A Trip to Whole Foods

 

I was thrilled to see this building! It was my first trip to Whole Foods in over a year and it was an artful experience!

 Are you like me at Whole Foods, the whole experience filled with eye candy where you're in an alternative world floating along the aisles, trying to take everything in as if you're in a fine arts museum, the produce department as breathtaking as a Cézanne still life?

No? Then you must go there so often that it's just another food market to you. I go there rarely since we moved from Valley View, which was only twenty minutes away. Even before the world was shut down, it was RH who most of the time went every month to Whole Foods for me, just to pick up these three products:

 A shower gel that is kind to my sensitive skin and two supplements that I take. As these products are sold in a separate building from the food, RH would park, run in and buy these three products and leave. He's not as fond of Whole Foods as I am so when I had my first opportunity a few weeks ago to go there with him, I enjoyed the whole trip immensely.

We drive through one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Nashville to get there and at this time of the year everything was in early Spring bloom.

 

I always forget to take pictures inside the store, too much in my own little world to think of blogging, but it was mostly produce that we bought this time and non-perishables as we were headed on to Kroger's and Costco afterwards.

But I was so taken with the Flamingo pears I picked out, never seeing them in our neighborhood stores, that I tried to be artsy with them.

 

Definitely lacking something and since PicMonkey got too complicated for me to navigate, I have turned to BeFunky for editing and just don't seem to be able to delicately make adjustments. I'm sure it's my whole lack of skills but everything I try seems to be not enough or too much.

 

 

What! I was hoping for something a little less than this but it will have to suffice. 

As will my pear, cheese, and cracker platter. I would spend time online trying to master this skill but feel sure it would be a waste of my time.

But I have four of these pretty little plates with a pear on them and wanted to use them.

And I had two jars of walnuts in honey that I had left to pickle for two months and wanted to try it.
 

Absolutely amazing! I saw this on a Japanese YouTuber's channel and the preparation seemed easy enough for me to handle: simply pack the walnuts in the jar and keep letting honey trickle in until the whole jar fills up. So good with crackers, cheese, and apples or pears. Or on ice cream or buttered muffins. 

We get our honey locally as all honey should be gotten, although I think my two favorite honeys so far have been the sourwood honey we always get in the North Carolina mountains and the Tupelo honey we once got in Apalachicola, Florida.

And who were the men with discriminating palates I served this snack to? 

RH and his brother and our grandson who had been working on outside projects all morning. With their luncheon meat sandwich on a paper plate. They were a sticky mess after eating the honey and walnuts but claimed it was very good, almost finishing the whole platter. They thought the platter of pears, cheese, and crackers was beautiful and said I could practice on them anytime.

Unfashionable Or Not

 I get it, Chex Mix is passé. But if we wave the sophistication of Bon Appetit magazine over it, someone out there must still be making it. When I saw my other favorite food magazine, The Local Palate, had a recipe for it last Christmas I decided to give it another try. 

So I combined the two recipes, leaving out ingredients I didn't care for--wasabi flavor green peas--or couldn't find in my local Publix--Terra Stix--and came up with a Chex mix that disappeared when set out in an old Mary Engelbreit tin for Christmas.

I searched in vain for a picture of it in that pretty tin to use here but did find this one I took as it came out of the oven.

 

And yes, that's Bugles (original flavor) in it, from the Bon Appetit recipe and the otherwise bland snack is a nice addition to the cereals. 

 Here's the link to Bon Appetit's recipe. 

And the link to The Local Palate's recipe.

In combining ingredients for my mix, I used:

Bugels, a mix of the Chex cereals, cashews, peanuts, pumpkin seeds, pretzel sticks, butter, garlic cloves, Dijon, worcestershire sauce, Paul Prudhumme's Blackened Redfish Magic Seasoning, dry mustard, paprika, and Crystal Hot Sauce.

We had never bought Crystal Hot Sauce before but became a quick convert to it over our regular. And definitely using the Bon Appetit direction to gently cook the garlic cloves in butter was a big flavor boost. And we followed their direction to cook at 250 degrees F, instead of 300. 

Since there probably won't be hordes of people in our homes snacking this Christmas, you may not need the recipes this year. And if you do, I imagine it will go in individual serving bags. Actually, that sounds so much nicer to me than hands dipping into a common bowl--even when you put a scoop in it.

With just the two of us here to eat it, I'll be skipping it unless RH begs for it.

But we can always dream of next year, even if Chex Mix is still passé then.