Fairway to Heaven

We went to a ridiculous/wonderful market in Red Hook today. Eric has been there a couple times before, but this was my first excursion to grocery shopping heaven. It's called Fairway and it looks like this:


Now, just imagine all the good foodstuffs (or prisoners) inside a building with that kind of façade. Foodstuffs like this...

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(I said use your imagination lazy bones)

We decided the best thing to ready us for shopping was eating. So we went to the hot food bar. If you go, skip the buffalo tofu, grilled eggplant and wild rice salad. Go for the spinach cassarole.

That's what gets you with those hot food bars; it's hard to choose between things that just look good and things that are actually delicious. It's like your eyes are playing tricks on you, yet for once it isn't the work of adverstisers and food art people that make Taco Bell look good on TV.

Those people that dress up the food for ads are probably really weird. When they were kids, did they play with anemic reheated hamburgers instead of dolls? Time to put on the lettuce skirt! That will look so cute with the cheese top. Ok, maybe not.

It could have been the disappointing eggplant, but the store seemed even bigger once we had to wind our way back to the front to get a cart and actually go down the aisles. Don't get me wrong, seeing the organic section, cheese shop and produce was thrilling, but I got overwhelmed quickly. It reminded me of coming back from my summer trip around Europe, where the grocery stores were almost all bodega-sized, and going to Sam's Club with my dad. Overload.

Eric was patient with me, as he usually is. Even when I made him push the cart (while I lost it for 20 seconds in the dairy aisle). And we ended up with twice as many groceries for the same price as what we pay at the natural food store in our neighborhood.

Not that you care whether we save money on groceries. Or maybe you do (hi grandma! thanks for all those coupons!). Except that maybe with the money we saved we could do something fun and then blog about that instead of grocery shopping. But we probably won't.