Crap on the Lawn

6/30/07 UPDATE: Information on the veggie booty recall is at WebMD and at the corporate web site.

I've had an uneven weekend.  Some animal has been crapping on my front lawn every morning.  The craps are smaller than a dog's and larger than a cat's.  The culprit is almost certainly the fat bastard living behind my garage.  Not knowledgable in the ways of suburban members of the rodent family, I can't tell you what it is.  A woodchuck, a muskrat, a craprat, who the hell knows.

On Saturday night, in a cheap ploy to get out of the nighttime routine, I volunteered to run out to do the week's grocery shopping.  "This the BEST time to go.  Really.  Don't forget to read Jonah three stories.  Bye." 

Then for some reason, the Shop Rite threw me into a fit of depression.  It's huge. Three times the size of what we were used to back in the city.  The trouble is that I don't want to buy anything in the place.  They have Wonder Bread, but not crunchy, crusty, Manor Loafs. They have 27 varieties of baked beans in a can, but only one kind of soy sauce.  The cheese comes in individually wrapped slices.   

(OK. I'm showing my snobby city side now.  I aspire to be a populist, but when it comes to food, I'm an elitist snob.  I can't help it.)

A short trip from our old place in Manhattan was the Fairway.  I've been mourning my separation from the foodie mecca all weekend.  It was a fraction of the size of the Shop Rite, but it had all the best stuff.  They saved a lot of room by cutting out the Wonder Bread and having less varieties of sliced pickles and baked beans.  Like a city street, the aisles twist and turn, and there is always too much traffic at the deli section.  In the produce section, there is a mountain of mesclun, an organic area, and a bushel of fresh basil.  By the deli, they have an olive bar, three variety of heavily herbed chickens, bagels that are bagels (not rolls with holes in the center), and a huge cheese section.  100 variety of cheeses are available -- goat cheese, feta, fresh mozzarella tied up in bags, obscure moldy cheese that fermented under some French guy's armpit for two years.  And meat, fish, and dairy is in a walk-in freezer.  You and your kids put on communal coats before entering to buy extra firm tofu and organic yogurt. Everything looks so fresh and exotic that you're immediately inspired to try out the recipe from the Sunday Times.  Shop Rite only inspires me to nuke some frozen pizza.

Steve mowed the lawn for the first time.  Big huge manly grin on his face the whole time.  Flash to the scene in the John Hughes's flop She's Having a Baby, where the suburban men do a synchronized dance while mowing their lawns. 

We spent the day pruning back the overgrown yard, taking down an old fence, and watching the kids ride their bikes on the street.  Later, we grilled hamburgers on a $8 charcoal grill. 

If we could just catch the crapping bandit and find some arugula, life would be good.

Comments

[PZ Myers]

You've hit a sore spot with me: bread. I moved to a rural university from Philadelphia, and one thing I miss is good bread with texture and a crackly crust and flavor. All we've got here is this ghastly pale gooey flabby stuff that makes Wonder Bread look good.

[moira]

Emerging from lurking to say: www.wegmans.com.

Don't know just where you are in northern NJ but there is one in Woodbridge. Good bread, lots of deli, exotic produce, the lot. Worth checking out.

[Prim]

Oh yes, I second Wegmans, although I have yet to go to one. My Mom and a couple of my friends back in the States go there and have said good things about it. I'll join you in your Food Snobbery. I loath shopping at the commisary here - just this weekend I was telling my husband how uninspiring the commisary is. We go there only for the soy milk and veggie burgers. The rest of my grocery shopping I do at a Activ Markt - a small German store. It reminds me a lot of Trader Joe's. Even better - it is in walking distance. And I've gotta say, the commisary here is not cheap. I'm guessing it's because there are no other American grocery stores (Giant, WalMart, Safeway, et al.) to compete with. Makes me mad.

Gosh your yard-crap problem sounds like a riddle. Maybe it is a large rabbit? I've seen sleek 15lb rabbits running around here.

[Allison]

I'm sure you can find good stuff in your area, you just have to do some research....you may have to hunt around for smaller stores than doing the one-stop shopping at the supermarket. Is there a Trader Joe's near you?

[Donna Boucher]

Well, while your husband mows the lawn...you can bake some nice crusty bread.

Don't forget your apron! *wink*

Donna in Wisconsin

[teep]

On the critter: if it's an uninspired brown and runs with a galumphing gait, odds are good that it's a wooodchuck or, if you prefer, a groundhog. While muskrats are roughly the same shape, size, and color as groundhogs, they're aquatic in nature. Unless you've a creek *very* nearby, it's a groundhog.

