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“Drinking to the point that you have a hangover the next day is kind of like taking a peaceful drive through a majestic countryside only to arrive at your destination and find your wife nailing your best friend.”
That’s the funniest way I’ve ever heard this put - courtesy of cracked.com.
In researching these recipes, I came across a little blurb about Holiday Inn coming out with a whole line of non-alcoholic drinks that’s “an industry first.” Which it really is, and I’ve never understood why. Alcohol is not the tasty part of a drink, y’all. Most of those ingredients in fancy mixed drinks are there to mask the flavor of the alcohol. That’s why it’s always strong flavors like ginger or citrus or chocolate.
I love all those flavors, but why throw in the alcohol? Granted, I have zero interest in getting drunk: it doesn’t feel good during, it doesn’t feel good after, and even back in college I was too concerned about always being “in control” to want to drink. There were still times that I way overused in college, but they just served to confirm that I didn’t want to do that.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want fun, interesting stuff to drink! I am always reading the descriptions of cocktails on menus and thinking “Wow, lemon and sugar and zest, that sounds great!… Oh right, except the gin and vodka.” And what better day than New Year’s Eve to explore and share some real drink recipes with you all?
Photo credit: Risa Bear via Flickr
This one was featured in last week’s meal planning kits of recipes from the Gold Rush era. That’s the California Gold Rush, 160 years ago! I remember drinks like switchel appearing in the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder - whenever Pa and all the hired men were working out in the field, they’d drink something that sounded nasty made with vinegar and water. Maybe sugar was mentioned. I don’t know if they had ginger to add, off in the middle of the country back then, but I think it really makes this drink delicious. Like an old-fashioned ginger ale.
Switchel
½ cup light brown sugar
½ cup white wine vinegar
¼ cup light molasses
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2 cups water
Mix together the first four ingredients, then stir in water. Serve chilled.
You know what else reminds me of those books, every time I hear of it? Yellow jackets. Remember when their cousin was acting out all over the place and got tangled up with a nest of yellow jackets? And they had to cover him in mud (which draws out the toxins) and wrap him up in a sheet (to keep the mud on)? Well, apparently someone named a cocktail after it!
Yellow Jacket
4 parts pineapple juice
4 parts orange juice
3 parts lemon juice
Shake and strain out over ice.
I’m sure it wasn’t really named after the scene in those books, but that’s my only association with it. The drink is undoubtedly less painful than the sting! Or do yellow jackets bite? I think one bit me during a company picnic once… we had a great citrus-marinated chicken that they were all over, and I did okay maneuvering around them until I tried to brush off something I felt tickling my finger and it bit me. Fair enough, I suppose. But I wasn’t very happy about it at the time.
My vote for “most hilarious name” has to go to the “Virgin Mary”. Or maybe that should just be “most unintentionally gross name”.
Photo credit: BitchBuzz on Flickr
Virgin Mary
Equal parts tomato and cranberry juice
1 tsp. lime juice per serving
Hot sauce and pepper to taste
Wouldn’t you think a Virgin Mary should be, I don’t know… Jesus-ier? Maybe a traditional drink of Bethlehem? Or blue, or something?
But the mocktails that just virginize a standard cocktail are not my favorites. They’re the -tinis of the mocktail set. You know, like an appletini, a mintini, a scotchtini - just a mindless variation on a theme, created more often because it’s expected than because it tastes good. When I pick a mixed drink, I want it to be there because someone thought those ingredients really went well together.
I find that I can trust the New York Times to think hard about food, and they have some good insights into mocktailing. In one recent article, Melissa Davis suggests using tonic water:
“Made from botanicals and quinine, which gives it its distinctive bitterness, it can transform even the most mundane fruit juice into something sophisticated, especially if you use a less sugary brand like Q or Fever-Tree. At Franny’s, Nekisia Davis, a manager, makes tonic water with cinchona bark (quinine), lavender, chamomile and plenty of fresh herbs. Zipped up with lime juice, it’s one of my summer favorites, boozy or dry.”
She also wisely observes that “A mocktail should be the grown-up in the crowd, a complex drink with just enough sharpness or bitterness to set itself apart from anything cloyingly twee.”
The extreme end of that fascinates me:
This said, no amount of passion fruit purée will hit the spot for cocktail purists of the dry martini ilk. For them, Sheridan Square in the Village offers what might be the most restrained mocktail in town, the Mineral Cocktail. Made with Badoit sparkling water, mineral drops and mineral water ice, it’s the brainchild of the chef Franklin Becker and the bar manager Rainlove Lampariello, designed to be healthful, light, and easy to knock back.
