Day in the Life of an Idiot

 The weekend kicked off with... well, not a bang, more of a STAB. 

Before I start this story, Shawn is okay, No stitches were even needed.

On Friday nights it is the tradition at chez Roundhouse to have pizza and movie night. When Mason is off at school this is often date night. But, even when we're all together, I will either make pizza (my family really loves the deep dish I make in our cast iron pans) or we order in. When it's just us, Shawn and I will watch a movie together, but when Mason is home we tend to go off and parallel play--each watching our own things. 

( Not graphic, but still medical.... )

Even though it always feels like forever, we were only there three hours. Not bad for a Friday night! Mason, being the kind of trouper he is, had the house cleaned up and ready for us to just come home and collapse in a heap. 

Saturday we did a very truncated version of our alliterative errands: coffee, cardboard, and cardamom. For those of you just tuning in, Saint Paul provides recycling, but is very picky about only picking up "what fits in the containers." So, we have simply started reserving our cardboard so that we can take it to the citywide recycling center on Saturday mornings. Since the recycling center is near where I like to get coffee, we started this whole coffee, cardboard thing. Once we had two "c"s as part of our errand list, we now insist that anything else we do on Saturday mornings start with a c.  Cardamom is, like coffee, not really an errand, but there is a lovely bakery on West 7th that makes amazing cardamom spinners, so either when we have a lot going on (or, like this last Saturday, NEED A F*CKING TREAT) we will stop at Brake Bread (so-called because it is a kind of drive-up window.) 

Saturday night we had a lovely backyard get together with the set of friends who make us feel Very Grown-up. Do you have friends like this? Like, there's something about this set of couples that is just like Hollywood's idea of hanging out with adults is supposed to be like? There's always this food starting on their big kitchen island that migrates out to this picturesque backyard, with LITERAL fireflies, and bottles of wine.... we love hanging out with them because it makes us feel cool (and they're good company, of course!) 

Sunday we had planned to make the food of Shawn's people, fleischkuekle.  This is an ALL DAY affair. We spend several hours assembling these meat pockets/pierogi and then several hours deep-fat frying them. If you count shopping for the ingredients as part of the process (which I do!) we started at 10 am and ended at 7:30 pm. 

On the other hand, we make literal HUNDREDS of these things.


Image: A small portion of the finished, fried fleischkuekle

How was your weekend? 100% less ER trips, I hope!

 
Image: Chocolate bunny in a fancy bowl

Mason's longtime bestie, a lovely nonbinary person named Grey, happened to be in town for a mock trail competition at the same time as Mason's Spring Break. The two of them concocted a plan wherein Grey would stay with us until they needed to head back to their school (in Iowa.) So, we have had a houseguest for a week. It's been nice and so we wanted to send them off in a grand style. Ostara, Spring Equinox, is not for several days yet, officially, but we always retain the right as Wiccans to call on Pagan Standard Time (which is normally a joke about tardiness to rituals, but which we use to say that we can celebrate our holidays anywhere in the vicinity of their actual day.) So, we treated Grey to an early Ostara High Tea.


Image: Shawn's amazing jelly roll.

We pulled out all the stops. Shawn made an incredible (perfect!) jelly roll (sometimes called a Swiss roll), I made pierogi, Ukrainian potato balls (pampushki), scones, little egg tarts, and we had fruit and faux mimosas... and, OF COURSE, tea.  The jelly roll was a huge hit. Shawn used strawberry jam and orange marmalade for the filling. I think Grey was impressed. To be fair, we love setting the table to impress.


Image: Early Ostara table setting (2024)

Mason, like me, always enjoys playing host. He took Grey book shopping and they both came home with arms full. We also had the entire Mock Trial team in our basement playing video games at one point. Mason and Grey went off to the Mall of America to meet up with more friends at some point, too. It's been such a socially busy week for us, I find it deeply amusing to report that, after waving goodbye to Grey, the three of us immediately collapsed into bed and took a long afternoon nap. 

Happy early Ostara to those who celebrate it!

 
Image: Tiny black cat, Clover, asleep on the bed, buried in the green comforter.

