So, back in September, and yes I'm clearing a certain amount of mental backlog, but back in September, Penzey's sent out their monthly catalog. And it had two coupons. One was for a free bottle of their new spice blend, and one was for a free gift box you could give to a teacher which had a small bottle of cinnamon and another large bottle of their new spice blend.

You may recall these lobster ravioli from Mother's Day. Well, Costco sells them in double-packets, which means I had an extra packet last week that needed using. And while, for my mom's tastes, I paired them with a cream sauce and no real vegetables to speak of, when I was making them myself, things were different.

I'm fucked.

So we're T minus one week until the big move, and Cathy was exploring the new neighborhood, specifically Texatonka, with she-who-comments-as-Floating-Lush.

I love fancy cheese shops. There. I said it.

Of all the fancy food shops in the universe, fancy cheese shops are the best. And by "fancy cheese shop", I do not mean the cheese section of Whole Foods, or the islands of Nice Cheese at the supermarket. I mean a proper cheese shop where you ask for a certain amount of fancy cheese, and then they cut the cheese for you.

Anytime you can get someone else to cut the cheese for you, that's fucking LUXURY.

So, it's official. I won't be with Rock Spring Farms for my third year of CSA vegetables. Nothing against them, honestly - they were great, and I will miss things like, oh, their taking Paypal. 

But they raised their prices to $560 for 16 weeks, which seemed a bit on the high side. Also, when I first went CSA-shopping, I ignored all the ones with Linden Hills dropoffs because I didn't realize I lived near Linden Hills. So I had more options than I thought I did, and spent a couple of days doing some comparisons.

Ah, the self-checkout station. I don't know about your city, but in these parts, every new or remodeled supermarket has four of the things. They are a gift... and a curse.

I love Costco, but fuck knows, you can't get everything you need there. Which means I need a regular grocery store to go to. Now, the closest grocery store to me is Whole Foods, but that's as much of a specialty market as Costco is, only more expensive. The second closest is Byerly's, but seriously, fuck Byerly's. I do not trust carpeted supermarkets. When I started You Are Dumb in 2004, one of the things that inspired me was how much I hated shopping at the nearby Byerly's.

It's almost a given that I shop at Costco, really. It's precisely the kind of store that fits in with my somewhat laissez-faire attitude toward food politics. On the one hand, Costco is not an ideal food supplier for people who need or want to meticulously source their products. On theother hand, at least it's not Sam's Club. Sam's Club is a gray pit of despair.

The downtown, Minneapolis Target now stocks four varieties of Combos.

This is serious, people. This may be the single greatest danger to my ongoing health since the three months the (now closed) convenience store near my office started selling Zingers. Dolly Madison Zingers. God, that was like a snack food version of Field of Dreams, but the body's decreasing tolerance for creme filling as it ages* made for an interesting time.

Yes, I belong to a CSA.