Generally speaking, we have preferred just about everything that we have been able to get organic (though we know that the standard varies). There have been two exceptions to this. One is canned beans, Private Selection Brand. This is the nicer store brand at our grocery store. We've been pretty happy with their offerings, and can usually save some money over other brands when we buy it. The organic tomato sauce they make is very nice. The beans, well, if you drain them well and cook them with lots of other things, they are okay. That's the best I can say about them. S & W still wins for canned beans, they know how to select good beans, prepare them for canning, so if they come out with an organic line, I will try it, but otherwise, I'm sticking to the inorganic beans they offer when we get them on sale.

The other disappointment we've had lately is also from a brand we normally like. Nancy's, which makes the whole milk, organic yogurt I used to get our batch started, and also pick up when we somehow let ours die, makes cultured cottage cheese. It was marked down for $1.49, so we picked some up. It is SALTY! Way too salty. The children commented on it when I gave it to them with their lunch last week, and I thought that cottage cheese is usually salty, so how bad could this be. Well, it was so salty, I could barely eat it. We have unsalted chili powder and adding that helped, because it needed the salt, but I don't know that we'll be buying this again. We'll go back to buying the store brand when it's on sale, and possibly learning how to make our own.

There are some organic foods that we didn't think would taste much different, but we were able to get them on sale cheaper than the regular, and we ended up switching. Organic garlic and sweet potatoes were so noticeably better than their inorganic counterparts that we now buy those exclusively, even though they are often a bit pricier. The garlic is usually firmer (I honestly think they just take the time to cure them properly) and has fewer blemishes, so I lose less of it and the flavor is incomparable. The sweet potatoes tasted astoundingly good and made for great lunches for me and the children.

As an aside, it kind of annoys me that factory farmed food which is full of pesticides, is farmed using all sorts of bad for the soil methods, etc is the normal kind and organic is marked as distinct. It seems to me that the "regular" kind should be marked out as factory farmed and the organic should be the normal.

Labels: Homemaking, Tales from the Kitchen