I'm exhausted this morning because last night we decided it might be nice to let Clover have the run of the house for once. We don't want her to be under the impression (no matter how much Willow might like it to be true) that she is forbidden anywhere downstairs.  But, to give Clover free rein meant  that I slept with Willow in the TV room, on the couch. Our couch is... okay, but getting a bit worn in the springs. It's a bit lumpy.

Plus, while Willow mostly tolerated being cooped up with me, Buttercup really wanted in twice in the middle of the night. He scratched at the door insistently, waking me up. I usually fall right back to sleep, but last night I didn't.

We had another good morning with a bit of grumbling, but also some sharing of space. Mostly Clover deals with Willow by trying to be very small and doing a lot of slow blinking. Clover is not all submission, though, because today when Willow decided she was done staring at the new cat and got up to hop off the bed, Clover rushed at her when he back was turned. It surprised the [bleep] out of Willow, who jumped into the hallway and looked shocked. Clover, whose tail had puffed out to six times its size, sat on the edge of the bed looking triumphant. I'm not sure what this all means, but Shawn and I both later confessed to each other during our afternoon walk that we were kind of glad to see Clover stick up for herself a bit. Obviously, we don't WANT cat fights, but at the same time it would also be nice if Clover was not so terrified of Willow that she won't come out from under the bed, you know?

Clover is really starting to show off a somewhat cranky princess personality. 


Image: Blurry because her head was in motion, but I caught the elusive curling tongue cat yawn in progress.

In other news, there are six days until the final arc of the Bleach anime comes out. Yesterday, we (the fandom) found out that Bleach is breaking from Crunchyroll and will be airing on Hulu and Disney+. Luckily, I have access to both, and now all the jokes about various characters now being Disney princesses can begin. I remain of very mixed feelings about this final arc as many of you well know. But, I am hoping for an uptick in activity in my fandom, which has been fairly dead since the manga ended several years ago.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is my weekly D&D group. I'm trying to decide if I should bring the peanut butter chocolate star cookies that I made the other day, or if I should make "Elven Bread" from the official Dungeon & Dragons cookbook, Hero's Feast. Elven Bread is basically a hearty cinnamon swirl. Feel free to cast your votes in the comments. I would do a poll, but I have the worst luck making those. Anyway the only two choices are:


In related news, after watching the zillionth ad for it while watching "Critical Role," I decided to try the D&D Beyond App for character building. I will say, it's kind of slick. Like, once you pick your class it knows what kind of equipment you're allowed and with the click of a button your inventory is filled with the standard "explorer's pack" items, etc. Which is, I have to say, really handy. You can even roll die on the app, which I might use because Jeff's set up does not really have a good table top and I don't own any kind of fancy dice tray. Plus, it's free? You only get six character slots with the free version and if I ever end up running a cleric, however, it will require me to buy some add-ons if I want anything other than Life Path, but for now it's fine. And it actually might make everything easier, because it will mean just holding my iPad and not all the sheets of my character sheet. I am kind of the disorganized player that really can use something like this. I feel pretty good that I have one notebook for all my games, but after that there are so many pieces of paper shoved into various plastic sleeves that's not even funny. I will report after tomorrow how it actually works in game.

In other gaming news, I'm attending ConFABulous next weekend. They're still hammering out their final schedule, but I'm excited to be on some paneling and also dong some gaming. I'm going to be joining the Thieves'' World game as well as the Heart of Wulin, both of which I'm very excited about. 

Image: Cardamom buns on parchment paper, fresh from the oven.

The recipe might be behind a paywall, but I got this one from our local newspaper, the Star Tribune: https://www.startribune.com/ring-in-the-new-year-by-baking-cardamom-buns/600130101/.

I told Shawn when we decided to make these on Sunday that I felt like, because it was NOT YET February, we could still TECHNICALLY consider ourselves "ringing in" the New Year.

Regardless, they were delicious.

I notice that I didn't report on anything else that happened over the week, since my last HeyGo round-up. I apologize for being so remiss. Part of it is that I am finally starting to feel the malaise that so many of my friends have felt since the beginning of the pandemic. This frustrates me because I normally find a lot of value, even joy, in the mundanity of life. I am totally the sort of person who considers a trip to the pharmacy as "a side quest." But,. lately, I've been struggling to find the day-to-day interesting, and I don't quite know what that's about.

My current hope is that this, too, shall pass.

