if you find lists of people’s grocery store purchases boring you are in the wrong place

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Cake Update Already, Grocery Store Report

Well, you bolstered my spirits SO MUCH after yesterday’s cake talk (please continue to share your cake dreams; it is a delightful distraction) that I felt totally pumped up and ready to make my cake call. I fished out the business card the baker had given me, phone in hand, ready to dial… and noticed that she has a website. 

Listen, I KNEW that she had a website – I’d looked at it before Carla and I went to the event she hosted. My recollection was that the site listed some of the cookies and baked goods she normally offers at the farmer’s market, and that it mentioned cakes on the menu, but that the only thing it said about cakes was that they are custom. 

But I wanted to research as much as possible, without doing SO MUCH research that I would lose my phone call determination, so I quickly visited her site. Turns out I was wrong: she has a page on her site devoted to cakes. Not only did it list the price per cake (THIRTY DOLLARS), it had an ONLINE FORM that I could fill out with all of my details!!! 

You will understand that the clouds parted and the sun shone down on me and the air filled with the gentle chorus of angels singing, “Ahhhh!” in harmonious unison.

I included as much detail as I could (and the form was nice and long), and left my name, phone number, and email address in case I left out critical details, or in case she refuses to work with lemon curd on principle, I don’t know; I will angst about literally anything. And then I paid VIA PAYPAL (the angels’ song crescendos). THIRTY DOLLARS. I thought for sure I was looking at least $75, if not $100-$150. But no. Thirty. Dollars. 

Then, it DID turn out I had left out important information. But I learned this because she emailed me because she is clearly my cake soul mate. (She wanted to know how many people would be eating the cake, if I had a color scheme, and if I wanted any decorations/words.) Then we figured out where to meet to pick it up, and voila! Done! 

I am very pleased. And honestly, even if the cake is so-so, the purchase experience was SUCH a good experience on its own I will definitely patronize her again. 

By the way, I told Carla when I picked her up from school that I’d ordered my birthday cake! Soothed by everyone’s comments, I was completely unfazed by having done it myself: it is not a big deal, and lo, it was not. But Carla did not get the memo. She was AGHAST. “WHY did you do that, Mommy?” she exclaimed. “You’re NOT supposed to do that!” And I said, “If I don’t do it, who will?” “DADDY!” She was further scandalized when I said she and I were going to pick up the cake after school on my birthday. “You can’t LOOK at it, Mommy!” she said, eyes wide. “DON’T LOOK.” 

On to the grocery store report, which I am adding here simply because I like reading other people’s grocery store reports. 

I went this morning, which is not my usual morning. Also, we are expecting around a foot of snow overnight, so people are panicking. (Is that why I went to the grocery store when I’d already stopped there Monday afternoon? PERHAPS.) So either of those variables could be responsible for the store being much more crowded than usual. 

There was an elderly couple who was on the same route that I follow. I swear I have seen them or their couple-twin before, because they are a) darling and b) incapable of standing in a way that does not occupy 75% of the aisle. I am constantly saying “Excuse me!” “Ope! Sorry! Can I squeeze by?” to these people. They also deliberate long and hard about every item they buy. Seriously. I stood beside them in front of the lettuce and they stared at the romaine for what felt like many minutes. I could NOT get away from them. They were even in the cracker aisle, where I had to replenish our Triscuit supply. Carla is very into Triscuits lately. 

Anyway: As usual, our store was fairly well-stocked, although I felt a little… wary, as I made my way around. 

First, there is yet another reorganization of the produce section happening. It seems to me like they have added black trays/bins to the normal shelves, and for all I know, it’s to enhance cleanliness and make washing/removing/refilling the trays quicker and easier. But what it LOOKED LIKE is that they are finding ways to make less produce look as abundant as ever.

And it is still abundant! I had a rainbow of bell peppers to choose from! When I was a kid, we were lucky to find a single wrinkled green pepper at the grocery store in the middle of winter, let alone a pile of not only green peppers but red and orange and yellow ones.

