Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Elephants in my kitchen!

Our new apartment is exactly 200 feet from a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's. I feel like we have been kicked up to a new level of grocery shopping. The Whole Foods is beautiful and I want to spend hours walking around exploring it and petting the food and buying more than we can consume, but my wallet and I have not yet had the chance.

The Trader Joe's was a bit of a surprise. I went in there for the first time on New Years Eve and it was PACKED. It immediately made me feel like I was back at the co-op in Park Slope. (Briefly JR and I belonged to one of the country's largest food co-ops. Then the whole "having to work to wait in line for an hour just to be harassed by the all-organic preaching checkout person before you can buy your food" got to be a bit much.) Anyway, back in Boston, the Trader Joe's was full of lovely, neat, different foods and about 4000 people too many. I quickly grabbed a few things and while checking out asked the very polite and helpful cashier when the best time to come was. He confided in me that any night after 8 was pretty safe.

Last night on our way home from the gym I wooed JR to the Trader Joe's by promising him beer. It was much less crowded and I got to spend some quality time wandering the aisles. The produce area was pretty depleted, but everything looked fresh and clean. I needed some garlic and had to choose between some mini-bulbs and some ELEPHANT GARLIC. I had no idea what I was in for.


I finished up and headed home to make my standard Boboli Pizza. Crunchy crust heaped with peppers, onions, broccoli, zucchini, cheese and, last night, garlic. A normal Boboli pizza in my house gets 1-2 cloves of garlic depending on if I have any client meetings the next day. I pulled off and diced one clove of the ELEPHANT GARLIC, and had about 6 cloves worth. It was very pungent, actually making me cry like an onion, and tasted fabulous in the pizza.

The good news is, I am working from home this week, the bad news is, JR is in week two of his new job. I hope they like garlic!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Roast the garlic and some new potatoes with a little olive oil and just eat it with some salt and beer or wine. Pick up some $2 Buck Chuck wine at Trader Joes. It might be $3 and a lot of people buy it by the case.

Unknown said...

lucky for me my coworkers do enjoy garlic, and they have already asked me repeatedly about all the fantastic lunches that I bring in (mostly leftovers from the previous nights dinner), and they are impressed, and then they always follow up with the, "how old are you?" question. I never know whether I should take that question as a compliment or an insult...