I did want to talk about one thing of interest that happened over the weekend. Shawn and I went to the Roseville Ramsey County Library on Saturday because Shawn has a standing "order" with the Friends of the Library to pull any Minnesota related cookbooks for her--we're talking about all the church, synagogue, community cookbooks that are hyper localized. She buys them all, and, because she works at the Minnesota Historical Society, she'll check the history center's library's catalogue and see if there are any that the history center doesn't already have. Whatever they don't have, she donates. On Saturday, we brought home THREE grocery backs full of these quirky community cookbooks and most of them will be going to the history center.

If you're wondering WHY anyone would collect such things, there was a lovely article that was picked up by MPR that went around during the holiday season specifically about Minnesota cookbooks, https://www.minnpost.com/arts-culture/2021/12/the-enduring-appeal-of-the-minnesota-church-cookbook/, in which a member of Shawn's staff was interviewed about the history center's collection.

One of the ones I was looking through yesterday wasn't a church cookbook at all, but the cookbook of the local "linemen," the folks who work on electrical lines. The recipes were kind of terrible?? But, the story of how the cookbook came to be was pretty fascinating.

I am not one of those people who reads cookbooks like novels, but I do LOVE thumbing through them, especially the very, very old ones. I'm sure everyone out here already knows about this TikTok guy, Dylan Hollis (I linked to his YouTube, but you can always find him on TikTok), but if you've never watched his "cooking" show/60 seconds, you really should.

 There was an article in The Atlantic or maybe the Smithsonian Magazine years ago about a guy who was living in Germany with his young daughter. She was very enthusiastic every time they went to the butchers. She was very into all the wursts and whatnot and horrified her health-conscious father by happily demanding, "Fleisch, Papa, Fleisch," which does, in point of fact, sound a bit like she is demanding human sacrifice. 

We think about this every time we sit down to make Shawn's family recipe for fleischkuechkle.

VEGANS MAY WISH TO AVERT THEIR EYES....


Image: My lovely wife Shawn filling meat pies, aka fleischkuechkle 

So, even though we made a "small" batch, making these meat pockets take a full day of work. I bought all the supplies ahead of time on Saturday morning so that we could go into assembly line production by 10 am on Sunday morning. I am the dough whisperer in the house so I am in charge of rolling out the dough.



Image: blurry shot of dough being rolled out, no doubt because my hands were already shaking after having made nearly a hundred of these with very difficult to make thin enough dough...


Image: A row of meat filled doughy crescents ready to be fried.

Mason takes part in this production these days, but mostly as "entertainment." He knows that we're stuck in the kitchen for several hours, so he comes down and keeps us company. We have been talking him through how to make some of these, but he is really leery about all that raw meat (which is understandable,) and, of course, you can see from the above picture that my workspace isn't exactly expansive. But, he's very content to sit in the kitchen with us and tell us about games he's playing or books he's reading, and so that passes the time very nicely.

Of course, as a teenager, he always ready to help us EAT these grease bombs of meat pockets:

Image: A fried meat pie fresh out of the deep fat fryer... so greasy, so good.

After spending most of the day doing this, I ended up conking out in the bed bag chair while listening to a podcast. This is one of those things that we do once a year and I'm always glad to have done it, but I am likewise glad that we only do it once a year, you know?

 'Yeah, but would you want to...?" has always been the question I have asked myself about the general prepper/apocalypse planning advice that says: "You can live on rice and beans forever! Plus, they're easy to store!"

Like a good liberal prepper, I did, in fact, stock up on dried beans even though my family currently eats almost ZERO meals that involve ANY kind of bean beyond those you would throw in to make a good chili. Rice I already had a lot of around, though I did buy more when it came time to lay in stores. The rice, I've been using steadily and have, in point of fact, had to replenish a number of times.

The dried beans? They're still just sitting there. 

So I am determined to use these apocalypse beans up. I feel, in some way, that my using up the apocalypse beans will herald an end to the pandemic... or, at least my willingness to not feel like I have to have some kind of white knuckle fear that it may NEVER end. (Don't tell me how wrong I am, okay? I need any shred of hope I can cling to.)

This is a long way of getting to the fact that yesterday I cooked up a mess 'o beans that was (and still is, as I am having it for lunch) DELICIOUS. 