Lettuce was bountiful.

Berries were back in stock, although the berry section was rather small. That’s probably just the time of year, though. Or they are winnowing the blue-, black-, and raspberries to make room for an influx of Valentine’s Day strawberries. 

The banana and onion sections were full. There was NO CELERY, which was worrying for a moment… but when I circled back around to get more mushrooms (I was adding new items to my meal plan as I went; see yesterday’s post for an updated list), the celery had been restocked. 

The cereal aisle had some worrying holes – no Rice Krispies. But I did snag a box of Wheat Chex – not that we need Wheat Chex. My thought process was something like, “If we run out of power and have to dip into pantry food, we can all eat Wheat Chex” which is nonsensical, but the anxious brain has its own sense of inarguable logic.

Pasta was well stocked, except that rigatoni was missing. This is my husband’s preferred pasta shape (I am penne 4 life), so it was notable. I got him some campanelli; he can be soothed occasionally by the ruffles. 

The freezer section still had pancakes, and I just bought pancakes Monday so I walked right past. I know! I am the epitome of restraint! Still no French toast sticks. 

The chicken nugget section was VERY thin. Probably six or seven bags of various breaded chicken options total. Since we just emptied a bag, leaving me with one bag in the freezer, I picked up another bag. Since the pandemic, I have been fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Backup. As Nicole said the other day, “I always have backups in the pantry of household staple. If the backup comes into use, then I buy another backup. It gives me an enormous amount of comfort to know that if we run out of an item on the main floor, there is a backup in the pantry downstairs.” YES. This is the one true way. Someday I will convert my husband to our movement. What’s not to like? We always have cookies. 

The ground beef section was VERY low. Once again, the prepared foods counter was closed. But it was open when I popped in Monday afternoon – it must simply have shorter hours these days, probably due to staffing issues. 

Lunchables were available. My daughter’s favorite muffins were not, but her second favorite muffins were, so I grabbed some of those. Bread was plentiful. 

The one thing I regret not grabbing was a package of tulips, on sale for $6.99 a bunch. (That’s… a lot. But I have been eyeing the tulips my past few trips, and I think it was running $8.99 before. Two dollars off is a good savings.)

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Dinners This Week; You Will Be Very Surprised That Crab Sandwiches Are Not on the Meal Plan

Despite a) truly glorious, early spring weather, complete with sunshine and birdsong and blooming forsythia, and b) a brisk morning walk with a friend in said beautiful weather, I am cranky. For no substantial reason!

(I DO have to go to Target, and go inside no less, to procure some Easter candy. And I am dreading filling the plastic eggs with… whatever it is I normally fill them with. Candy? Maybe the Easter Bunny will upgrade to some dollar bills. The prospect of a Target trip is not super cheering.)

(Yesterday I had to make multiple phone calls, AND I deep cleaned the bathrooms, so perhaps I have some residual grouchiness from that?)

(We ARE supposed to go from low-seventies to low-thirties in the next day or two, so there’s that. Plus, it is QUITE WINDY and you know my feelings about THAT.) (Grump grump grump.)

Well, crabby mood or not, we must eat. I skipped my Dinners This Week post last week because I just couldn’t BEAR to think about food or plan any meals or cook. My husband is very agreeable in times like these, so he put up with leftovers, scrounging around, and takeout for several nights. And then HE planned this week’s meals (except for tonight’s tacos, which were a Carla Request). By “planned” I mean that he suggested things for me to cook, but that is indeed helpful because planning the meals – thinking of things that we haven’t eaten too recently, that don’t take a million years to cook, that will make at least some use of food we have in the house already, that two-thirds of us will eat and not hate – can be just awful.

Armed with my husband’s meal plan, I went to the grocery store after my lovely, not-de-grouchifying-in-the-least walk. (I am sure my friend found me RULL PLEASANT.) I did not want to go to the grocery store. Yet I really needed to go to the grocery store. We had run out of half and half, people. HALF AND HALF. I have been putting MILK in my tea like an Agatha Christie character.

