Friday, April 26, 2013

Loot

Today's spur-of-the-moment trip to New York (expensive train ticket, but I do work best on the train, second-best work in coffee shops with good pastry) was probably my most successful shopping trip ever. I now have, or had:

-Two bunches green garlic.
-Two bunches ramps.
-One big bag of excellent-looking arugula.
-One bunch each, chard and broccoli rabe.
-One City Bakery chocolate croissant.
-One sake oyakodon, Sobaya.
-One (discounted) book I'd been looking for, Strand.
-One package frozen tofu skin, Sunrise Mart.
-One massively discounted Tsubaki Damage Care set, same store. Yes, that's right, a set. For $27 - giant shampoo and conditioner and a normal-size tub of the hair mask. The mask itself is normally $20.

What this tells us:

-Almost my entire non-necessity budget goes to food. Allium if at all possible. Glanced and Uniqlo and Sephora but was unimpressed.

-I'm under the mistaken impression that I'm Japanese.

-Farmers markets in Central NJ-to-Philadelphia don't open until May, and supermarkets around here don't seem keen on stocking decent produce, local or far-flung. It has indeed come to this.

-I had the opportunity to get coffee out, at any number of HMYF establishments, but simply forgot. To be fair, I had to get back early because there was a talk by a famous historian on blogging and French history, preceded by a wine and cheese reception, aka a WWPD dream (free!) event.

5 comments:

Petey said...

"I'm under the mistaken impression that I'm Japanese."

Have I ever mentioned that you might enjoy a day-trip to the Mitsuwa Marketplace?

(Any brief exploration of the topic will definitely show that the Japanese are god's true chosen people, so it makes sense that you or I might occasionally fall under that mistaken impression.)

Amber said...

Do you find the frozen tofu skin superior to the dried and reconstituted?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Amber,

I've never come across the dried variety in a supermarket, and am not sure which version one gets in restaurants. The frozen one's pretty good. I do know there are Japanese and Chinese versions of this, and that I generally prefer the Japanese.

fourtinefork said...

I think you must be going to the downtown Sunrise Mart-- whereas I tend to go to the one near NYPL on 42nd St.-- so I'm not sure if that Sunrise Mart stocks the same baked goods, but if it does, I highly, highly recommend the banana & chocolate croissant. That, plus a chocolate-covered mochi donut from Zaiya-- is my reward for going to the library these days.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Fourtinefork,

Somehow, when I was doing research at the NYPL, I never noticed there was a Sunrise Mart over there. I would get some good prepackaged sushi, but that's about it.