Think On It

Ho-hum… wow!

July 22nd, 2007

I’ve been getting emails from amazon.com about their grocery pages and a sale they’re having. I even looked at that part of Amazon, and I thought, why would one buy crackers and microwave popcorn over the internet? Those things were, as I recall, in every supermarket in America. You can’t buy them here, but the shipping would be a killer and I’d have to want popcorn a whole lot more than I do to pay it. You can buy simple, ordinary popcorn at my supermarket here, anyway.

Then this morning I clicked on the side list out of curiosity and I found this.
Now that is a different kettle of fish! Flours and meals of almost any kind I ever heard of would certainly widen the possibilities. There’s gluten free flour, too, which answers my question about what do those poor people eat? That’s a resource I would like very much to have.

Curiosity then led me here.
where yeasts and leaveners abound. Whoopie! Baking powder in tins– bet you didn’t know we can’t get that here! Yogurt starter, too. That looks like baker’s heaven, you know. All those choices I haven’t seen in years, poor me.

I’m going to have to live without Panko breadcrumbs, because I learned about them too late to ever try them before leaving the US, but here they are. I wonder are they really as different as all the posting cooks say? Will someone here tell me?

So, I wandered over to oils and found this truffle oil, which, although it isn’t the brand I use is exactly the ingredients I told you to look for when I made the pork with sage perfumed rice and truffle oil. That’s a good sized bottle that will last you a long time and the price is less than I pay here, where they make it. I don’t buy those flavored olive oils, but when I find them, I do buy nut oils and other natural oils, and here they are, all on these pages. If I want something even as ordinary as toasted sesame oil, I have to make a day trip to Rome, and that’s something I used to buy in any good grocery store in the US. Walnut oil, almond oil or grapeseed oil are only dreams to me.

There were lots of things to discover. I haven’t seen a dried cherry in seven years until today! At first some of the prices seemed wacky, but then I realized that they were for packs of several of the item — who packs in multiples of seven?

Anyway, by the time I cruised through the offerings, I realized I had ignorantly ignored a resource that I would use if I could. People who live in New York, Washington, London or Paris can find these things, but for the rest of us who live in small and not so sophisticated cities or in the countryside, this resource makes sense.

Have a look, because the sale ends July 31st. I’m sorry I am so late to the game.

You know I’d prefer that you don’t buy all the pre-prepared mixes and certainly not any fake food, but I found quite a list of things I do buy or that I would buy if I could. I also feel freer to publish recipes that use things like chick pea flour or chestnut meal, which I haven’t previously done because I used to have to search out Indian groceries or wholesale suppliers to find them myself. Now you can buy them with a click and a credit card.

Entry Filed under: Food, Italy, kitchen stuff