Grocery Shopping

Ever since Tam published the photographs of her grocery shopping goodies, I have meant to do the same, and today, I even remembered before I put all the groceries away.

Here is the produce:



You may not be able to tell, but the square item on the right side is a mix of pre-cut melons, strawberries, grapes, and blueberries that is kind of expensive ($7.50) but is an indulgence I let myself get.

Here is the rest:



One thing I've noticed since moving to W-S, where grocery prices are higher than they were in Austin, is that I am more inclined to purchase the store brands and I am willing to consider them for a wider range of products. I surprised myself today by getting the store brand old-fashioned oats, since I've been loyal to Quaker for so many years, but the price differential was pretty large and I only use them for baking muffins (either whole or ground into flour).

I have a large box in which I keep my broken-down paperboard for recycling, which makes very clear what my commonly-purchased boxed foods are:

* Honey Nut Cheerios
* Quaker Instant Oatmeal
* Trisuits - Rosemary flavor
* Saltine crackers (Wal-Mart brand because they really are the best, though I am sure many of you will react to that as I react to the concept of a best English muffin: OK, it's a tastier flavorless lump of dough than the other brands)
* Morningstar Farms breakfast sausage patties

The Honey Nut Cheerios are conspicuous in their absence from today's shopping, but I had decided that I've come to rely too much on them for snacking purposes. (For a while, it was really bad because I'd discovered how delicious it is to eat dry HNC with walnut pieces. I had to stop buying walnuts a couple of weeks ago to put an end to that particular madness.) And there's this odd but kind of awesome thing: if I do not buy food, I do not eat it. So I bought more produce instead.

I sometimes have trouble remembering that I have bought produce, and I think it's largely a function of the out of sight, out of mind phenomenon that arises with putting items into the crisper drawers. Today, I reorganized my crispers so that the left contains stuff I bought for specific recipes and the right contains snackable stuff. (I also typically leave berries, baby carrots, and leafy greens on the shelves themselves.) I hate it when I'm cleaning out the drawer and find bell peppers that I've forgotten long enough that they've gone bad - roasted bell peppers are the bomb and I can eat them with pretty much any meal or as a snack.