Probably it was good that I was able to go to the grocery store on a cranky day. Grocery shopping puts me on edge as it is, so I’m putting the crankiness to good use, at least. And then I could really glower at the frozen foods case where the pancakes are once again MISSING and sigh dramatically over the dearth of regular-old large eggs (I do not need extra large eggs or jumbo eggs or super jumbo eggs, thank you very much) and stare in a pointedly Very Patient Way at the woman who was ambling – AMBLING – in a zig-zag fashion down the aisle, making it next to impossible to pass her on either side. 

I did buy myself some flowers, which helps. 

And I bought ingredients to make cinnamon rolls, which I DO NOT NEED to make, but which sounds like a very festive Easter morning breakfast. Because if there’s one thing a home visited by the Easter Bunny needs, it’s more sugar. Well. If my husband talks me down from the cinnamon rolls, at least bread flour and cream cheese keep for a good long while.

I stood in front of the beef selection for a Very Long Time because my recipe calls for chuck roast and my choices were chuck EYE roast or chuck SHOULDER roast or some other things that had the word CHUCK in them but not the word ROAST. I wanted to CHUCK a ROAST right at my husband for choosing the recipe, I’ll tell you that much. Google did not help. I did not have the recipe on me, because it is in a PHYSICAL BOOK, not on a website, like it’s 1953. I see I am getting a little shouty. At least I did not shout at the beef selection. I finally asked the meat monger – a young woman, which pleased me – and she very decisively told me that the chuck EYE roast would be best for my stew purposes, so I went on my way. (I was very glad she’d said chuck EYE roast, because the recipe called for 3 to 3.5 pounds of chuck roast and not a single roast in the entire case was 3.5 pounds. They were all 2.25 to 2.75. But! I did find ONE ROAST that was just a squeak under 3 pounds and it was the chuck EYE roast.)

Carla and I – after much deliberation – are planning to make macarons this weekend, as our Easter baking project. They will be filled with lemon curd and buttercream as per this recipe (although I bought the lemon curd in a jar), but will have speckles per this recipe. I am very, very exhausted by even the prospect of Holiday Baking Projects. But perhaps by the weekend I will feel more chipper about the idea. Anyway, I had to buy a huge giant container of cream of tartar, even though we only need a pinch, because I had failed to check on our cream of tartar situation at home. Let me tell you, my face fell when I saw a little container of cream of tartar in the spice cupboard. Fortunately for all involved (me and the cream of tartar), it had expired in 2014. 

For some reason, I have had a craving for cinnamon gummy bears. I don’t think I have had a cinnamon bear for… thirty years? And I am fairly sure that I would eat a total of three of them and then be satisfied for another three decades. But the craving is strong. So of course I cannot find cinnamon bears anywhere. Grouse grouse grouse.

This isn’t so much a grocery store report as it is a catalog of things that irritated me whilst at the grocery store. 

Grocery availability has gotten so reliable (aside from pancakes) that I didn’t even LOOK for some of the things that I normally bought in duplicate just in case – was there any pepperoni? Who knows! My preferred taco seasoning in my preferred little jar is still out of stock, but I can buy it in the envelopes so it’s not a BIG deal. And the taco shell shelves seemed a little patchy, but I still only purchased a single box of taco shells. What did that meme say last year? “The earth is healing”? (Is “the earth” in this scenario me or the grocery store supply chain?) Now we just sit and wait for Suez-Canal-blockage-related shortages to start. 

