What Makes a Good Shopping Trip for You??

I was just reading one of tammystips posts about the price of canned goods, and that reminded me that I'd had a wonderful "shopping week."

For one thing, I found canned vegetables.  For only $1.60 per can.  Is that a good price?  For me it is!  Frozen vegetable choices here are:  corn, mixed vegetables, peas, and asparagus.  That's it.  Oh, and on a good week, spinach.  This week wasn't THAT good.

There are, of course, an AMAZING variety of fruits and vegetables here.  The only problem is, I have no idea what most of them are.  "Do you peel it?  Is it poisonous if you don't cook it?  What is that interesting smell?" are some questions I routinely ask myself in the vegetable section.  I buy a lot of apples.  I also almost always buy something I have no idea what it is. Sometimes these forays into the unknown are a success.  Sometimes they are not.  The cocoa pod was a success:  we roasted the seeds.  I LOVED it.  I don't know what that thing was that no one liked, but we threw it away.

Anyway, this week I found canned green beans, beets AND spinach.  Woo hoo!

But wait, there's more!  The store also carried:  creamy peanut butter AND American hot dogs AND cheddar cheese!!

Double woo hoo, since for the past couple of weeks those things have been nowhere in sight and they form the bulk of the protein selections my Pickies will eat.

And here's the best news of all:  my husband discovered a source of CHEETOS.  CHEETOS!!!!  I haven't had regular access to Cheetos since we lived in Israel.  And those were kosher, and you just really haven't lived until you've tasted kosher Cheetos.  And then you want to die.

Not only that, these Cheetos only cost $1.00 per bag!  Which we just can't figure out because Doritos cost $4-$5 per bag here.  Weird.

But in any event, you can see from this list of Very American food that we are living high on the hog.  Costa Rica has an amazing selection of American goodies, and, frankly, after 15 years without regular access to cheddar cheese and soda crackers, I *love* it!  Of course, there are all those new and interesting things to sample as well, and we do, but sometimes without much success.  It's so great to have something familiar to fall back on!

And besides, the "familiar" is stuff my kids will eat, meaning:  Less Screaming!!

Woo hoo!!