Shopping...

I went grocery shopping today and realized something... I've always said that I don't like to shop all that much. I don't enjoy slogging around store after store searching for some item and I don't really like the grocery store particularly either. But today I was at La Habra Ranch Market and I realized that I love shopping there! I always find such interesting and beautiful fruits and vegetables and the bottles and packages with Arabic, Chinese and Spanish labels really catch my eye! They have teas imported from everywhere and you can almost always find a tray of Baklava if that's what you're looking for. Every kind of chili pepper sits waiting and there are stacks of boxes of 6 mangos for $1.99 per box. David likes jam made with sugar instead of corn syrup and sure enough, they've got it... for $1.00 a jar! (You can see it in the upper right hand corner of our fridge.) Medjool dates go for $2.99 a pound. And if you're in the market for any type of bottled marinated garlic, that would be the place to go!

Here is it January and I was able to pick up little watermelons, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries and, well, $45 worth of goodies! Dried white figs packed in Greece, little cookies with Greek writing all over the package and a pretty net bag full of small red and yellow sweet peppers that would be wonderful halved and stuffed for an appetizer! A couple of days ago I was looking in Lee Bailey's "Country Weekends" cookbook for something and I stumbled onto his 4 pages of "Natural Fruit Desserts!" Each one is beautiful and I'll bet they're delicious, too! So, now I need to find the time to make a bunch of them, take pictures and put them onto Erin's website. I wish I could have you over to taste test everything! That, and going to work, are what slow me down!

Something else I like about shopping at La Habra Farms (as I call it) is all the different kinds of people who shop there. There are always Chinese housewives and I usually see an Indian woman in a Sari. Two times people have asked me if I'm from their home country! Last year a nice older lady started speaking to me in her language, so I asked her what language she was speaking. She said 'Bulgarian' and indicated that she thought I for sure looked like I was Bulgarian! I told her I was sorry, but I wasn't and we had a very nice patched together conversation about a yummy dish made with Bulgarian cheese and cornmeal. Then a few weeks ago a lady ran up to me and asked if I was Lebannese! She was sure I was! She had been looking all over the place for these roots that she loves and thought I'd know where to find them! They only grow when there are lightening strikes and are very delicious cooked with butter! She called them truffles, but they are roots, not mushrooms. I like being mistaken for someone's familiar "neighbor."

Shopping can also be fun for me if it's really a date with David. This morning he proposed that we should go shopping this evening and upgrade our bathroom towels (since Macy's is having a big sale and he's hankering for some new car rags), and then he would sweeten the deal by taking me out for a bite of dinner at Nordstrom's Tea Room. Yes! I'll go! Now that's the kind of invitation to shop that I can't refuse!