Dinners for the Week of March 30-April 5

  • Tacos
  • Mulligatawny Soup – This was my lone suggestion for the week, simply because we have mire poix pre-cut in the freezer AND because I picked up another loaf of sourdough bread at the grocery store. Sour toast will pair very nicely with some Mulligatawny.
  • Slow Cooker Balsamic Pork Tenderloin – I got my husband some feta and he already has some sundried tomatoes. I will make rice and caramelize some onions to serve with the pork. Easy peasy.
  • Guinness Stew with Side Salad – I bought some Guinness for St. Patrick’s Day, because I had never tried it before. Turns out I do not care for it. But my husband pointed out we could use it for stew, and indeed we will. I found a recipe in The Best International Recipe cookbook, from the editor’s of Cook’s Illustrated (which is different from America’s Test Kitchen in some way but I do not understand what it is). Why is it “recipe” instead of “recipes”? Just to tug my toehairs, I guess. Also, holy Slovenian sausage, this cookbook is PRICEY. I sure as sugar did not pay $66 for this cookbook and neither should you. 

What are you eating and/or baking this week? Or, if you feel like joining me in a Celebration of Crabbiness, what is getting all up in your grump today?

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Friday Randomosity: Once Again Mostly About Food and Grocery Shopping Edition

Shall we ignore All Current Events and talk about random inconsequential things? Yes please. 

