Grocery Update

Back in November I wrote a blog about things I had trouble finding here in SMA. One of the things was canned tomatoes.

Canned Tomatoes - Up until the last year or two I couldn't find canned tomatoes at all but now I'm seeing some Spanish or Italian brands. So far I haven't found one that has the flavor and texture that I want.

That situation has been overcome. First I found about a 5 pound can of S&W canned tomatoes at La Cava. I bought them and used what I needed and put the rest in the fridge. Of course that means you gotta think up some more stuff to do with tomatoes before they go bad or freeze them. But at least I knew when I wanted tasty canned tomatoes I could find them. Just imagine my excitement when I found a box of eight small cans (you know the regular 14-16 oz cans) of chopped tomatoes at Costco AND they were canned by S&W so I knew that the quality would be good. Cook's Illustrated rated them as 'Highly Recommended.' The cost for eight cans was about $7. Less than a $1 a can. I only bought one box of chopped tomatoes so I could try them out. I made a tomato sauce with Italian sausage this week and the tomatoes were wonderful. Now I probably should go back and buy another box or two because you never know if Costco will have them the next time....like the boxes of chicken broth. Chicken broth has disappeared from their shelves never to appear again.

The next story is about mantequilla (butter). I don't like Mexican butter. It reminds me of the stuff that we used during WWII. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember back in the old days. My mother would buy a lump of white grease (I guess it was lard) and then mix a packet of orange powder in it and we called it butter....but even as a kid, I knew it was NOT butter. The Mexican butter makes me think of that WWII butter. So I've been buying 'foreign' butter.

When we first came it was New Zealand butter but that disappeared from the shelves at Espinos and Bonanza. Then came the Danish butter. I look at the price and at the grams and decided that the cost was about $4 a pound. Almost double what I would pay for butter in the USA. So I used it sparingly but sometimes you just need the silkiness of a little real butter added to a recipe. A few weeks ago I bought Danish Lurpak butter again and when I was putting it away I noticed the price 32.50 pesos for 200 grams....About $3.25 for 7 ounces of butter. WHOA.....more than $7 for a pound of butter.

I had seen Kirkland butter at Costco for less than $4 a pound but you had to buy four or six pounds at a time. With our little fridge, I didn't want to have to store butter but now I would figure out a way to do it. Guess what.....when we were at Costco last week, they didn't have any of the Kirkland butter.

When will I learn, buy it when you see it even if you don't need it at that time.