I haven’t sampled one, but Mr. Lampariello swears it tastes “like putting a pebble from a river in your mouth.”
I am dying to try that, but the middle ground between the drinks that are basically fruit juice and the ones that are basically rocks is what interests me the most. I see all the incredible, fascinating explorations being done by mixologists - lavender-infused simple syrups! verjus! pomegranate in everything! - and I wonder why the same work isn’t being done with regular drinks. We do all of this with food and with alcohol, but rarely with that middle ground: liquid food, food in drink form, just regular drinks. How about this?
Verjus Cocktail
Simmer a grape juice made from wine grapes until reduced by half. (These are increasingly common in upscale grocery stores; Navarro Vineyards sells theirs online.) Mix equal parts verjus and sparkling mineral water; flavor to taste with the concentrated grape juice, anywhere from a few drops to a teaspoonful.
Jennie Love at Eat. Drink. Better. came up with a vanilla-rosemary spritzer that works just as well (or better) without vanilla vodka, commenting that “Fresh rosemary and a vanilla bean steeped in a warm simple syrup make a heavenly perfume and an even more divine taste senstation.”
Vanilla Rosemary Spritzer
1 large bunch of fresh rosemary (5-6 stems)
1 vanilla bean
3/4 cups sugar
1 cup water
Club soda
Crushed ice
In a saucepan over medium heat, combine the rosemary (reserve a few of the tops of the stem for garnish), vanilla bean, sugar and water. Bring to a gentle simmer for 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool for at least an hour. Strain the syrup into a jar or other container and chill until ready to use.
To make the cocktail, [pour about 2 ounces of syrup into the glass and fill the rest] with club soda. Adjust ratio according to taste. Garnish with a sprig of rosemary and serve.
(makes enough syrup for 6-8 drinks)
The Bay Gourmet has some wonderful insights into this drink genre, including an awesome idea for “persimmon beer”:
“Crush ripe, crisply firm Fuyu persimmons and strain them for their juice. Add verjus and a few drops of strong tea made with hops. Adjust proportions to taste. This produces a wonderfully smooth and balanced beverage with a faint, refreshing sourness and just enough of a bitter edge to be appetizing.”
(Check out the instructions in there for the olive essence cocktail and the ocean cocktail… definitely more adventurous than I have seen at any bar, or than I was planning to be. But now my curiosity is piqued!)
Back on the sweeter, but still intriguing, side is a rosewater cocktail. Try this:
Bouquet of Roses
Rosewater simple syrup:
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup rosewater
3/4 cup sugar
Heat and stir together until the sugar is completely dissolved; let cool.
For each cocktail, shake together:
1/2 cup sparkling water
1 tablespoon rosewater syrup
1 teaspoon grenadine
That recipe was adapted from a mocktail in the fabulously fussy Storybook Woods which was garnished with pink rose petals and rimmed with pink sugar. It’s a good idea to keep presentation in mind as you make any of these: serve them in gorgeous glasses, garnish them with twists and slices of related ingredients, decorate the rims of sweet or sour drinks with colored or flavored sugars, put the glasses in the freezer before making the drinks so they come out beautifully frosty.
The consensus in many articles was that non-alcoholic drinks need all the bells and whistles they can get to stand up to their alcoholic brethren; personally, I think that any fancy plating we can do is a great gift to ourselves and our guests, no matter what we’re making.
This week’s boxes and meal plans feature New Year’s recipes from all over the globe. Ghana, Ireland, Japan, the American South…. It was a lot of fun researching what different cultures eat.
The groceries for the premium meal plans run about $40-$50, depending on where you are and what you have on hand, so with the $15 meal planning kit your meals for the week are $55-$65… and with no wheat, and lots of veggies and protein, it’s a super-healthy and delicious way to start off the new year:
Herring in Sour Cream (Germany)
Eating herring at midnight on New Year’s is supposed to be good luck - so save one just for that! The omega-3s and omega-6s packed into these little fish are bound to bring you good health, too.
Photo credit: Wordridden on Flickr
Cotechino con Lenticchie (Italy)
So many of the dishes that different cultures use to celebrate their new year are aimed at bringing in the bucks. In this case, the round green lentils symbolize money, while the delicious sausage symbolizes the abundance and good fortune you must have to be eating sausage whenever you like!