  • Now that Carla is back in school, I can return to planning my grocery store runs for the week. This is useful because I don’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn on the weekends, and also because the grocery store is MUCH less crowded on a random weekday at 8:30 or 9:00 am than it is on Saturday at 8:00. There is supposedly a limit on the number of people who can be in the store at any given time, but it always seems Very Full. Perhaps it is just that we all move together from produce to dairy to canned goods to meat, like a school of hungry mask-wearing sardines.
  • I went today because I needed dry sherry. (And also because I cannot go Monday or Tuesday because Carla is not in school, and Wednesday I have a mammogram and Thursday I am taking Carla to the orthodontist. Gotta give yourself motivation to wake up every morning, amirite?) I have a French onion soup craving something awful, and I like abundant sherry in my French onion soup. Why didn’t I pick it up with the other French onion soup ingredients when I went to the store last? Because I live in one of those states where you can’t buy alcohol on a Sunday before a certain time. Which is a RIDICULOUS law. What is the purpose? To prevent people from swinging by the store and grabbing a bottle of hooch to drink during church? I will be endlessly annoyed by this. Partly because of this law, I don’t typically go shopping at all on Sundays. But my last shopping trip had to take place on a Sunday for some reason, possibly related to me feeling cranky about waking up early on a Saturday. And as usual when I slip up and go to the store on a Sunday, I completely forgot about the stupid no-alcohol law and was unable to buy the sherry. That’s five extra days of life without onion soup, Internet! Yes I know I sound ridiculous! Anyway, today I was able to get the sherry plus some wine and I am never going to the grocery store on Sunday again. Until I forget about the no-alcohol thing and get annoyed all over again. 
  • By the way, there is apparently a SHERRY SHORTAGE.  I’d had a bottle of sherry in my hands on Sunday – the checker gamely agreed to see if it would scan as a cooking item or as a wine; it was prohibited for sale – but today there was no sherry to be found. I had to ask someone to help me look — surely they had just moved the sherry, I thought. But no, the staff person led me back to where I’d been looking. Fortunately, she was able to rummage around and dig a bottle of sherry out of somewhere. But while she was looking, she told me that sherry has been backordered for ages because there is a shortage. A shortage of… sherry???? Baffling! I find it so fascinating to learn about all these shortages of sort-of odd items – like the graham cracker shortage this past summer or the Hormel pepperoni shortage (which seems, thank goodness, to have ended) or the bucatini shortage going on now. Flour and sugar and yeast, okay; those are STAPLES. But WHAT is driving the shortage of more niche items like sherry? Has there been a lobster bisque upswing? An aperitif movement I’m not privy to? Perhaps we can blame it entirely on the UK, who, according to that one specific article, is going gaga for cocktails. I’m guessing there is some combination of increased demand and the shifting of resources to higher-demand products, but it is so wild to me that odd things keep running low.
  • Speaking of shortages: Every time I go shopping, I peek down into the cleaning supplies aisle, just in case. Today I was rewarded with a bottle of Clorox bleach spray AND a bottle of Lysol spray. Lysol is my preferred kitchen cleanser. I usually like the lemon scent (does not smell remotely like lemons) but have only seen it ONE TIME since March. There was a bottle of “mango & hibiscus” scented Lysol, though, and it was a family size, so I bought it. Okay, I just checked and it is in fact called “A Brand New Day” which seems quite aspirational for a cleanser, but here we are. The “mango & hibiscus” scent is noted in smaller print, so I think I’m supposed to feel more tied to the fresh start aspect of the aroma than to the mango and hibiscus. I tried it out and it has, so far, a fairly pleasant smell. It reminds me of hotels I used to stay in when I went to Florida for work: faintly tropical with an institutional essence. Only time will tell whether the scent eventually becomes repulsive. My grocery store also had a good supply of sanitizing wipes; I would have grabbed a container of those as well, but there is still a limit of two cleaning supplies per person, so it will have to wait for next time.
  • Moving right along to discussing more food-adjacent topics: my husband got me my all-time favorite tea for Christmas this year, Tea Squared Uncle Grey. The first time I had it was a million years ago when we could do things like travel to foreign countries and eat in restaurants. It was the tea served with my brunch at an adorable restaurant in Toronto, and when I make it at home it is just as aromatic and flavorful and luxurious tasting as it was then. It is expensive ($11.50 per box), compared to the tea I normally buy ($2.50 per box on sale), and I drink tea DAILY, so I am trying to keep myself to using two tea bags a week, as a special treat. It is difficult because Uncle Grey is so superior to all other teas but we soldier on. 
  • Why yes, in the background that IS a mug decorated with cats in tacos flying through space. It is another of my favorite Christmas gifts – this time from my daughter. I don’t think any piece of crockery has ever captured a person’s essence better than this does mine. 
  • To move away from food, but not out of the kitchen, I am wondering what to do about our gratitude tree. We started it way back in early April and gave up on it… at some point not too long after. It was always kind of a teeth-pulling sort of experience to get my family to participate, and it got to be too little reward for too much nagging, so at one point I was the only one adding any leaves or flowers. And then after awhile I just gave up completely, even though I continue to have many things for which I am grateful. But the tree remains. I don’t know if I have some delusional kernel of belief that we will pick it back up again? Or if I just no longer see it because I’m so used to it? But I am thinking about possibly taking it down. Or maybe I should leave it up! And try to jumpstart my family into helping it bloom again – maybe, this time, not requiring it, and certainly not DAILY, but just bringing it up time and again in case they want to add a leaf? That sounds really unlikely, doesn’t it. What would you do?
