A Trend in Sweet Corn?

I've been grocery shopping for frighteningly close to half a century, but only recently have I noticed Sweet Corn Shucking at my local stores.

In the olden days, (say three years ago) you might lift an eyebrow to see even modest peeking at sweet corn in the produce aisle. Only those who were really concerned shoppers might peel back an inch or two of green to check if the corn was fully developed. It was a reluctant defense mechanism due to farmers rushing their products to market before the proper harvest time.

Now however, people wantonly strip their corn right there in the store! Off come all the green leaves and even the silk before the naked ears get bagged it in plastic.

I noticed this disconcerting habit first at Michael's Market where they have an extensive array of vegetables I don't know how to cook, let alone pronounce. Michael's attracts customers with a wide range of ethnicities, many of whom look to be newish to this country. With maybe one driver in the group, whole families of multiple generations come on shopping trips, much like I remember from my own childhood when we had just one car and only my dad had a license.

I shop with efficiency. Certain stores for certain items. Coupons organized by my route through the store. In, out and back home again as quickly as possible. So it really threw a wrench in the works one day when "sweet corn" was on my list and the bin was so mobbed I couldn't even reach an arm in. And I have long arms.

The bin of corn was surrounded by women ruthlessly ripping husks from the corn. Each woman was accompanied by her man who was equipped with a plastic bag to receive the pathetically pale yellow ears, as well as her cart-full of squirming children, and often a grandparent. Green leaves overflowed from a huge garbage can onto the floor and corn silk was flying through the air.

I was a little taken aback, but chalked it up to learning something about different cultures, which is why I go to Michael's Market in the first place. Just a short time later, however, I ran into, quite literally, a big garbage can of corn husks in the Jewel produce aisle.

As always, Jewel's produce section was quiet and sedate. No one was frenziedly denuding the corn, but there it was: a newly-added garbage can filled with green leaves.

Since corn is purchased by the ear, not by weight or volume, I can't understand the need to shuck it before purchasing. Does this only happen in my grocery stores? I'd love to know what this trend's all about.

Not enough of Too Much Information

We were invited to a barbecue. My contribution was to be a pasta salad, and since I was sick of my usual pasta salads, I selected a recipe I hadn't used before. This wasn't your boiled rotini with bottled Italian dressing sort of pasta salad. This one called for tortellini, dijon mustard, sun-dried tomatoes and prosciutto, among other things. Still, I headed to my local Aldi's because they carry prosciutto both chopped and sliced, and I had other groceries to buy.

While I was pulling yogurt and butter from the dairy case, the woman next to me was yakking on her cell phone. Like most folks, I usually tune out those sort of people, trying to preserve the privacy of both of us. But something she said just jumped out at me.

"Well, I told her she shouldn't go live with Papa after she got out of the penitentiary! Now look, she's right back in jail!"

I couldn't help listening after that, but I didn't hear anything else of interest. It made me feel sort of cheated. I mean, if you're going to broadcast that sort of personal information in the grocery store, don't you have an obligation to finish the story? Who's in the penitentiary? Her sister? Her mother? Her daughter? What did she do that put her there? And why was it a bad idea to go live with Papa? "Papa" is such a warm, cuddly name and yet apparently there's something sinister about him.

While I was pondering all this, I heard a noise behind me. Actually, it was less a noise and more of a vibration, barely audible to the human ear, but probably picked up by seismographs.

The deep, low, nearly out of range noise said "We need a loaf of bread." Okay, that's a pretty boring thing to say, but wow! the way he said it. I turned around to see just a dad shopping with his two little girls. A very tall, very black dad with a beyond-Barry-White voice.

The girls didn't seem impressed. I guess they're used to it.

My Best Grocery Deal

Everyone loves a bargain. One of my favorite "Cathy" comics has the girls exchanging gifts and bragging how little they actually spent on each other because of sales, discounts, credit card points, etc. I shop just like that, but I refrain from telling the bride "Your gift was worth $110 originally, and I got it for $27.50!"

My best bargain was at my local Dominick's grocery store. By best I mean percentage, not actual cash saved. I get a bigger thrill from getting 90% off a dollar item than saving 1.1% on a $25,000 new car.

My Dominick's is one of the few stores around her that put clearance stickers on food. Some are great bargains, like rib eye steaks that are facing their "sell by date. I bring them home and stick them in the freezer immediately. Others I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, like catfish. You can smell their "sell by" date just walking by the cooler.

Even though I avoid questionable fish, I stopped to look one day and saw a bunch of containers of seafood salad. I don't usually buy that sort of thing since making it is usually half the cost, but these were on sale. Eight ounces, regularly $3.68, now on sale for $1.98.

Seemed reasonable, so I took a closer look. Two rows of the little plastic containers were bumping up against their "sell by" date. Needing to be cleared out, a Dominick's clerk had slapped the familiar blue stickers on saying "$2.00 off."

Hmm, that means they'd be paying me two cents to try their seafood salad, doesn't it? I wondered if it would be really awful, but I gambled on a couple. They were pre-packed at some factory and sealed for my safety, as they say. How bad could they be?

I took them home and tried some. It was really quite good! So I went back. There were still plenty of little plastic containers, and I did some quick calculating on how much of this stuff we could eat before we got sick of it. Or before it went bad and we got really sick of it.

I didn't buy them all, but I did buy quite a few more. They were delicious. No one got sick. I spent nothing, and Dominick's paid me two cents for every purchase. And the containers were perfect to store and stack craft items in my basement.

That's what I would call a good bargain.