One New Thing...

I actually have two new things to report this week.

New Thing One:

At Christmas Middle Son gifted us a box of goodies he curated from Imperfect Foods.   It came the week after Christmas, with meats in an insulated bag with a cold pack:

Unpacked, this was what the box contained:

There were several new-to-us things in the box, but the most delicious were 2 filet mignon steaks (from grass fed cows) - they must have been swept into the fridge before the above picture was snapped.   Mmmmm...  They were melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and I think it might have been the first time we've eaten that tender of a cut of beef.  It was definitely our first taste of grass-fed beef.

With the gift came an offer from Imperfect Foods of $20.00 off the first four orders we placed (if we should decide to do so).  We decided to give it a whirl, and we received our third order this past week.   I've ordered some new-to-me things each time, but this week the most interesting new thing I ordered was a dragonfruit:

I let it sit for a couple of days, 'till I was pretty confident the insides were the right amount of softness (based on the squeeze & press test).  I've read online that these fruits do not ripen after picking, so they are picked as close to ultimate ripeness as possible.  And some people say the fruit grows sweeter after it's picked and sits for several days. Not knowing who was right (or if both are technically right), figuring this fruit might have been close to a week old by the time I made the decision to cut into it, I was reluctant to put off eating it too long for fear that it might go bad.  

So...  Thursday, with much anticipation, I cut it open

and we had a taste.  

I don't think the color of the plate above enhances this fruit at all, but aside from that, we remained intrigued to try this.

The verdict?

For how exciting this fruit looks on the outside, the taste was pretty underwhelming.  I've read descriptions of this type of dragon fruit tasting between a watermelon and a kiwi.  Or a pear and a kiwi.  I'd have to say something much less than a pear or kiwi, but ever so mildly like those two things comes closest to what this one tasted like.

It was kind of disappointing, and maybe we ate a slightly underripe dragonfruit, but with these being pretty pricey, I'm thinking this will be our last (and lasting) impression of this very impressive looking, but underwhelming tasting fruit.

~~~~~

New Thing Two: 

This may particularly interest my fellow Blogger bloggers.  I think it was last summer, that we all lost our follow-by-email widgets from our blogs.   While I was disappointed this happened, with all that was going on in my world I didn't have the mental bandwidth to care too much about it.  That is, until one of my sisters discovered I had a blog and asked last week if there was a way to follow my blog by email.  Suddenly, I was motivated to do the thing I hadn't been motivated to do for months.

I did a little searching and found a free web feed subscription service in follow.it  and put a widget at the top of my sidebar.  I may move it down at some point, but I wanted to make it easy for anyone reading today to find it if interested.

I'm sharing this with you because 1)  it is a new thing, and 2) if you had been previously following my blog by email (through the original widget that was provided by Feedburner), you may receive (or may have received) an e-mail from follow.it offering you the opportunity to follow my blog through them.   If you are already receiving my blog posts through email, you may not want to do anything different.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.  I just want to let you know you may receive an email from follow.it and to let you know why. 

And if you want to start following my blog by email, it is as simple as plugging your email into the widget and hitting subscribe. Another way to subscribe to my blog through follow.it is to create a follow.it account, find my blog in their database, and follow me that way.

You may be wondering why you'd go to that trouble.  To be honest, I wouldn't, but you may care about these things:

• If you subscribe using the widget, while I don't see anyone's name, I am made privy to your email address.  I promise you, I will never make use of your email address, unless you are a regular commenter and I think you might welcome a private email from me.  But seriously, I would imagine that situation would be rare, if it ever did happen.  I also don't plan to keep serious track of who may be following me.  Or who may chose to unfollow me.  It's just not something I'm into. 

• If you create a follow.it account, and find me in their database and subscribe that way, your email address is kept private from me.   The other advantage you would have in creating a free follow.it account is that you can subscribe to various other news feeds, blogs, and I honestly don't know what all...  and keep track of your subscriptions there.

That's as much as I know at this point.  If you chose to use the widget to follow me by email, I'd love to hear any feedback you might have about the experience.  I doubt I can control anything, but knowing if readers are happy or not with it, will certainly help me know if it's a good service.  I subscribed to my own blog, and found it simple to do, and it works well for me.  But if you have a different experience, please let me know.

And that's all for this week!  

I think that's 10 new things in 2022!