It's garden fresh squash prepared in a pasta shell served on the first day of December. It worked. The wine complemented the squash taste and made a feast for two. Loved it. This is how it looked through the lens of my camera on my iPhone 3.
This great dish with a good wine, perfect for a Saturday night.
Getting ready to eat it on a lapdesk we bought at Ikea in Budapest.
We know where our turkey is right now at 1:16 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. It's in the oven. Covered by a special bag, it will stay in the oven for a couple more hours. This is how it looked going in.
This is our turkey right after we put it in the oven.
I continue to document my day with my iPhone 3 and its pretty handy camera. Today super-wife and I went to Meijer on Lake Lansing Road in East Lansing for last minute items for Thanksgiving dinner. At the store, we ran into sweet potatoes for 19 cents a pound. We found these are great for the main item for lunch or summer after being baked in a microwave. Check the boxes of sweet potatoes (below) where a whole box could be bought for a few bucks.
These sweet potatoes at Meijers are from Mississippi
Super-wife and I ate this past week at the new Penn Station East Coast Subs in Lansing.
We had a half hour before Central Methodist Church in Lansing started accepting shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child, so we went out to lunch. Driving down Saginaw Street, we turned into the new Penn Station East Coast Subs. We tried a toasted veggie sandwich that hit our taste bud's desire for something new. The banana peppers had a high testosterone bite that wasn't harsh but memorable. I can't describe this fast food experience as life-changing, but it was decent.
Trying out Penn Station East Coast Subs in Lansing.
What wine should you drink with pistachios and sliced bananas? Picture taken with my unlocked iPhone 3 which I purchased from Amazon.
Over the past seven years, I have had lunch with my friend Ken Alexander just about every Monday or Tuesday. The menu is usually pretty standard with a can of Progresso soup, some oyster crackers and maybe a cookie or two or three. A couple of weeks ago, he shook up my palate with two delightfully competing tastes and textures, pistachios and sliced bananas. The combo made my taste buds stand up and take notice and smile. I'd recommend it.
I gave the camera on my iPhone 3G a test drive when we went grocery shopping this morning at Meijers on West Saginaw in Lansing, Michigan. It's easy to use and it's easy to upload the photos. In the pictures, there's one item of note. It's the availability of Great Lakes Red from Lelanau Cellars. You don't have to overthink or work hard with this wine. You can just drink it. It goes down nice. It's in the stores this week.
It got mighty hot yesterday in mid-Michigan. But what about other parts of the state?
Check this mLive story about a Cornerstone University employee who baked a pizza on his dashboard as an experiment to see if it could be done. The result: It was very edible after being in a 197 degree closed up car.
The Michigan Legislature torched the state's item pricing law about a year ago. This required retailers to put a price sticker on most everything on their shelves.
With most stores using price scanners, you have a way to check to see if you were being overcharged. State lawmakers said they removed this requirement because it was too expensive for businesses.
A lawmaker from the Detroit-area, Rep. Douglas Geiss, D-Taylor, illustrated the challenge in protecting yourself from being charged too much when he bought a package of nuts. The price should have been three-plus dollars and he was charged ten-plus.
He took the store where he purchased the nuts-Wal-Mart-to court and won. He won $250 plus legal costs.
How about you? Do you check your register tapes? What do you do to protect yourself from being overcharged?
What have you heard about this restaurant? Have you eaten there? How well does it's Michigan-centric menu work? It has only Michigan craft-brewed beers. Check the video portion of the review:
When was the last time you bought baloney or bologna in the store? Did you find it to be cheap?
The Lansing State Journal this morning has a page one online story about the rise in popularity of this pseudo meat as a cheaper choice during this down economy.
With a city and a state that is struggling to keep its head above water, is this a real news story?
And is baloney a cheaper choice in the supermarket?
Michigan farmers are dangerously behind in planting their crops this years, according to this article in the Detroit News. Many may reach the point of no-return in waiting for their fields to dry and just take a pass on this year.
What does this mean for consumers? Higher prices in spades. Corn will continue to skyrocket as will other crops.
An answer: Put farmers and their fields on your daily prayer lists. They and we need it.
My son Justin lives in Washington D.C. where coffee-drinking has reached new levels with close attention paid to nuances of beans, where they come from and how they are roasted, as well as, how the coffee is made. In his blog post this morning,he writes about it and asks for opinions.
Here is Michigan, it seems like coffee-drinking is still pretty pedestrian with high-flying among coffee-drinkers here being flavored coffees and drinks. What do you think? Read Justin's post and leave a comment too.
Our son Justin and his fiance Lauren hit a homerun this past Sunday when they took my wife and I out for brunch at Zest Exciting Food Creations at 1134 East 54th St. in Indianapolis. We had just gotten out of church and the two of them found it by using Yelp and looking at reviews of nearby restaurants.
I wasn't sure what to expect when we found on the restaurant's window that the Food Network's Guy Fieri had just been there a few day's before to film an episode of his show, Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives. His visit airs in May, according to our waitress and we will be watching.
The only thing that qualifies me as a foodie is that I like to eat. I'm not one for tasting something and then being able to separate layers of different tastes. I know what I like and I really liked their crem brulee french toast. It was served with a side of cherrywood smoked bacon.
The taste quickly moved the meter for me to the wow side. I'd love to try it again to spend more time with the tastes. But that would preclude trying other items on the menu that grabs your attention like: a meatloaf sandwich with white cheddar&sun-dried tomato marmelade on sourdough, eggplant wellington, a 3-napkin burger and carrot cake. I'm sure all of these have a special twist.