  • In other things-I-don’t-know-how-to-address topics: my return, apostrophe, and shift keys are… stuck. Not completely. But you have to press them REALLY hard to get them to work. Capitalizing letters is hardly worth it anymore and I am about ready to give up on paragraph spacing altogether. I have watched a few videos about how to remove the keys and clean under them, but it sounds very risky, and putting them back on seems VERY tricky indeed. (It took me three times to write the all-caps “very” back there which is too many times.) My husband’s taking a throw-up-his-hands let’s-just-buy-a-whole-new-computer approach which seems extreme. Sure, the computer is old and has some other issues, but I am not eager to spend the money on a new one. Especially when I have new towels to buy. (As if a person who has kept scratch, stinky towels for twelve years would just willy nilly replace an entire computer on the basis of some sticky keys!)
  • Today I finally gave away the last of the holiday gift bags I’d prepared for the various mail delivery people. Obviously my plan was to hand them out around the actual holidays. But those mail delivery people are slippery – they never ring the bell or knock to alert you to a package. And even if I am anticipating a delivery, by the time they drop it off and I get to the door, they are inevitably in their trucks already. A few times, expecting a delivery, I hung the gift bag on the outside door handle with a big note that said “FEDEX/UPS THIS IS FOR YOU” – but no one took it. We were able to give a present to the postal service worker; Carla spotted her coming down the other side of the street and set up camp by our mailbox so she could hand the gift off in person. But then the rate of package delivery slowed dramatically. Today, my husband had a new desk delivered. It came in several pieces, so while the delivery person was collecting the second box, I snapped up a holiday gift bag and handed it to him. He was a little surprised but said thank you and — this is the important part — took it with him. I hope it wasn’t too weird for him, because it was a little weird for me. Next year I think I will try pretending that I don’t know about the money restrictions and give out gift cards as I have in the past. 
  • I am in a bit of a book lull. I read my first book of 2021 last week (The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman – I enjoyed it immensely but it also made me very sad and I cried several times.). But since then, I haven’t really been able to get into anything. There’s no dearth of books, of course! I am reading four, currently – it’s just that none of them is grabbing me. I’m not sure whether to press on (meh) or give up on these four books entirely (I don’t wanna) or start a fifth book and hope that IT grabs me. 
photo from amazon.com
  • As I mentioned earlier, I have to take Carla to the orthodontist for the first time next week. It seems likely she will need braces, but the actual reason we are going is because we are playing Dental Tag, which I don’t recommend. A little over a year ago, her dentist suggested we see an oral surgeon to remove the frenulum between her top teeth. The oral surgeon said that he needed her to be under the care of an orthodontist first. At least, that’s my very vague memory of it; Carla gets super anxious about dental things (who can blame her?), so my husband and I went with her together to the oral surgeon last February for the consultation. I was very nervous (wherever does Carla get it?) and also quite busy trying to persuade a very amped-up Carla not to touch all the oral surgery equipment in the room, so I did not really register what the surgeon was saying. Unfortunately, neither did my husband, despite the fact that he was the designated calm, listen-y, ask-doctor-y-questions-and-listen-to-the-answers person. I must have had some inkling about the orthodontist aspect, because I asked our dentist for a referral when we went for a cleaning last fall. But my husband’s recollection (and he has the well-established Better Memory of the two of us) was that we were to come back in a year. An email I wrote to my mother after the fact said the same thing. It’s now been nearly a year, so I called the oral surgeon to set up the appointment and the receptionist told me I needed to have Carla see an orthodontist first. SIGH. So, long story very long and super boring, we are going to see the orthodontist next week. I am nervous. I don’t recall enjoying the orthodontist when I needed orthodontic work as a child. And I can’t imagine it’s any easier to deal with when it is your precious baby whose mouth is being fooled with. Perhaps we will go out for ice cream afterward as a reward for getting through it.
  • Oh, I see we’re back on food: We are having pizza tonight, per Carla’s request. Pizza, for Carla, is pizza CRUST with just the barest kiss of tomato sauce. She will eat pepperoni on the side as well as raw mushrooms and cherry tomatoes. But she will not eat pizza with those exact same things on them. My husband requested two small pizzas, one with pesto, chicken, tomatoes, and mozzarella; the other with tomato sauce, pepperoni, mushrooms, pepperoncini, and shredded mozzarella. I will just have my normal, which is tomato sauce, pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, and shredded mozzarella. That is the pizza combination I get 90% of the time. And usually if I order some other set of toppings, it’s because I don’t know how smooth the pizza sauce will be (or I know it will not be smooth). For me, pizza is a very specific thing. My husband, on the other hand, likes to get a wide variety of topping combos. Is that normal? Do people like to try different topping variations on their pizza? Or is there One True Pizza for most people, like there is for me? I wonder if I should branch out a little? Sometimes I bookmark pizza recipes that sound exotic probably because they aren’t my boring old norm. But it’s very rare that I actually commit to making or ordering something different. (I did make a delicious mushroom/goat cheese/onion jam concoction a few times, but I always come back to the old faithful.) Do you have a One True Pizza?

Well, now I am hungry. I hope you have a restful, healthy weekend my bloggy friends.