Grocery Shopping

At the risk of having you all hate me, I’m about to write the most obnoxious, overprivileged, out-of-touch, bougy post. And its only redeeming factor is that I’m self-aware about it.

I went grocery shopping. At a regular grocery store. And it was a nightmare.

Yes, I go grocery shopping weekly, but I usually go to Trader Joe’s or, ahem, (mumbles) Whole Foods. And (digs hole even deeper) I get a produce box delivered to my home every other week.

To be fair, I’m good about meal planning and cooking, so I go to Whole Foods with a list and just buy what’s on the list. Mostly. But seriously, I shop carefully and probably don’t spend more at Whole Paycheck Foods than you do at the regular supermarket.

But sometimes there’s something that drives me to the regular supermarket. A certain brand of chile garlic paste. Nonstick foil. Cleaning supplies. A wide variety of La Croix flavors (I don’t think I’m helping my case here).This time it was matzah. Passover is right around the corner and I don’t want to be scrambling for matzah at the last minute.

I went to Ralphs and emerged two hours later, exhausted. How do people do this every week? Here’s what I hated about the experience.

Size. The store is huge, and since I don’t go often, I don’t know where everything is. It takes me so long just to find everything I need.

Choice. There are so many varieties of everything – how do you know what to choose? At Trader Joe’s, there’s one choice – their brand. And that’s fine with me. I was literally staring at the butters for hours minutes trying to choose. It’s butter, people!

Crap food. Yeah, I said it. I can’t believe how much junk food there is out there. And I don’t just mean the snack food, although there is a lot of junky snack food. There’s also all the prepared foods. Now here’s where you tell me that people are busy, they’re low income, they’re working several jobs and taking care of kids and don’t have time or money to cook. But I challenge that. First of all, some of these packaged foods are not cheap. Second of all, cooking doesn’t have to be expensive or labor-intensive. Do you know what I make for dinner constantly often? Ground beef, onion, and spinach over rice. That’s it, one two three, done.

I was so tired after leaving Ralph’s. But hey, I was able to score a case of limoncello La Croix. You’re not going to find that at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. And I found my matzah.

Thanks for the help…Not

Normally I am the one to clean out the refrigerator. Or else no one cleans the refrigerator until science experiments start growing and then see scenario 1 – me cleaning the refrigerator. But I asked my husband the other day if he’d clean it and he agreed.

That evening, he told me that he cleaned the refrigerator and all was fine until….uh oh. Honey, did you see the miso when you were cleaning out the fridge, I asked? I’m afraid I threw it away, he replied.

And that’s when I lost it. Because we were having tuna steaks with miso butter for dinner and you can’t make that with NO MISO. Why the miso? It was sitting innocently in the back corner of the refrigerator not hurting anything, and probably has a shelf life of about a hundred years. Why not one of three open bags of flaxseed meal? Or the off-brand of sriracha that no one will eat because it’s not the brand with the rooster? Or the cream with the expiration date of 6 days earlier? Why none of those things yet the miso caught his attention???

You may think I’m overreacting. But my life is planned very precariously and I don’t take well to things that throw it off balance. I plan my meals at the beginning of the week and shop accordingly. What’s more, I was planning to cook quickly and go to the gym after dinner. I hadn’t gone to the gym the previous evening and really wanted to go that night.

I knew that the logical thing to do was to make the tuna another way. It’s important to be flexible right? Especially when my husband was just trying to help? I mean, anyone who writes a blog called Good Enough Gourmet (my other blog) should be able to figure out another way to cook tuna. But by now, I really had a taste for that miso, I had already softened the butter, and the flavor would go so well with the sesame spinach I was planning to make as a side dish. Besides, if I made the tuna another way and it was good, that would send a message to my husband that it was ok to throw away the miso, which it most definitely was not.

So I stormed out of the house making a dramatic proclamation that I was going to buy miso. I do a quick calculation — Trader Joe’s is closest and easiest (I know that store backward and forward) but whether they would have miso would be a crapshoot. Whole Foods would definitely have it but it’s a little farther away, so I went to the regular grocery store figuring they would have miso for sure. It’s L.A., right? Wrong. I scour the store and there’s no miso. The Asian aisle, no miso. The refrigerated aisle with the tofu, no miso. I asked two supermarket employees but they were basically useless. Don’t you have computers where you can check your inventory, I asked? No.

So at this point I’m left with the following choices: 1) make a different type of tuna, which I could have done at an earlier point and still made it to the gym; I’ve obviously already rejected this option; 2) go to Whole Foods where I know exactly where the miso is, but that seems a bit ridiculous at this late hour; or 3) buy this sketchy-looking miso powder for instant soup, which is the closest I’m getting to miso at this store. I opt for option 3 and go home with my miso powder.

The tuna came out ok, not as good as if I had proper miso of course. And what was the lesson I learned from all this? Don’t let my husband clean the fridge? Give explicit instructions when asking husband to clean fridge? Chill out and just cook the tuna however? No need to scream at hubby when he’s trying to be helpful?

No, the lesson I learned is that leaving the house when I’m boiling mad, even when the excursion adds to my frustration as my trip to the miso-less supermarket did, gives me just enough time to calm down a bit, therefore avoiding a huge blowup that would have likely lasted for days. And that, for better or for worse, is my takeaway from this comedy of errors.