El Supermercado

#217

Or ‘le supermarché’, if you will.

We have a WFM aka Whole Foods Market, which is two blocks away, and is 30000 sq. ft. huge! We’ve only been there a couple of times now and have to combat decision fatigue every time we visit the store, though it’s getting into a more auto-pilot mode if it’s a repeat ingredient. From the super long aisles to the varied assortment of each type of item to the categories of different items (fresh produce vs processed vs frozen veg) to the self-checkout mechanism - this place warranted at least an hour’s worth of time even if our list only had a handful of items in it. 

The various departments in this massive store included - grocery and produce (fresh fruits and veggies), processed aisles for pureed tomato, soups, and sauces, frozen food (cooked stuff like frozen pizzas, frozen Mac ’n’ cheese, frozen burritos), frozen vegetables (in chopped format), several compartments in the refrigerator for different kinds of cheese, bakery and dairy items (separate compartment for vegan dairy products), cold (fizzy) drinks, and more. There were also body care items, beer and wine aisles, cereal aisle, meat and seafood, vitamin supplements and protein powders, and more!

A lot of the time went in figuring out which of the obscure-sounding regular items were the closest to Indian vegetables. For instance, there were red, white, and yellow onions - all bigger than the ones we get at home (see image for size comparison) - the red ones are the ones that resemble the purple-ish onions we get in India, while yellow onions are a tad sweeter, and white is mainly used for soup (like French onion soup). Similarly with tomatoes, you had tomatoes on the vine (more expensive, but also contained higher water content so probably had to be juiced and used), organic tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes (one of the largest varieties), cherry tomatoes, slicer tomatoes, and the Roma tomatoes, which is what we identified as the best alternative for our Desi naatu thakkali (tomatoes that are just the right amount of sweet and sour, whether they feature on a sandwich or in a gravy veg or in rasam/sambar). Lemons were as big as oranges, and of course, the corresponding lemon squeezer were bigger too. The Indian lemons are known as limes here, are greener, sourer, and more expensive.

Buying frozen, pre-washed and pre-chopped veggies in order to save time while cooking during weekdays was a good piece of advice we got. It indeed was helpful as I was able to make sambar rice and other similar one-pot dishes with veggies and rice in under 15-20 minutes. The only caveat is remembering to keep the frozen veggies out to defrost for at least 10-12 minutes. 

After 2-3 trips to WFM, we behaved like slightly seasoned shoppers, managing to pick the right kinds of fruits, veggies and dairy from the lot. Yogurt with 1% milk fat in a green container, as opposed to the orange, seemed like the closest to Indian curd, did not try making curd from milk yet due to the subzero average daily temperatures. With the colors, we could also relate to the green vs orange packets we use to get from the milkman, green meaning lower fat or cream content than the orange (blue -> green -> orange -> brown, order of lowest to highest cream percentage).

Another thing we had to newly learn apart from the above was the art of scanning to bill each item, paying for it, and efficiently packing it in bags (each bag costs 8 cents, so we started carrying our own reusable bags). In the self-checkout kiosk, scanning the barcode for labelled items got easier but for fruits and veggies, we had to weigh them on a scale after selecting the right item. It was slightly trickier initially because we kept going back to the aisle to figure out whether the avocados we added to our cart were medium hass, large hass, or organic medium or large hass avocados - each priced differently! Self help is usually the best help, but sometimes we had to ask for assistance, especially when we were blocking the line behind us trying to fumble with things for the first time.

All in all, it felt like a good experience actually going in-person to the supermarket and handpicking each item after 2+ years of ordering everything online via Swiggy’s Instamart. The bonus was an additional ~2-3k steps per visit!