This recipe is not for vegans or vegetarians, however, as it is the classic ham hock and bean pot. The cool thing, however, was because I was going to simmer this pot in the oven for four to five hours, I didn't even bother soaking the beans overnight. I just threw a half a bag of pinto beans in with the soup stock and ham hock, onions, and bay leaves, and walked away. Obviously, this is not quite apocalypse fare as in a lot of doomsday scenarios (as opposed to the one we're living) since, if you are hunkered down in your bunker, you can't just go out and get a ham hock. Ours was left over from a Honeybaked Ham that we bought for Christmas Eve dinner that I threw in the freezer. I mean, this did a lot for cleaning out my freezer? And, I am surprised how delicious it is. (To make it slightly MORE hearty, I also threw in some brown rice that I had also over stocked for the apocalypse.)

If you are a meat eater, I highly recommend. Though I suspect you could do something similar with vegetable stock, beans, onions, and rice?  Feel free to chime in, if you have a good recipe--because I am bound and DETERMINED to eat up all these beans!!

By chance I read yhlee 's DW journal when he made a recipe from the Overwatch cookbook.


image: Official Overwatch cookbook


I instantly perked up because Mason LOVES Overwatch. Like, CRAZY loves. It's more than just a game he plays with friends. He obsessively follows the e-sport.  In fact, when we visited Los Angeles and rachelmanija last year, we went to a live Overwatch competitive game. His social group is basically friends from an Overwatch Discord.

So, a cookbook? That seemed to have usable recipes?

I had to get it for him for the holidays.

Amazon didn't think it would arrive in time for actual Christmas day, but it did!  On Christmas eve night, in fact, we tried Genji's (soy and chicken broth-based) ramen. SO GOOD. The picture is missing the soft-boiled egg because I FAILED soft-boiling three times.


Image: Homemade ramen sans softboiled egg (because I fail), but wildly delicious soy and mirin based sauce. 


I made this with some chicken thighs I had in the freezer, even though the recipe calls for chicken breasts. The thighs were INSANELY good in this. I didn't actually miss the egg. I am also a loser who just used ramen noodles from the 35 cent packages. 

The recipe asked for:

2 chicken breasts (I used thighs, about eight or however many were in the package)
1 tablespoon of butter
salt and pepper to taste

What Genji has you do is fry up the chicken just enough to crisp the skin and then pop it in the oven for a cook at 375 F for fifteen minutes or so.  In the meantime, you simmer the broth, which is basically garlic, ginger, shallots, 2 tablespoons each of soy and mirin, and then about four cups of chicken stock. Ideally, you have some you've made yourself, but honestly it was pretty damn good with just canned chicken stock from the grocery store, which is what I used. 

That all just simmers for the time it makes to make the chicken then, ideally, if you are not a loser like me, you manage to soft-boil an egg or two and then assemble everything once you've poured the broth over the noodles. I happened to have nori, but no shitake mushrooms, and honestly at this point in ramen, it's whatever toppings you like. 

The recipe was so good, but so simple that we decided we would just start cooking our way through this cookbook. So, today, I made Sombra's conchas.


Image: cute little blue hatted concha on a vintage plate.

These are amazing.

I just inhaled three of them without stopping to breathe. So good. Holy crap.

The recipe is also really easy to follow. You basically make a sweet dough and then separately make this little hats, which are granulated sugar, vanilla and flour (and food coloring. The book suggests making three, so I made red, the blue you see, and purple.)  I'll write it out for you, because I know everyone will want to try these.

Dough:
1 cup of warm whole milk
1/3 cup of unsalted butter or lard (<-- I used LARD. Always use lard in Mexican recipes if it is offered as an option.)
1/3 cup of sugar
2 teaspoons of active, dry yeast
pinch of salt
1 egg
3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

Topping:
1/4 cup of softened unsalted butter (I didn't have unsalted around. It doesn't seem to have made a huge difference.)
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. (If you want to be authentic here, you could use Mexican vanilla. I didn't. I used to have it around thanks to my parent's trip to Mexico, and I will tell you even if I had had it, I might not have used it. I find the taste to be much STRONGER.)
1/2 cup all-purpose four
food coloring of your choice.

