Grocery Store Heaven

I love to cook and I love watching The Barefoot Contessa. Often when I watch good ole Ina she makes this wonderful dish and as she is chopping up her fresh ingredients she sometimes says things like, "Now this ingredient may be hard to find, but a speciality store down in the Hampton's carries it." Most of the time this is not helpful to me. Except for last year.

In Texas they have this wonderful wonderland grocery store called Central Market. When people came to visit this store was always on the tourist stop. It had incredible local and state wide produce, a variety of exotic cheeses, a bread isle of wonder, a butcher, a seafood counter, many, many bulk items, an olive bar, a sandwich bar, and samples galore. In fact, I would take the now toddler boy there after nap time just to enjoy the fresh juice samples and grab some coffee.

Then we moved. Now, I'm not regretting the move. We have family, a great church, a house we can actually afford, less working hours for the husband, and a great small city to raise our kids. I was however, really sad about the grocery store situation. It's not terrible, but we did chose to live in suburbia with a small grocery store. It has a home town feel to it. Then there is Walmart with cheaper items, but terrible produce. The Whole Foods is a bit of a drive, but I could still go and get my Tahini when I needed it for dressing and hummus.

Then this week a miracle happened.

They opened a HUGE grocery store down the street. The husband went there and actually found Tahini for me. He was agog and couldn't stop talking about the store. Today I realized we still needed some small items from the store so I loaded our toddler and decided to try the store.

It's pretty, shiny, and new. I fell in love at first sight. The first thing I noticed was the wonderful grocery carts with TWO places to put children in. Perfect for when the baby actually can sit in the cart. I entered the store and noticed a sandwich bar AND an olive bar to my right. I went to the lunch meat counter and 5 people asked if I needed help. (I mention this because I usually have to beg the Walmart employees to even notice that I'm at the counter.) I continued to walk around. The store had a case of exotic cheeses, the produce was incredible and there was a lot of it from the state and local area. I kept walking. There was a real butcher and meat counter and a seafood counter.

I now feel like watching some of Ina. Perhaps when able, I'll make something with exotic cheese.