Day 99 - Saturday 4th April 2009

Woke up bright and early this morning, with a huge desire to be practical and do stuff. Over the past two years the pantry has become a disorganized mess of cans, sauces, pasta & all general foodstuffs… Today was the day to empty it, clean it and restock it in an organized manner.

It now looks wonderful, is totally organized, isn’t rammed full (but has more stuff in it than before…)

As we were going through it we made shopping lists and went out shopping. The precise lists meant we had a super efficient shopping trip in the afternoon

Drove to IKEA to exchange a broken light plug from a few weeks ago, just walked in, got it done and walked out; all in less than 10 minutes.

We then went to the Big Wall Mall which is around the corner from IKEA (and is effectively a huge Asian supermarket). We often spend a long time wandering round trying and buying new stuff, but not today. Efficiently walked in stocked up on coconut milk, sushi vinegar, sushi nori and cans of weird tofu based fake meat (all off our shopping list) and were out of there in again roughly 10-15 minutes.

Headed back towards Ballard, knowing that we had the horror of Costco at a weekend to encounter before we got home. (Costco is kind of like a Cash and Carry bulk items type store when canned food comes in slabs of 10, everything in Costco is sized large. It is open to the public, and usually best avoided at busy times). With our shopping list in hand we grabbed a trolley and went directly to each item on the list grabbed it and moved on. We lucked out on a reasonably short line, and while this in and out wasn’t quite 10 minutes it was significantly shorter than any previous visit.

Then to Fred Myer for Baked Beans, it’s unbelievable to a Brit that the vast majority of baked beans in the States contain either bacon or some other meat product. So even though they did have a nice cheap 12 pack of beans at Costco they happily declared that they had the extra flavour that only bacon fat can deliver. L In the UK I would assume that Beans are vegetarian, where as over here, we have to make sure that we pick up the special ones which are marked ‘vegetarian’ as their flavour…

Our final stop on this shopping spree was the Liquor store to replenish our Vodka and Rum stock… (In Washington State the only place where you can buy spirits, or ‘Hard Liquor’ as they call it, is from state owned and operated Liquor stores. Supermarkets carry beer and wine…)

I got carded (which is pretty standard, as I was buying), but the clerk also wanted to see Sunny’s ID as we were obviously together, so she had to come over to the checkout to show it… We must have been looking so youthful.