Sanshu-zakana (Japan)
This is just part of the elaborate boxes of New Year’s dishes that people eat at this time: the o-sechi, a ton of food in three or four lacquered boxes that allow people to go for several days without having to cook! (Hey… a lot like using these meal plans!)
According to the Japan Times, the kuromame (a black bean dish) is “for the blessings of health and the ability to work; seasoned dried small anchovies, tazukuri — for fertility in the field; and prepared herring roe, kazunoko — [are] for maternal fertility and abundance of generations.”
Photo credit: _e.t. via Flickr
Yam Fufu with Stew (Western Africa)
As a local restaurant review put it, “the fufu reaches a soft, fluffy consistency between mashed potatoes and whipped cream. You eat it by using your right hand to pluck morsels off the mound in your bowl. Then you dip the fufu into the stew and delicately flick it into your mouth. Don’t chew, just swallow. ‘Once you get used to it, it’s a very sensual food,’ [Ghanaian food expert] Osseo-Asare says.”
In “Things Fall Apart,” Chinua Achebe writes lyrically of the fall Yam Festival, when “old things of the past year are ritually discarded and thrown out in anticipation of a new yam and new year.” Different cultures in Ghana and Nigeria celebrate this in slightly different ways; for example, in Ghana it is also known as the “Homowo” or “To Hoot at Hunger” Festival. Yam fufu is, of course, a highlight of this celebration.
Fatt Goh (China)
Moist, fluffy little cupcakes traditionally made with rice flour. If they puff up while steaming, you will puff up yourself with good luck and prosperity during the coming year! And hey, if not, you still have delicious cake to eat.
The groceries for the basic meal plans run about $20-$30, depending on where you are and what you have on hand, so with the $15 meal planning kit your meals for the week are $35-$45… and damn is it getting yummy in here:
Fatt Goh again (China)
Yep, this meal plan has the same little cupcakes. They’re also called huat kueh, if that helps you at all! But here, you get to eat them every day. Cake for breakfast?! That’s a VERY happy new year! And then:
Photo credit: jetalone on Flickr
Stuffed Cabbage Rolls (Hungary)
So many of the dishes that different cultures use to celebrate their new year are aimed at bringing in the bucks. In this case, the cabbage leaves symbolize money, and the meaty, colorful filling symbolizes all the prosperity and abundance we want on other levels too.
Photo credit: Sheila Miguez
Boxty (Ireland)
“Boxty on the griddle,
Boxty in the pan,
If you can’t make boxty,
You’ll never get a man.”
Whether or not that’s a goal of yours, boxty is a delicious, hearty way to ring in the New Year. Besides, potatoes stave off scurvy. You don’t want scurvy, do you?
Hoppin’ John (American South)
The black-eyed peas symbolize coins, and the dark leafy greens simmered alongside them represent riches and good luck. A little bacon or other pork product tossed in for flavor symbolizes prosperity. Oh yeah - and it all tastes great too! I especially love how creamy the black-eyed peas get; it makes such a good contrast with the slight crunch of those greens.
Happy New Year’s to those who celebrate it this week!
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Etsy (a great, gorgeous site where people sell anything they make themselves) has a tool where you can make a tiny showcase of your favorite items or your own items. (Of course, those categories might overlap!) It can go on blogs or Facebook or whatever… I suppose eventually I’ll figure out how it goes on other sites, but blogs I get!
To celebrate posting 10 meal planning kits over there, I’ve made a little mini showing off all those pics/listings. There’s also a sale: if you order through Etsy and enter the code “paganyule” in your comments to seller (that would be me), you get $5 off. That’s $10 for all the meal plans, instead of $15! Not bad for a week’s worth of nutritious and exciting meals, a grocery list organized by aisle, and a fun story or activity. You may never have to wonder what to eat again.
Those of you reading this by email will have to click through to the website to see the pictures. But I think it is well worth it.
This is a little excerpt just for you from the meal planning book I’m writing!….
Why Plan Your Meals?
Meal planning can improve our lives in many ways at once, but it can also seem confusing and overwhelming. It’s tempting to just settle for “good enough.” It might seem easier to just buy whatever looks tasty in the grocery store, to try to estimate the right amount of food for the next couple of weeks, or even to plan enough meals but not make any decisions about when to eat them. If it seems to work, more or less, why mess with it? Well, because:
• Meal planning saves money on groceries. People who try weekly meal planning often find that they have been buying more than they need, even if they previously planned their meals for two weeks or a month at a time. Buying enough food for just one week means that we still have time to use leftover meals and excess ingredients before they go bad, which means savings on the next week’s grocery budget. People who have not been planning their meals at all often find that they have been overspending - like financial educator Ramit Sethi, who discovered that he had been spending 70% of his take-home income on food before he started tracking his finances! It also cuts back on impulse purchases at the grocery store: that box of frozen pizza on sale may look tempting, but when are you going to have time to eat it? Now you can turn those impulses into inspirations: you have enough time and money to throw a special pizza party next week instead.