Your grocery trials made me laugh.

Wegmans is a good resource. I have one not-exactly-near me in State College (two hours away -- where I live, everything is two hours away) and that's where I pick up things like twenty pound bags of sushi rice. I keep wanting to take a camera into the store and photograph their produce section. It's so artistic...

Also. I think you mean "mesclun" unless grocery stores where you live are a lot more interesting than the ones where I live. Last I checked, mescaline was a psychoactive drug thing. Mesclun is the mixed baby greens for salads and stuff.

[teep]

Where'd my spaces go? Honest, I can use the space bar... I *did* use the space bar. Weird.

[Dr. Manhattan]

We love Fairway.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Aside from the great produce, Fairway has a lot of eclectic kosher stuff that keeps us coming back. Another reason not to move to Jersey...(we may be joining you anyway...)

[Erika]

I hear you on the food shopping. One of the major reasons I left academia for a job in a big city was that even after five years in the countryside, the need to eat cheese that wasn't orange and bread that wasn't Wonder never left me. (I learned to make my own cheese and bread - that's how desperate I became)

See if there's a Fresh Fields near you. I like it even better than Wegmans. (Sadly we don't have Fairway in DC, and I'm actually thinking of moving back to NYC just for Fairway, Venieros, Levain's Bakery, and Gray's Papaya. Yes, I'm a foodie too.)

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Well, here's the link to the Trader Joe's New Jersey page: http://www.traderjoes.com/locations/search/NEW+JERSEY.asp. I hope one's near you. I'm lucky, b/c all the big supermarkets near me (except Albertsons) have 'artisan' bread baked in-house. Some are better than others, but you can always find something. When I can, though, I just find a deli (in my case, the closest is Russian) where I can find good Landbrot brought in a couple of times a week from a bakery in Vancouver, BC.

It could also be a really small dog, BTW. Our neighborhood seems to have several Lhasa mixes that run loose and leave their droppings on our lawn.

[Shamhat]

Walk-in? You're talking about the NORTH Fairway, you heathen! Although I moved from 72 St. to Harlem and then to Washington Heights, I still find myself going back to the south Fairway. Never later than 9 am, though. That could be dangerous!

[Laura]

Thanks all for helping this food snob. I'm such a pretentious git that I fed my kids veggie bootie and sweet potato chips as snacks today. Veggie bootie are organic puffed snacks dusted in kale and spinach.

Quick googling found out that there is indeed a Trader Joe's close by, but no Wegerman's.

[Laura]

Thanks all for helping this food snob. I'm such a pretentious git that I fed my kids veggie bootie and sweet potato chips as snacks today. Veggie bootie are organic puffed snacks dusted in kale and spinach.

Quick googling found out that there is indeed a Trader Joe's close by, but no Wegerman's.

[beautiful]

I had the opposite experience, moving from West Virginia to the Pacific Northwest. Suddenly there's really good food everywhere and not enough time to eat it. On the down side, we're pretty much always broke now... take me back to the days of wonderbread and spray cheese!
Groundhogs are, in my opinion, the coolest creatures, all fat and round with those little chewy cheeks. But if you really want him to move on, ehow.com gives this advice:
"Empty the contents of your cat's litter box into the tunnel entrance. You may need to repeat the process several times, but eventually the groundhog will get discouraged and move out." Mhmmm... cat poo.
Alternately, hforums.com suggests planting tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and onions, which groundhogs hate. This would have the double benefit of giving you something yummy to eat, solving both your troubles at once!

[ogged]

Did you Google Wegmans or Wegermans?

Wegmans: http://www.wegmans.com/about/storeLocator/results.asp?region=7">http://www.wegmans.com/about/storeLocator/results.asp?region=7

[Laura]

Actually, I googled it correctly, but spelled it wrong here. Wegmans seems to be out of our range. But it might be worth a drive once a month to stock up.

And thanks, beautiful, for researching groundhog removal. I've seen the bastard since I wrote the post, bolding sniffing around the backyard. He actually is quite round and chubby. Maybe instead of dumping the kitty litter by his hole, I will just leave him a clean box and encourage him to crap there.

[Aqsaqal]

Find arugula? Arugula is the easiest vegetable to grow! It self-seeds,
so once planted, it will grow at the same spot for years,
with little help. (You may want to help
it by scattering seeds over frashly dug land in
early spring and early fall).
It likes cool weather, so if you
are in NY State, you'll only have it in spring and fall,
but in Vancouver-like climate it can be grown almost year-round.