Tag: snack foods

The most boring decision I’ve made all year.

On By StevenIn Life At Home25 Comments

Since I arrived in Arlington, I’ve been trying to find the One True Grocery, and my search has been unfulfilled so far. I mentioned back on the first of November that I’ve been to a crazy number of different grocery stores since my arrival, and I still haven’t settled into a grocery routine here.

When I moved to Germany, I did some of my grocery shopping at the Globus near the office, but the vast majority was at the Kaufland a few minutes away from my apartment. Since I was walking to and from the grocery store there, I fell into the habit of only getting what I could carry. When I repatriated, I started grocery shopping with a car again and the amount of food that I bought was significantly larger. I have a tendency to overbuy, and it’s something I’ve mentioned before in this blog.

Here in Arlington, I’m somewhere between the two extremes. I’m not buying a lot of food, and that is in part because the grocery stores haven’t thrilled me yet. It’s really tough to top Publix. I’ve been to many different stores here so far, and these are my impressions so far:

  • Harris Teeter – I Teetered my Harris on my first day in Arlington, and I haven’t been back. The one I went to was a two-story affair with a very confusing layout. It looked to me like what might happen if MC Escher was really into neon and wanted very much to make a knockoff of Whole Foods. I have not yet been to a second Harris Teeter to see if a different location might suit me better.
  • Giant Food – I’ve been to two different Giants now. The first one was like a dirty, poorly stocked Winn Dixie where nineteen out of every twenty people completely ignored the directional arrows on the floor. The second one was a bit better, but I still had trouble finding everything I was looking for.
  • Safeway – I’ve been to three different local Safeways so far, and the closest location off Lee Highway is the one I’ve actually gone back to more than once. They have a decent selection, and their Zebra Cakes are always really fresh. (Snack standards are important.) I was thinking that they reminded me a lot of Albertsons, but then I found out while fact checking this post that they’re actually a subsidiary of Albertsons now, so that tracks.

I haven’t bothered to shop in Target, Trader Joes, or Whole Foods, even though they’re reasonably close. I haven’t even seen a Wal-Mart, even though there’s gotta be one nearby. And last but not least, everyone keeps telling me Wegman’s is great, but I haven’t felt like driving half an hour each way for groceries.

If even a single one of these stores carried absolutely everything I wanted, I would keep going back to that one over and over again, but some things are just incredibly difficult to find.

For example, my favorite pickles are Claussen, but they’re not carried anywhere locally except for Wal-Mart. I did try Vlasic again, and I immediately regretted that decision. They taste like turmeric and existential dread.

As an aside, when I couldn’t find Claussen in six different stores, I turned to the Internet for reassurance that they were still being sold, and I was treated to the most delightfully unlikely sentence I’ve ever seen online:

“The Federal Trade Commission blocked the proposed merger on the grounds that it would have severe anticompetitive effects, leading to a monopoly in the refrigerated-pickle market.”

So that’s where things stand with the Great Grocery Selection of 2020. They opened a Wegman’s in Tyson’s Corner this week, so maybe I’ll finally give that a try this weekend. Or maybe I’ll finally give in and just go the Instacart route. If you’ve read this post all the way to the end, then bless your heart! It’s definitely not my most interesting work. If you’ve read this far, you deserve a treat, like a cookie or a White Claw or something. Treat. Yo. Self!

Treat. Yo. Self.

Do you have a favorite grocery store?

27/52 (and 6 of 30!)

[#AtoZChallenge] C is for Cookie!

On By StevenIn Life At Home10 Comments

I have a sweet tooth.   I like cakes and chocolate and pastries of all kinds.  There’s one type of sweet that will always be my favorite, though.   As anyone who knows me really well could tell you, I really love cookies.  I have a passion for cookies that is only slightly less frenetic than Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

A few months ago, Amelie and I were near the University of Central Florida for a concert, and we stopped for dinner at a little sushi place, but  I got slightly turned around and we parked on the wrong side of the little complex of shops and restaurants.  Because of this slight unplanned detour, we walked past this little shop:  Insomnia Cookies.

I probably looked for all the world like a starving puppy with my nose pressed to the glass on that first night.   The sign on the door, if you can’t read it, says “warm cookies delivered until 3 am.”   This is true.  They even have an app to place your order.

Yes, you read that correctly.  You can get an app on your phone.  With that app, you can have warm cookies delivered to you, all the way until 3 am.  This is pure bliss for me.Here’s some of the varieties available.  I haven’t tasted all of them yet.  Yet.

There’s about a hundred locations now, in different states.  There are two in Orlando, and another one in Miami Beach.   If you buy a six-pack, it comes in a small box that looks for all the world like a tiny awesome pizza box.

For this particular visit, we got two chocolate chunk, two snickerdoodle, one oatmean raisin, and one white chocolate macadamia.   Their snickerdoodles are balls-out amazing.

The real danger of Insomnia Cookies, as I see it, is that while I always wind up with a box of six cookies, they sell a 12, an 18, a 24, and even 50, 100, 200, and 300 cookie packs.  When I have cookies in the house, I usually can’t stop myself from eating them.  Yesterday, I put the box on top of the fridge so that I wouldn’t keep eating them.   Fast forward to two hours later, while Amelie and I were cooking dinner-  she turned around to find me on my tip-toes, peering into the open box of cookies with an absolutely delighted expression, and pretending not to be eating one when she asked.

Yup, a box of six cookies is just too dangerous.  Better make it a twelve-pack, just to be safe.

What’s your favorite type of cookie?

Administrative note: This post is part of the A to Z Blogging Challenge. Each Monday through Saturday in the month of April, I will write a new post- one for each letter of the alphabet. If you would like to participate, it’s never too late to start. Just look over the guidelines at http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/.