• Planning ahead saves time. It means shorter trips to the grocery store, because there’s no need to spend time in the aisles deciding what to buy.
Photo credit Ralph Bijker via Flickr
It also means no more time wasted with low blood sugar, trying to decide what to eat, or frantically trying to find something fast to make because you’re already too hungry and there’s nothing on hand. Meal planning means delicious meals, made before hunger hits, integrated into our full and exciting lives.
• Food tastes better when it’s planned. Sure, it’s not literally true. But sitting down to plan meals in advance provides us with an opportunity to think about what we really want. Instead of falling into a rut of the same easy well-worn recipes or restaurants each week, we can take a few minutes to look through forgotten cookbooks and explore new things. We can use the boundaries of our meal plan and our food budget to splurge on one or two exciting ingredients each week. As adults, most of us have the freedom to eat whatever we want. But many of us don’t truly enjoy that freedom, out of a fear that the recipes will be too difficult or take too long or be too expensive. With meal planning, we can take a realistic look at these factors and plan to be as luxurious as possible.
• We get to eat better and feel better. Meal planning allows time to do research into nutritional issues, and to think about how they fit into our lives. It’s easy to read a magazine article about choosing vegetables of many different colors to get a broader range of nutrients, or about migrant farmworkers being abused and sprayed with pesticides on many non-organic farms, It’s harder to figure out how to use this information on the fly. But a few minutes a week spent on meal planning makes it easy to design balanced meals as well as to experiment with how different foods can improve the quality of our lives.
Photo credit Ralph Bijker via Flickr
• Meal plans create clarity. It’s easy to go through a whirlwind week or even a year without really noticing that every other meal is fast food, or vegetable-free, or comes from a box. Food can be a tremendous source of pleasure and has a huge impact on quality of life, but many of us don’t pay enough attention to our relationship with food to use it to its full potential. A meal plan can give us an honest, unflinching understanding of how we have used food in the past, while offering the opportunity for wonderful changes.
Photo credit Sakura Chihaya via Flickr
As I explore Etsy and build a shop there (which you’ll get to see here soon - it just supports our online store here) I keep finding more gorgeous and incredible handmade stuff.
In fact, I really got into Etsy as I was looking for a great engagement ring for my girlfriend (now fiancee!). I wanted something funky and nature-inspired and made by a real person. I found the most amazing nature-inspired stuff by searching Etsy for something like rings and nature. Rings that looked like bark, like gingko leaves, like rivers, like waves in a pool, like a pool itself, like twigs….
I talked to a bunch of different sellers about whether they could mount a moissanite stone on their rings. (We had agreed on that because it’s sparklier than diamond, cheaper, and lab-created - no “blood diamond” questions.) It was a huge struggle at first to choose a ring - which was a nice change from just looking at rings that sooort of worked but were never quite right! I finally realized that my problem was that one of the rings I was choosing between was the one I liked best, and that I should of course choose the one that my girlfriend liked best (”subtly” showing her different rings as I found them)… and then I just flat-out told her which one I liked! Because it was too beautiful to risk miscommunicating about.
(We had agreed, almost two years ago now, that we would both get to propose and both get rings, when we were ready to propose… and whoever went first would just be less surprised when they were proposed to! What ended up happening was that we both proposed on the same day, one right after the other. But that’s another story!)
I found really good low prices on eBay and chose a 1/3 carat stone to have shipped to my ring’s creator. Not long after, I got this ridiculously gorgeous ring back that looked like a tiny shining circle of river, with the stone mounted in the middle of the current. And, eventually, I got to give it to her and receive my amazing engagement ring, which was cast from a pine twig and which you can actually see in these pictures below! (You can see the water ring that hers is based on too, but without the stone.)
What I love about Etsy is that it is all so personal. I know a lot of the artists featured below - one is a close friend’s wife now, one is another writer on everything2.com - and have come to meet others as we’ve chatted about things there. It’s all so hands-on and human.
My one regret about the site is that I have yet to see anything savory there - you can buy food people have made, but it’s almost all candy and baked goods as far as I can tell! My grocery boxes and meal planning kits seem to me to stick out in a weird way, but that will probably change as I learn more.
