Grocery Store Chronicles – THE SPECTACLED BEAN

Adapting With A Smile: Getting The Groceries, Trying The Recipes

Welp, it has finally happened even though I said I’d never do this.

You see, we’ve started using online ordering for our groceries, then we go, together, to pick up our order outside the store.

There’s no charge for this now and it does seem like a healthier way for us to get groceries. Plus not to put too fine of a point on it, we have the time– and allow me to clue you in, it can take time to do this.

On our last adventure our assigned pickup time was for a 5:00-6:00 p.m. We arrived at 5:03 p.m., got in a line with about 20 cars in front of us, and left the parking lot with our groceries in the trunk of the car at 6:58 p.m.

Yes, almost 2 hours in line to get food, safely.

Ain’t life a pip?

• • •

The knocked over sign said: **PICKUP LINE STARTS HERE** We laughed at the folly of it all, having been in line for an hour before getting to this *beginning* spot. From the look of the damage to the sign someone before us may not have seen the humor in that sign at that point in line.

• • •

We did have a weirdly good time waiting in line together.

We started watching shoppers, most of whom didn’t have masks, going in and out of the store. We started making up back stories about them OR criticizing how they handled their groceries once they got to their vehicles.

Case in point, a woman wearing surgical gloves came out of the store pushing a cart, walked to her car, opened the trunk, put her groceries into the trunk, walked over to the trash container, removed her gloves properly.

Then USING HER UNGLOVED HANDS she opened the flap on the trash container, disposing of the gloves therein. She walked back to her car trunk, shut the trunk, got into the car, and drove away– using her hands that had touched the trash container to do so.

ICK!

• • •

The shy sign said: **PICKUP WAITING STARTS HERE** We chuckled with mirth, but weren’t duped. We’d been in line for close to an hour and a half at this point. Clearly this sign saw what had happened to the previous sign and was taking precautions to stay safe.

• • •

Now that we’re dining in all the time we’ve been cooking and baking: carbohydrates are our friends.

In truth we’ve been having fun while trying new recipes and/or revisiting old ones. In all cases we’ve adapted the recipes to work with what we have procured via said online ordering/pickup scenario discussed above.

Below is an alphabetized list of recipes we’ve made. I’ve rated them and made a few notes about what we changed because of… oh you understand why.

Click on the title of the recipe to be taken to it online.

Alton Brown’s Shepherd’s Pie [A+] – used ground beef instead of ground lamb

Baked Cheese Grits [A] – used half & half instead of whipping cream

Bisquick Velvet Crumb Cake [B-] – added nutmeg to batter, cinnamon to topping

Brown Rice and Corn Cakes [A] – used onion powder instead of fresh chives, white flour instead of whole wheat

Classic Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies [A+] – didn’t change a thing!

Classic Strawberry Shortcakes [A] – added 1 tsp vanilla extract, a pinch of nutmeg

Easy Bisquick Chicken Pot Pie [C-] – made as is, not bad but old-fashioned and blah

Grandma’s Anything Goes Strata [B] – used all milk [no half & half], used cooked bulk breakfast sausage instead of deli meat, added 1/4 tsp brown mustard

Lemon Curd [A+] – no changes to ingredients, cooked using double boiler instead of directly on heat

Martha Stewart Spiced Walnuts [B+] – used 1 tsp chili powder for 1/2 tsp coriander

~ The End ~

Shopping For Valentine’s Day Flowers, Chatting With A Fellow Shopper

Feeling the blues? Click on image above to go elsewhere to see and hear Little Milton & Bonnie Raitt sing *Grits Ain’t Groceries*.

A glimpse into my daily life demonstrating that random people talk to me– sometimes making me laugh out loud and to myself.

I’m in the floral department of the grocery store on Wednesday, late afternoon.

I’m shopping for a bouquet of flowers as one does when Valentine’s Day is on the horizon.

A random person, Observant Dude, a 40-something man walks into the floral department where I’m pushing my cart. He looks at the displays and spies something I hadn’t noticed, being focused as I was on the price of mixed flower bouquets more than anything else.

• • •

Observant Dude stops in his tracks, looks amazed, then forsaking all other shoppers in the floral department he says to me: There’s cabbage in the floral department. Cabbage doesn’t belong with the flowers.

I look across the way to where he is pointing and see, nestled amongst the red roses, what appears to be bouquets of purple cabbage leaves wrapped in brown paper in a cone shape.

I start smiling because Observant Dude is correct. It looks like there’s cabbage in the Valentine’s Day flower display in the floral department in the grocery store.

Kind of quirky, but fun. On the surface of it.

• • •

At which point Observant Dude looks at me, totally baffled, and says in the most earnest voice I’ve heard in years: Who would get their loved ones a bouquet of cabbage? That wouldn’t be right.

I started laughing at Observant Dude’s sincere observation because you have to admit he had an excellent point. Unless you’re a rabbit, bouquets of cabbage don’t generally express everlasting love.

True dat.

But here’s the thing, the kicker: what Observant Dude was looking at wasn’t cabbage at all. Nope, it was a bouquet of hydrangeas, dark purple ones that he’d mistaken for cabbage, and while I could see what they really were, I didn’t feel it was my place to correct him.

Having just met and all.

So I nodded my head at Observant Dude and went on my way, smiling, because when you get down to it, who doesn’t like to hear an unsolicited heart-felt Valentine’s Day rant about something as mundane as cabbage, that wasn’t cabbage?