TO MAKE THE DOUGH:
When I do this I tend to heat the milk, sugar and lard together.  Also because I am terrible at using a thermometer to make sure the milk isn't too hot for the yeast, what I do is put a cup of flour with the yeast mixed in in the mixer and then pour the milk mixture on top. Add the egg, and then add the remaining flour a bit at a time as the mixer is running. I have a fancy Cuisinart mixer that has a dough hook and I love using this for these kinds of soft, sweet, sticky dough. Once all the flour is incorporated, you hand knead just enough so that the dough springs back into place when pressed with a finger.

Return the dough to greased bowl (I used butter here) and cover with plastic wrap. Let it rise for one hour, or until doubled.

TO MAKE THE TOPPING:
This is basically a sugar paste. Mix together butter, sugar, and vanilla until smooth. Add a little flour at a time until you have a thick paste. Divide the paste into three equal parts and mix the in the food coloring to your liking. I will note that for me, a little extra flour was needed at this stage because the food colorings added liquid.

Roll out each ball of topping past to little under a quarter inch thick. Using a cookie cutter (I used a pastry cutter) or small glass, but out four founds about 1 1/2 to 2 inches across of each color. (I ended up with ten instead of twelve, so I just made ten buns instead of twelve.) Slide one disc at a time onto a spatula and gently score it with decorative shapes using the cookie cutter (I just used a knife?) being careful not to cut all the way through if you can. (This is important because they will separate more on the second rising!)

TO ASSEMBLE:
Preheat oven to 375 F

Once dough has doubled in size divide it into 12 equal parts (or ten or however many hats you ended up with). Gently fold the pieces of dough over and pinch together on the bottom of each bun to form a smooth ball. (Not sure why this direction is so careful, I tore off equal sizes and jammed them together to make round rolls and they were fine?) Set these on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, pinched side down, and brush tops with water.

Slide finished sugar paste round onto the top of moistened bun. Repeat until all the buns are covered. Let them rise for another 30 minutes.

Bake at 375 F for 15 to 18 minutes (I always split the difference and put them in for about 17) until the buns are just turning golden. 

EAT THEM ALL


Image: multi-colored conchas on a pan

 Without our usual guests arriving for Thanksgiving, we are trying some new things this year. 

Firstly, we are going to attempt to home make our lefse. Because it has such a fearsome reputation, normally, we just buy it. For my out of town and international friends, lefse is (as cribbed from Wikipedia): "Lefse (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈlɛ̀fsə]) is a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread. It is made with potatoes (often, but not always), flour, butter, and milk or cream. It is cooked on a large, flat griddle. Special tools are used to prepare lefse, including long wooden turning sticks and special rolling pins with deep grooves."

This year, we sprung for all the equipment!


Image: A lefse grill, grooved rolling pin, lefse stick (for flipping), and a cloth-covered pastry board for rolling.

For our first year, we decided to buy lefse mix which, purists will tell you is a TERRIBLE idea because the potatoes are flaked and not fresh. I suspect the purists have a point. However, our thought is that we will try this the traditional way once we have a handle on the rest of the process. When using flaked potatoes, you have to reconstitute the mashed potatoes and mix in the second half of the mix and chill it over night. So, we did that part last night.

We formed them into balls and stuck them in the fridge overnight, per instructions.


Image: round dough balls in overnight container.

Shawn had collected a lot of blogs that talked about how to roll the lefse. Most of the advice can be summed up as, "When you're think you're done rolling, roll some more."  The thing you want from lefse is thinness. I managed to roll the lefse thin enough that I could read the writing on the pastry board's cloth through the dough.

Then, you used a fancy lefse stick to pick up the dough.


image: lefse stick under dough. Dough rolled so thin "your in-laws will never come back"

Then came the truly tricky part, moving the lefse onto the lefse grill. We had this set up so that I could roll out right next to the stove. On the stove we had tinfoil down over the burners, our pizza stone on top of that, and then the lefse grill. We were warned that the lefse griddle would be hot--500 degrees to be precise, so we did not want any accidents. The trick with lefse is that it's rolled so thin that it rips really easily. So, you need to get it on the gril fast and somehow flat. Shawn learned the trick is to roll it off the stick.



Image: Shawn's fancy rolling technique in action.

We did about a dozen of these--there was only one complete failure. The rest looked right and the corner of one we tasted, tasted right. So? I think we have lefse, folks!