Perhaps what drew Fieri to the restaurant is that after eating my french toast I could feel my arteries closing. But I sure had a smile on my face. Let it be noted that they had plenty of healthy type items on the menu like a veggie burger and grammy's porridge.
Thank-you Justin and Lauren for this special treat.
My wife and I just got home from grocery shopping at Meijers on West Saginaw in Lansing, something we do every week and usually enjoy doing together, but the question in the title for this post keeps being raised. Why?
It's the periodic difference between the price on a product and the price that's scanned at the checkout. Now if it was an infrequent experience, it would be easy to excuse. But we are finding that it's becoming more and more common and it is becoming costly.
Now this issue has taken on new relevance with Michigan's new Gov. Rick Snyder demanding that the Michigan Legislature repeal the item pricing law that protects consumers when there are item pricing mistakes like this. The Republicans who have a majority in both houses are poised to put this legislation on the fast track with the results that consumers would have no recourse.
What about our negative experiences with item pricing at our Meijers store?
OUR EXPERIENCE TODAY
Let me just recount what happened today. While going through the canned fruit aisle, I discovered that there were cut-out boxes of fruit with no prices marked on the cans, but there were cards on the edge of the shelves with the prices. There were other cases with the individual prices.
While putting our food in the shopping cart, I saw the store director, Mike Borek and introduced myself and share my observations. He listened and seemed concerned and then talked about the in-store audits done to assure that each item has the correct price. I believe, he mentioned, that they were in the 99 percent range.
We had a useful conversation where he shared the challenges of keeping up with price changes and their attentiveness to the state item-pricing law.
MY GREAT LAKES RED EXAMPLE
The Meijers store director and I then shook hands after I thanked him for the time and we went to the wine aisle. We were looking to buy a case of Great Lakes Red from Lelanau Wine Cellars up in the Traverse City area for our son's wedding out east. I'm the best man and I was going to use it for the toast. He and I both thought it was a great way to reconnect with his Michigan roots and it's a good wine.
Here's what we found. My wife looked at the shelf which said it was $6.49 a bottle, but, the sticker on the bottle said, $7.99. I found the store director again and asked him to see what I was concerned about. He did. The difference was roughly a $1.50 per bottle. Do the math for a case.
I can provide other examples from our experience.
CHECK YOUR GROCERY RECEIPT
Is it time for grocery shoppers at Meijers to start matching-up their grocery receipts with what's on the item if it's marked as the state law requires? There are waiviers for some items but not many.
How widespread is this problem? Am I the only one to have this experience? Do you match your grocery receipt with the prices on the item?
How much money does Meijer earn from these errors between what an items is stickered at what it scans at? A little? A lot?
We are experimenting for a month with Amazon's Prime shipping program where you pay seventy-some bucks for free shipping to have something shipped in two-days. And do you know that Amazon has a whole lot more than books, lots of grocery items and other household stuff.
We bought a six-pack of GoLean cereal for a price that's a bunch cheaper than our local Meijers supermarket. We are looking for other items that we buy on a regular basis.
Does it pay to go this way? Can you achiieve enough savings during the course of a year to make back the fee and save more? Or is it just a convenience factor? Is this an answer for baby-boomers and other senior citizens who are looking for an alternative to the supermarket?
We get one month free before having to make a decision to keep it or not. Do you have experience with Prime Shipping? Was it worth it?
Our house is getting ready for our Thanksgiving celebration as we anticipate the arrival in a few hours of our daughter and husband, along with our grandson. A big turkey's in the oven, cranberries are cooking, the pumpkin pies are out of the oven and we just put a bottle of Great Lakes Red in the fridge.
Here's a quick look with a few pics. Note the book, a Christmas present for our grandson. It's about a grandpa who challenges his grandson to answer a question, Where's God?
I remember how I felt when I worked out in the sun in the country of Mali in West Africa when the temperature hit the 115 degree mark like it is in Phoenix, Arizona right now. It may have been dry heat, but I constantly felt like the radiator in my body was going to boil over.
That's why my attention was grabbed by this video from the Phoenix Rescue Mission about the homeless in that city during this really hot part of the summer.
They need help buying food and bottled water for their mission. They are running short during this period when the temps get in the solid triple digits.
Even though I live in a different part of the country, I think I might contribute enough to buy a few cases of water. Here's the video:
The lick marks on my computer screen are the fault of the Sugar Shack Bakery in Lansing (MI) which specializes in gourmet cupcakes. It's pictures of its daily cupcake line-up are of a quality to become pinups in offices around mid-Michigan.
That's why super-wife and I went there today to buy a cupcake to celebrate our son Justin's birthday today. He lives in D.C., but we wanted to eat something to remind us of how sweet of a kids he is. Check this video from Derek, the "Sugar Shack Man" and how he describes our purchase:
This morning super-wife and I had breakfast at Bob Evans restaurant on the southside of Lansing to celebrate what she was doing 26 years ago, giving birth to our son, Justin. We noticed their sign advertising sweet potato french fries. Notice that they spelled it: "potatoe." Is that correct? Just curious.
The three of us-Justin, Gladys and me-ventured into the Washington D.C. Memorial Day heat to take a Metro Bus Circulator to go to the Harris Teeter supermarket to get the ingredients for "beef bourguignon".
The sun was bruising and the humidity was almost memorable as we passed the Navy Yards, Marine Corps barracks, around the corner for Eastern Market and down Pennsylvania Avenue and then a four block walk to the store.
Super-son and super-wife will start the food prep for the small party a little later today.
