Oh, the Thanksgiving food drama....

[dragojustine]

So I went grocery shopping this weekend. That's right, the big pre-Thanksgiving load up (though I didn't buy any form of turkey, and now it looks like Dustin's mom may not be sending any, which is good by me but both Dustin and mom have been trying to make me promise to make turkey even though I don't want any and it's all a big Thing and that was SO not the point of this story)



I did my pre-Thanksgiving load up, including all the items for the All Important Stuffing. Boxes of Stove Top, check. Mushrooms, check. Onion, check. Celery, check. Apples, check. Chicken broth, check. Water Chestnuts... uncheck.

My lovely Safeway at home had a whole isle of Asian food and I never had any trouble finding water chestnuts. But this place, despite being a huge, sparkly, good-neighborhood, upscale, brand-new Ralphs, has one dinky little shelf of Asian food consisting of a couple bottles of soy sauce, one thing of shittake mushrooms, and some varieties of Weird Asian Snack Foods. And this makes me freak right the hell out, of course, and I ask a guy at the store about them only to find out that he hasn't even heard of water chestnuts, and asks me what they are. Which is a bit awkward, because I of course don't have a clue what they are, other than "some kind of starchy Chinese vegetable" which makes me sound like a complete moron. More problematically, I don't relish the idea of trying to explain to the guy why I CANNOT make the most quintessentially American meal in existence (the Thanksgiving dinner) without an obscure Chinese vegetable. But I CAN'T.

So I retreated home fretting about where I could possibly buy water chestnuts by Wednesday and dreading having to make an excursion into some more-ethnic neighborhood of LA because navigating LA still freaks me out and I'm just mourning for Seattle and Wwajimaya and such.

But there is a happy ending. Because I think "Damn Ralphs! Safeway would never have let me down in this way!" And despite the fact that I haven't seen a single Safeway in all of California, I decide to cling to optimism and go to safeway.com and punch in my zip code. And, wonder of wonders, the mystery of Big Corporate Conglomeration spirits me away to the site of something called Vons, which I've never heard of, but it seems to be an alias of Safeway in this heathen state. So I take down the directions and go there, only to find this teeny tiny dingy run-down crappy little store in a very bad neighborhood. I almost don't go in, because if my lovely big upscale good-neighborhood Ralphs didn't have them, what good will this be? But I go in, and lo and behold! Crammed into two tiny little shelves in the "ethnic" isle, under the 7 metric tons of Hispanic food, is an itty bitty shelf with more mushrooms and bamboo shoots and snow peas and spicy mustard than you can possibly shake a stick at, including no less than FOUR options for water chestnuts.

In short, Thanksgiving has been saved and Safeway owns my soul for life. I have braved the wilds of bizarre grocery store chains and neighborhoods that think "ethnic"= Hispanic exclusively and I have come out on top! With water chestnuts! And now I can eat good stuffing, with just the right flavor of sweet crunch, from Thursday until Christmas straight through. I win!

Is it weird to be so homesick for a grocery-store chain?

Comments

[dragojustine.livejournal.com]

Aw, I'm just having a little orphan Thanksgiving. It won't be traumatic at all. I hope you survive too!