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, KIDS

~ ~ ❤️ ~ ~

The One In Which I Talk To Myself While Buying Beer & Am Overheard

This post has been published in black and white so that I won’t be accused of trying to influence your answer to the poll question below by using particular colors in this post. Nope, not doing that here.

• 🏈 • 🏈 • 🏈 •

I know that Super Bowl Sunday is a big day for gambling, but I know from experience that Super Bowl Sunday is a busy shopping day in grocery stores.

Keeping that in mind while I was at the grocery store yesterday, I decided to go ahead and buy food & drink for what will be our Super Bowl Sunday junk food feast. It’ll be just the two of us so our snacking will lean toward healthy, but we gotta have something special.

It’s a law.

While in the store I decided to buy a six-pack of fancy beers, one of those create your own dealios, you know? That’s when the store has a refrigerated section that offers a wide assortment [maybe 75?] of individual bottles of beer/ale/cider. You pick the 6 you want, placing them in a generic cardboard carrier that when taken to the register rings a set price.

$9.99 to be exact.

Welp, I got totally swept away with the variety in front of me and found myself contemplating each bottle as if I’d never seen beer before. I was smitten with the idea of having choices, and went with two local ales, two regional beers, and one national-brand ginger beer. But I couldn’t decide about the last one bottle so I carefully reviewed all my choices, finally adding a bottle of international beer to the cardboard carrier.

As I did so, with a real sense of personal accomplishment, I said out loud: “And it’s Heineken for the win.”

At which point I heard a man, who I didn’t realize was standing behind me waiting for me to choose my bottles, say: “Yes it is, always.”

Of course I jumped about a foot in the air and started laughing, apologizing for taking so long– because really I’d been dawdling more than deciding— but this kind man just grinned and said: “No problem.”

Which in this situation was an appropriate response, so all’s well that end’s well. Including, I do hope, football season this Sunday evening.

Bugged In The Burbs: 3 Things Of Note + My Astute Conclusions About Each

A garden rose with a bug on one petal. The perfect image to go with a post about small irritating things that have bugged me. *N’est-ce pas?*

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THE FIRST NOTABLE THING

I GOT A TEXT MESSAGE FROM SOMEONE UNKOWN to me. The message said:

“Hi Jim

Now that the mortar has had time to cure we would like to finish the cleaning of the brick on Monday

Roger”

Being a conscientious person I replied:

“Not Jim here. Good luck with your project”

Roger, who knows how to write clearly as evidenced by his [what I assume to be] erroneous text message to me, has not responded to my succinct polite response. Not even a one-word three-letter *thx* has Roger typed my way.

CONCLUSION? I do not like Roger who is a poopy head. He deserves dirty bricks.

THE SECOND NOTABLE THING

WHILE DRIVING DOWN OUR STREET TO HOME I realized that directly above me, hovering over my open car sunroof, was a medium-sized drone.

I quickly checked my rearview mirrors to see if I could figure who was controlling the drone. I could not, so I did what I thought was best. I looked up briefly, smiled, and waved hello to the drone operator.

I did not give the drone operator the finger, nor did I shut the sunroof. I played along like a kind neighbor, in on the joke, whatever it was.

CONCLUSION? I am a good pre-old person who deserves more praise for such.

THE THIRD NOTABLE THING

AS I WAS WATCHING THE YOUNG CASHIER GUY ring up my order at Kroger, I noticed that he’d made a mistake. He had charged me for .65 lbs of rutabagas instead .65 lbs of zucchinis.

[I don’t know how anyone could confuse zucchini for rutabaga, but he did.]

Now considering the last time I got into a conversation with a young cashier guy about produce and how my pear purchase peeved him [READ FULL STORY HERE], I chose not to say a word about the rutabaga/zucchini mistake.

You understand.

However I realize that rutabagas were $.99/ lb while zucchini were $1.49/ lb meaning that I may owe Kroger $.33 for the zucchini that were more expensive than the rutabagas.

CONCLUSION? I will not lose sleep over this, but wonder how often I get charged the wrong amount for something?

Overheard: Winning Big At The Grocery Store

BUSY WEEK HERE but of course I’ve been to the grocery store, source of all excitement.

Once there having collected what I wanted to buy, I found myself standing in the checkout lane with a family of four, soon to be five, directly in front of me.

Mom was holding the coupons while Dad and 2 boys, ages 5 & 7, were putting the groceries on the moving conveyor belt so that the cashier could ring up the items.

AS THEY DID THIS Dad occasionally pointed out to the boys that something was on sale, or that Mom had a coupon for this particular item.

He was, I believe, trying to instill a sense of frugality in his sons.

When all the items had been rung up the total was over $200.00. Mom handed the coupons to the cashier then she went to sit down on a nearby chair.

This left Dad to pay for the groceries while the boys watched him. Again, I do believe, that his intention was that this be another learning experience in money management.

ALL THREE MALES stared at the computer screen as the cashier swiped each coupon into the scanner. The screen showed coupon savings while simultaneously the computer made a bell-like ringing-dinging sound with each subtraction from the total.

Apparently this sound reminded the boys of a video game adding up points. The sound was so reminiscent of a game that the older boy, thoroughly impressed with his father’s game skillz, said:

“Wow, Dad. You did great. You got a really high score.”

~ ~ 😆 ~ ~