Happy post-U.S.-Thanksgiving, everyone
I just finished creating the meal plans for this week and I am excited! The basic box has a garlic theme: roasted garlic and olive oil plate, pasta with garlic and parsley, lemony-garlicky scrambled eggs, and roast potatoes with garlic aioli. Yeah… it’s plenty of garlic! Great for your immune system, right? And just enough to make you smell deliciously garlicky in a good way.
And the premium box is designed to help people use up leftover turkey! First you’ll make patties out of it and wrap them with garlic bacon to get the turkey super-moist and flavorful. Then you’ll use some to stock up the Amish Bean Soup, so you don’t get bored of eating bird. And to make turkey sandwiches exciting, we’ll punch them up with gorgonzola, proscuitto, and arugula, much in the way that Food Blogga did last year! Plus for the first time, there is some variety in the breakfasts (and NO TURKEY) some days it’s a fantastic pumpkin soup with bacon-flavored whipped cream, and some days it’s gluten-free coffee cake! (That one’s store-bought - I am sure many of you will be tired of cooking at that point!)
Seriously, I am drooling here. I’ll try to get the meal planning kits with these recipes up by Monday too, so that everyone with turkey has some interesting and easy options for using it up! And I’ll be sharing my own experience with that pumpkin soup soon, because it is AWESOME.
Another rescued vintage post, from November 23rd, 2007
If you celebrate the American Thanksgiving and are among the millions of turkey-cookers this weekend - or if you just like making your own stocks and demiglaces - the San Francisco Chronicle had a neat article a few weeks ago about what different local chefs advise when you use up those bones, and why. I love kitchen science articles: it’s so neat to learn about the effects of simmering versus boiling, adding mint instead of rosemary, or cutting up the vegetables before adding them to the stock.
The article also, awesomely, has information about how to make vegetable stock. I’ve been reading a lot of Jeffrey Steingarten lately - in this same kitchen-sciency-researchy vein - and he has a certain amount of very stern things to say about how vegetarian cuisine in the United States is often treated more like medicine than good food, how it’s a lot harder to prepare vegetables well than meats and fruits and such. So the more articles there are that say things like “don’t just throw all your leftover vegetables into water and boil them, think about the balance of flavors,” the better.
Another rescued vintage post, this one from November 29, 2007
Last week winter squash was on sale - Whole Foods tricked me into thinking that it was a huge savings, but I’ll talk about them separately! So I explored the wonderful world of winter squash with spaghetti squash, acorn squash, and delicata squash. I’ll share those recipes separately too - right now I just need to figure out what to eat this week. After all those squash adventures, I’m feeling like some good down-home familiar flavors. I want some chicken! I have a ton of apples that my mom gave us for Thanksgiving; maybe I should make some more Chicken On Fire!
I also want to make chicken under a brick. Hey: apparently I can get a free-range chicken, have the butcher cut it in half, and brick it. I’ll call it bricken! And then I could use the bones from that to make chicken stock, which I would then use to make the chicken a la Normande. I wonder if I could bricken some legs without boning them (as a Chez Panisse recipe told me I should do). Everything2.com seems to think I could! I have cooked many good things from there with great success, so.
“What are you doing this weekend?”
“Oh, I thought I’d do a little brickening!”
Plus, there are actually bricks in the backyard. Use what you’ve got, that’s what I say! So… perhaps I could budget $8 for the chicken, $3 for the creme fraiche, and 60 cents for the onions. And we have carrots that a lovely friend brought by as she is packing to move (is that why she gave us carrots? I’m not clear on how this worked). That should end up being like $11.60 for 8 meals.
And for breakfast… let’s splurge. It’s supposed to be the biggest meal of the day, after all. How about a cranberry-orange bread and this breakfast “sundae”? About $3 for a bread mix, $3 for a big tub of yogurt, and maybe $1 each for hazelnuts and a pomegranate, and I think I have cacao nibs on hand.
That leaves six meals, $19.60 spent so far. And I need vegetables! Maybe some grapefruit and avocado salad? Say fifty cents for the avocado, a buck for the grapefruit, a buck for the arugula. And then… rapini! with olives! and bell peppers and some artichokes with that! Here are my guesses: $3 for half a pound of rapini, $2 for good dark herby olives, a dollar for a bell pepper, fifty cents for a jalapeno pepper. And $1.50 each for three organic artichokes. That’s $30.60 and that is all I need to do!
