C-Town now carries dumpling wrappers

About two weeks ago I was walking through Chinatown to buy dumpling wrappers and thinking about how annoying it is that these are made not far from my house but I have to go to Manhattan to buy them. Then a lightbulb went off over my head and I tweeted a picture to C-Town to ask if they carried them. Yesterday C-Town tweeted me a picture of them back to let me know they're now in. Now I can make dumplings every time I feel spiteful without advance planning. (I exaggerate. If I made dumplings every time I felt spiteful, I'd never get a chance to eat anything else.)

Sriracha

While I was eating my fish tacos, I noticed the price tag on my old bottle of sriracha.  $3.99. I bought a new bottle in Chinatown for $2.29 yesterday. What a deal.

An interesting note about this blog is that all of its hits come from searches for sriracha, rooster sauce, chinese hot sauce, chinese rooster sauce, and misspellings of the same. My favorite hit so far is the search for "Chopin stage fright" which was a post about how I was nervous to shop for Thanksgiving. Here is the last week.

Here's all time.

My Many Trips to C-Town

I've been reading library books at a pace of a book a day (Phillip Roth - Indignation. Bret Easton Ellis - Imperial Bedrooms) and because C-Town's on the way back from the library, I keep going there. Today was my third day in a row. (I got a collection of Jay McInerney's short stories, but don't expect to finish it in a day because I am going to cook the things I bought at C-Town and be social.)

I am happier to be at C-Town with each trip. Yesterday I found my tomato juice I requested and it's at the price I requested: $1.79. I couldn't find my La Squisita artichokes for $1.29. Today I did find them prominently displayed on a front shelf instead of hidden behind other displays in the first row. The best way to hide something from me is to put it prominently displayed. I also picked up 2 more boxes of Barilla whole grain pasta for $1. I ate a box of it yesterday. The box tells me that is 1400 calories of pasta in a day. I made it with an alfredo sauce and it was good enough to stock up. I also got some sausages I had never seen before for $3.50 or so. I'll find out if they're good when I cook them tonight. Pierogies were $3.29. That is more than Key Food lists them as, but exactly as much as Key Food charges me. (Associated had them for $3.39. I checked on the way.)

More Grocery Store Violence. This at Key Food!

I read a terrible thing in the Brooklyn Paper.

Three perps robbed a Grand Street grocery store on Jan 7, pistol-whipping one victim and stealing $800 from the register.
The perps entered the Key Foods near Lorimer Street at 8:45 pm, flashing handguns and demanding the cash. One perp struck a witness’s face with his handgun while the other took the cash.
The thieves ran out of the store five minutes later and one fired a round into the air across the street.

Terrible.

"Crêpe Mix"

A correspondent who spends a lot of time in Manhattan wrote in to say he spotted crêpe mix for sale at Morton Williams for $6.99. As he noted, such a mix is "almost all flour."

Stupid things like crêpe mix contribute to people thinking they don't know how to cook. Nothing galls me like pre-made polenta.  (I can make real polenta in 10 minutes using 1 ingredient.) But I admit I can't tell you if cake mixes fall into this category because I never bothered to try making a cake out of real ingredients.

N.B. I use the circumflexes on the word crêpe because in my other role (I resisted saying rôle) as the editor of a society rag, I had to learn how to make one because every other article describes a "fantastic fête.")

Two Grocery Trips Today!

I'm happy about both. First, I went to Compare (better known as "cat pee") to buy a dozen eggs so I could break my $10 bill to do laundry. I paid $1.75 for extra large, which is apparently as good a price as they come for now. I remember paying $1.25 for medium not that long ago.

Later I went to C-Town. I couldn't find the artichokes I like, but they do carry tomato juice now. Just in time for bloody mary season. It's even at the price I like best ($1.79) and now I never have to go anywhere else for it. I bought some and some Fresca and some pasta shapes that aren't usually on sale, including whole wheat spaghetti. I never buy whole wheat, but I thought it might be good with an alfredo sauce. There's also a really good price on ricotta salata ($7.99/lb) but I have a surfeit of cheese so I held back.

Key Food ripped me off again

The pierogies were labeled $2.99. They cost $3.29. I'm breaking up with Key Food for a while.

I DESPISE grocery store violence

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot.

Giffords, who was re-elected to her third term in November, was hosting her first "Congress on Your Corner" event at the Safeway in northwest Tucson, NPR reported.

People are nuts.

Grocery Stores that Rip You Off

I didn't know that Key Food's pricing practices were illegal. I thought they were only mean. But Gothamist clarifies.

The DCA has issued almost 750 charges so far this fiscal year, and found that the most common violation was for a lack of item pricing, which is, according to a DCA press release, "particularly troubling given that nearly one in three times supermarkets got it wrong at the cash register."

 Maybe that's not clear. Maybe it's legal to post one price and charge me another. It still makes me mad.

Publix Pix

A correspondent from Florida submitted these pictures to me as a birthday present. Here, with comments, they are.  They are from the Publix in Wellington. Publix is considered the class act of grocery stores.

I didn't realize it was this easy.

The Village Voice goes to Western Beef and takes pictures of its meaty offerings and passes it off as journalism.

The beef, etc.

I could do that.