Image: a blobby mass of Norwegian flatbread. Our first lefse--not exactly my most round one, nor our best fried--but not bad!

Even if this doesn't turn out to be the greatest lefse ever made, I'm not sure we will care. Neither Shawn nor I have a Norwegian grandmother who would sit in judgement of our from the mix lefse, and both of us mostly like lefse because it is a vehicle for sugar and butter So, I feel pretty chuffed about our first attempt.  Because we weren't sweating all day over potatoes, it was actually also a lot of fun and didn't take all that long. I could see doing this again!

Before you ask for the recipe, there isn't really one. We followed the directions on the lefse mix. We bought our griddle and mix from: lefsetime.com

 Back to your regularly scheduled FOOD posts....


Image: the penultimate summer box, plus sun-washed out cat.

In this latest Hmong Farmers' Association box, I got: curly kale (....yay?), arugula (yes!), ten ears of corn, a huge bag of green beans, Thai bird peppers, rhubarb, yard-long beans, and bitter ball eggplants.

Not pictured because already re-homed: four slicing tomatoes.

My family is not a fan of searing heat, so I chopped up the peppers and made them into... jam?  I'm not sure this one worked out as well as previous attempts as, when I last tasted it, it still tried to set my MOUTH ON FIRE. But, my thought is, that perhaps, in this concentrated form that will last for several months, I can cautiously add a bit of heat to things that would benefit from such an addition. If not, well, I mean, it was a fun experiment?

I was stoked to see rhubarb making a return this late in the season. Shawn is trying to decide which of the many rhubarb deserts we will make with it. 

And then, there were these, so MANY of these....

Image: a horrifying amount of yuck in an adorable green pumpkin shape.

No offense to the fine people of Liberia, Ethiopia, and the other African countries that really love bitter ball eggplants, this lily white Midwesterner did not like how bitter the bitter ball eggplants were. If you're curious about this plant, its scientific name is: Solanum aethiopicum ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_aethiopicum.  I suspect that my biggest issue is that I do not know how to cook these beauties. They are adorable as all get out, but they are very, very, very bitter. They are related to the nightshade (not unlike potatoes and tomatoes), however, this was one time when my body said WHAT IS THIS?? IT TASTES LIKE IT MIGHT KILL US!

It is said that one can eat them raw, so before cooking I tried a tiny bit.

Image: Interior shot of death, incarnate.

I will admit that I never found a particularly good recipe to try online, so I tried to simply add them to a stir fry. I think I was so fooled, thanks to my amazing luck with the Thai eggplants that look somewhat like this but are larger and HONESTLY DELICIOUS. Do not accidentally buy these little f*ckers.  I ate the dish as my friends naomikritzer and pegkerr can attest, but, wow, I do not know what I'm going to do with the rest of them. 

There is probably some trick to making them less bitter...  or perhaps it's an acquired taste, like coffee?

Speaking of coffee, my coffeemaker broke the other morning and I ordered a replacement. It hasn't come yet, so I've been getting along on tea. I swear to god this morning, however, all my neighbors helped me survive by brewing the strongest smelling coffee ever. When I took the compost out to the pile, I stood for a while just inhaling the scent of darkly roasted coffee like the addict that I am.

Image: a bounty spread out on my dining room table (enumerated below.)

This week's CSA has several exciting things. First off, we got, as you can see: cabbage (napa), carrots, corn, collard greens, eggplants (Thai), melon (sun jewel*), onions, radishes, and potatoes.

So, the sun jewel melon... it is listed in Wikipedia as "oriental melon,' but it is also known as 黄金瓜 / huángjīn guā  in Chinese, 참외 / chamoe in Korean, and 真桑瓜 / makuwa uri in Japanese. i am incredibly excited to try this melon. I suspect it's going to be part of (or all of) dessert tonight.  According to the Wikipedia article I linked to, the makuwa uri was once so popular in Japan that its name became synonymous for ANY melon.

The Thai eggplants are also a new-to-me vegetable that I'm going to have to hunt down some recipes for.  Just wandering through the Googles leads me to a lot of curry options, so I'm excited about that. Apparently, I can eat these raw? I'm going to have to try that!

Anyone else finding interesting things in their CSA boxes? At the farmer's markets? In their backyards?