Dining In Not Out

Grocery shopping this week was much better than last week, although I have seen articles in almost every news source about empty shelves in grocery stores. The timing was important: I arrived at the store (Bush’s Market, a local chain) just before 9 AM, and found very few shoppers and no shortages. The checker told me that they stock the store overnight, open at 7 AM, and by late in the day, the shelves are in fact sometimes emptied. Good timing too, because I didn’t want to be near any other shoppers — you can see that the only person in the beautifully-stocked produce department is a worker. 

I’m really avoiding crowded situations where the pandemic remains a problem. Our local hospitals are overwrought thanks to the numerous cases of the omicron variant. Scary. We are only going out for necessities. I filled my shopping cart to the brim, mostly with essential non-perishables in case it gets even harder to be in public spaces, plus I bought produce and dairy products for at least a week of meals. Yes, prices are going up! How are you doing?

We are still trying a few new recipes along with old favorites. Now for a few photos of what we ate this week:

Grapes from Bush’s produce department.

A rolled omelet filled with pepper jam for breakfast one day.

Best breakfast I know of: Len’s cinnamon rolls made from a King Arthur recipe.

Childhood breakfast favorite— now a guilty treat.
I’m glad that they still make it!

New recipe this week: roasted sweet potatoes in spicy tomato sauce.
Another from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook. The leftovers made good tacos.

I tried making my own black bean burgers. Bigger than the bun!
Not bad either. I did not buy any meat on my shopping trip.

Cauliflower soup with goldfish. No recipe but all fresh ingredients.

Another childhood treat, still as good as ever.

Many websites say that Jello. Butterscotch Pudding Mix
is no longer available. NOT TRUE! 

The other day, I tried making butterscotch pudding from a recipe using brown sugar, butter, milk, and cornstarch. It was pretty good (though not at all photogenic). Flavor-wise, however, the from-scratch version lacked the assertive artificial flavor of the real thing: Jello Pudding Mix. On my big buying trip to the supermarket, my eye lit on this box, and I bought it for some time in the future. 

That’s it for the week. The rest of our meals were pretty ordinary, like soba noodles with snow peas for lunch; oatmeal for breakfast; and dinners of grilled salmon or tuna salad or mushroom pasta. I tried one more Ottolenghi recipe as well, for chicken in a buttermilk (kefir) sauce with garlic and paprika -- delicious, but not photogenic!

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.