Trader Joes

Today Matt and I went to 'Trader Joes' a new 'specialty food grocers'. It's a chain that just opened it's first store in Omaha on Saturday.

The place was PACKED. Matt started to get grumpy about the number of people there until I reminded him that it was just like an Irish supermarket ;)

The store was nice and clean, but I wouldn't really call it a place that sells specialty foods. It was more that it sells off brands of regular food, has a higher amount of organic stuff and very little selection but a larger selection of imports than other stores.. Whole Foods Supermarket is much more what I would term a specialty food store.

Nevertheless, we bought 2 pizzas and a wild mushroom and black truffle flatbread. There are lot of little things I'd like to try from their, but most are foods that I'd serve when I have guests coming over. Then I just want to bung some stuff in the oven, toss it onto a serving tray and get loads of compliments for how nice it looks and how great it tastes ;)

I got very excited when I saw they had a large wall of cheeses, but was disappointed to see that about half of them were just different types of cheddar. Not a wedge of Wensleydale in sight!

Tonight for dinner I made some salad to serve with a couple of slices of one of the pizzas we bought.



The pizza was an organic woodfired sicilian style pizza with red pepper, provalone and peral mozzarella cheese. It also came with a small packet of olive oil with red pepper in it which was applied to the pizza half way through cooking to give it some spice.

The crust was delcious, reminiscent of crusts from France and Italy (the pizza is an import from Italy) but it was a little more crisp that they serve it over there. I think that was my fault.

Now I know you might think "Pizza? I thought she was trying to make her husband LOSE weight!" Well it's all about moderation. If I starve him and feed him nothing but salads he's not going to stick to it and is more likely to binge when he's in Indiana. So we had less than a serving size of the pizza and a huge amount of salad. Peaches were for desert.

So now it's back to 'cooking' for one until Friday, but that gives me time to think about what I can cook when Matt does get home. So I promise to have some great recipes to blog about next weekend!

Until then, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook!