Fruit City

I went to a different grocery store today. There are only 3 left in town--there used to be 5 or 6 (well, years ago there were more than that, even). The one I go to most often is a small(ish) neighborhood grocery store; one is (*koff*) Walmart; and the other is a big employee-owned chain store out on the east side of town. That's the one I went to.

I have plenty of chicken, fish, and cheese in the house, and lots of veggies in the freezer, so what I was really looking for was some good fruit, which they had in abundance. I came home with a banana (I only buy them one at a time, since I like them just slightly green--I hate mushy bananas!), a nectarine, a Gala apple, a Fuji apple, an organic Golden Delicious that actually looks ripe (I hate unripe apples and mushy apples both), half a cantaloupe, 2 plumcots, a Bosc pear (currently my favorite kind), a French butter pear, an Asian pear, 2 tiny Seckel pears, some red seedless grapes, and a box of raspberries which I don't really expect to taste like anything, but I thought I might try them. I've never had plumcots or French butter, Asian, or Seckel pears, so that's something to look forward to.

They also had ready-cooked vacuum-packed (as opposed to canned) baby beets. I *love* beets, pickled or plain. They have a really amazing produce section, actually, and they have everything labeled with the country of origin, which is nice, though I didn't see anything that was labeled "local."

I forgot to look for alfafa sprouts and organic cottage cheese and yoghurt. I know they have the sprouts and organic yoghurt, and I know other stores in the chain have organic cottage cheese, so I'll have to go back sometime and look again.

They had frozen organic goat meat. I almost got some for Taenzer and Timber.

I thought I had bought some kind of peanut butter that had flax seeds in it--nice and crunchy, and pretty good-tasting--from them, but I couldn't find it, so I must have got it in Walmart.

They also had teeny little 4-oz. containers of Hagen-Daaz! They look like doll-house cartons. I caved and got vanilla, chocolate, and dulce de leche. I think I got them more because they're so cute than because I was really craving ice cream!

To show that I'm not totally obsessed with food: the undergrad English honor society was holding a book sale as a fund raiser, and I bought a biography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Kind of sorry I did--the author doesn't seem to like Charles Lindbergh, thinks that AML married beneath herself, and looks down on her for it. It was written while AML was still alive, and of course both Lindberghs were fiercely protective of their privacy, so there wasn't much in the way of primary source material available; all the author could do was rehash the published letters, diaries, and other writing of Anne and Charles. She says she talked to Nigel Nicholson, whose father wrote the biography of Anne's father and was with the Lindberghs and Morrows during the trial of Bruno Hauptman, and who gave her access to some of the Nicholson/Sackville-West material. Anyhow, I wasn't much impressed. I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it. I'll probably donate it for next year's book sale.