Grocery list:
~At Trader Joe’s~
Cranberry-orange bread mix $3
Organic yogurt $3
A ton of sustainably raised chicken $8
Creme fraiche $3
Three organic artichokes $4.50
~At Berkeley Bowl~
Organic pomegranate $1
1/2 lb. organic rapini $3
Organic bell pepper $1
Jalapeno pepper 50 cents
Olives $2
Organic onions 58 cents
Hazelnuts $1
Organic avocado 50 cents
A vintage post, rescued from before the site was hacked -January 7, 2008.
Unless you use PeaceMeals, a big part of making your meals for the week is grocery shopping. So why not come visit the new Whole Foods here in Oakland with me?
I am telling you, it is INSANE in there. I always experienced Whole Foods as an upscale, schmancy place, but I did not know how far they could take it. Look at their bathrooms:
And you know that multi-stone-looking granite-type countertop material is some eco-friendly recycled stuff, too. I think it may even be a green building; up in the TOP parking lot (that’s right, they have more than one parking lot) the walls say things about their use of solar power and their carbon offsets and whatnot.
They have outdone themselves. The store is laid out in a circle. You’re led through the seafood and produce section around to the “Bistro.” I have no idea what the Bistro does, since there’s already a prepared foods section and what looks like it may be a cafe. Then past the meat area, where they DRY AGE THEIR BEEF IN A GLASS CABINET RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. I’m sorry, I got a little excited there. CUSTOM DRY AGED BEEF. For as long as you want, I think. Maybe I am projecting my Dream Beef onto them. I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay about how wet-aging is cheaper and easier and it’s so hard to find dry-aged beef and the ideal beef is dry-aged 6-8 weeks and, well, it’s a good thing I don’t really eat beef because I would be insufferable about it. Now I have fantasies of ordering beef for them to dry-age and coming to visit it once a week.
Oh, and the produce. The produce! It is not as good as the farmer’s market or the Berkeley Bowl. Anywhere that charges some $2.50 for one pesticide-coated pomegranate, in season, is on my shit list. Especially when I saw that right after buying an organic one for about 25 cents at the farmer’s market. Please. And could I find organic eggplant? No I could not. But (if you’re not actually trying to buy something to eat) they make up for it with the gorgeous layouts. Forests of asparagus:
Walls full of beautifully arranged pre-packaged fruit and vegetable dishes:
What you can’t see in that picture - besides the crazy prices - is that when I took it, every single dish was mislabeled. Fun to look at, happy I wasn’t buying them.
After you curve past the meat window, you pass by the valley of cheeses, where employees are slicing cheeses for you to taste right there. And, of course, the intimidating chocolate mountain:
I was quite impressed with the layout there. It’s really not that much chocolate. It’s just that little island. But the way it is piled up and strewn about, the way that they continue the brands and colors in a line from the top to the base of the pile, gives the impression that there is chocolate absolutely freaking EVERYWHERE, that it is about to start falling from the ceiling and piling up around your ankles and vast chocolate rivers are flowing down the adjacent aisles. And that’s reflected in this store as a whole: being forced to walk around this gently curving series of sections makes it hard to envision where things are and makes it seem like it goes on forever and ever. It’s a great design which I’m sure is making them tons of money - even without the hordes of upscale Oaklanders who have apparently been just dying to spend all their grocery dollars here instead of… where? the Montclair Safeway? The former Grand Lake Albertson’s?
After that the aisles start, and the store becomes something of a blur. The center of the store is mind-boggling all the way around, though: if you stay out of the aisles you get to see costly deli items, locally made refrigerated truffles from XOX, a bakery, a gelato bar… a gelato bar! Inside the grocery store!
And then, since it is Whole Foods, you get to wade through things like thirty dollar bottles of mangosteen puree promising energy and longevity and a mysterious glow emanating from your every pore - not that I’m not tempted by the mangosteen puree - and ridiculously adorable handmade baby booties made from organic cotton, and fair trade lavender-scented cacao butter hand lotion made by small groups of women in West African villages, and a small adult clothing section with more indigenous hand-crafted organic high-priced really pretty clothing, and finally you get to stand next to piles of peanut-butter brownies to wait in line and just try not to buy anything else before you get there.
And then try to figure out how to get back to where you started and find your way out!
It’s like Food Disneyland in there. It’s somehow both wonderful and evil, it’s gorgeous and dangerous, and it ends up costing you a lot more to go there than you initially planned. But man, is it pretty in there!
