Grocery Shopping

We grocery shop for most things at Countdown which is about 4 or 5 blocks away. It is your basic grocery store – a Shaws equivalent with not quite as much choice. The one very nice thing is that Countdown carries wine and beer and the wine is very inexpensive. We are going through about a bottle a day. There is also a vegetable stand and butcher also within walking distance. Yesterday my eyes were bigger than my daypack while shopping and I ended up with two bags to carry in addition to the full daypack. I think I will drive to the store from now on. Today Doug came home for lunch and we decided to take a Shoo Fly pie over to Susan and Colin’s for dinner tonight. That meant another trip to the store. It has been raining steadily for days so this time I drove. Yes, I finally broke down and got behind the wheel. With Doug’s subtle reminders everything went well. I just had trouble getting out of the parking spot in the parking garage. Looking over your left shoulder while backing up is just not comfortable. Our long narrow driveway with posts at the entrance is also a challenge. Doug found a recipe for Shoo Fly pie on line that sounded similar to the one I usually use. Pie making was fun. The Crisco substitute is Shreddo, a dry “quality shortening” made of suet. I needed to use a lot more water than usual. We’ll see how the crust turns out. Pie pans do not exist so I used a cake pan and a casserole dish. Another grocery difference was trying to find dry lentils to make soup off the lamb bone from last week. I ended up with canned lentils. Dry beans are not available. Kiwi fruit are great especially the golden variety.

The crust was OK. A little hard due to too much working the dough to get the dry shortening worked in. I need to do a little bit of experimenting with my crust recipe to adjust for the difference in ingredients. Maybe getting the suet wet – to the consistency of Crisco will work. Doug wants meat pies so I need to get it worked out.