Day 10--A "slip", a grocery trip, and dinner out.

Happy Tuesday!  My cold is really almost gone, and I had my first good night's sleep in awhile last night (although the crick in my neck that was almost gone came back. boo.)  The past few days have gone pretty well as I muddled through the end of the sickies.  Sunday (and Monday too because of leftovers), I had my first slip up.  We were low on groceries, so I thought for dinner I'd make two pasta dishes...a chicken alfredo for Dax and the kids, and a veggie stir-fry for me.  I figured, they should have the big box of pasta and I'd just take the little bag of egg noodles.  It didn't occur to me until halfway through cooking that egg noodles weren't exactly on the approved vegan list, but this is one of those times I can say I really didn't care!  If I had thought of it sooner, I wouldn't have had them, but since they were cooked, and it was my dinner, then I wasn't going to just let it sit there.  And I certainly wasn't going to throw out the leftovers and not have them the next day!  So there we have it...sin confessed, moving on.

Yesterday, I made a trip to my favorite grocery store here, the Tropical Supermarket.  We live in a highly Latin-American neighborhood (is that what you say?  Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc.)  and this market caters to that clientele which means there's always a lot of neat finds!  It's a little hit and miss though, and yesterday was a bit of a miss.  It's also an IGA store, which I'm happy to support. I think they get new stock on Thursdays so they were pretty picked over yesterday.  I did take a few pictures with my phone though, just to share a bit of the experience.  One of the things I like best about the place is their produce.  Their produce isn't always good  (it's probably just more "normal" than typical grocery store produce), but you can find amazing deals!  The best I've found was giant sweet potatoes for 7cents a pound!  That's right...7.  A week later, I was a little disappointed that they'd gone up to 27cents (which is still quite a bargain), that is, until I went to Whole Foods and saw that their yams (non-organic, mind you), were $1.99/lb!  Yikes.  I also managed to snag bags of fajita tortillas (20 per bag!) for 59 cents a bag last week.  I bought ten.  There weren't any amazing deals this time.  I actually left a little disappointed because they didn't have a lot of things on my list (bok choy, beansprouts, lo mein noodles...not specialty items for sure, but certainly not the bread and butter of Tropical, but the atmosphere of the place never disappoints.  They play awesome Latin music, barely anyone speaks English, and they have a "Cash-for Gold" counter by the customer service desk (more on the weird Cash-for Gold places they have everywhere some other time.)  And as always, they have a lot of things that are totally unrecognizable to me, and make me want to go all Iron Chef and see what I can make.

Like this?  What's this?  What do you do with it?

Or these?  What are these?  It has the word "coco" in it which sounds like chocolate, but I bet it's not. 

Plus they have all of these different flours to make all kinds of neat things, but I don't even know where to start.  (I have to admit that I noticed that in this pic is mostly varieties of corn meal.  I do know what cornmeal is.  lol.) It's certainly fun though, and since I hate hate going to the grocery store, going here at least makes it a little more fun.

Cori does too.  :)

Finally, last night Dax and I were going to go see local variety show and wanted to have dinner first.  My first mistake was not doing any research into the restaurants nearby to make sure they had something for me to eat.  My second mistake was thinking that a place I did know had some options for me.  We should have chosen pretty much any of the asian restaurants in the area, but at the time, I was thinking a veggie burger would be good, and I was pretty sure Smoky Bones had one (yep, a vegan at a BBQ joint.  I planned that well, didn't I?).  I was mistaken about that and ended up having a lovely dinner out consisting of...a side of fries.  At least I'm a cheap date!  :)