my bank accounts.

Cox’s statement hasn’t arrived this month. It’s usually here by now: last month I wrote a check on the 6th, meaning the bill would have been sitting around the house for several days by then. The bill actually isn’t due for another couple of weeks, but they claim you need to get the payment to them ten days before the announced due date, to ensure it posts on time. So I had to call them on the phone, navigate the infuriating punch-a-button system (is there any question why so many Americans have high blood pressure?), then find out what’s owing and what their mailing address is.

Snail-mail is so passé that the employees don’t even know what the company’s address is. It took the human I finally reached two tries to find what she thinks is the correct accounts receivable P.O. box.

There are some corporations, IMHO, that can’t be trusted. The phone company is one of those: I want to see the bill before there’s even any possibility of money being released. Ditto that for credit cards. I never pay credit-card bills electronically: I do not want Visa or American Express to have any access of any sort to my bank accounts, other than through a check. I want to be able to see and confirm each charge in each billing cycle before sending money.

A credit-union rep once remarked that it’s not a good idea to pay insurance companies electronically, either. I do: long-term care and life insurance premiums are EFTed to the relevant companies. But I don’t pay the annual homeowner’s and auto insurance that way. Too squirrelly: you never know when they’re going to run amok with the premiums, so I want to minimize potential hassle if I decide to switch insurers.

What bills, if any, do you pay the old-fashioned way?