Shopping

When we first moved to this area, a friend said that he was amazed to find, once, that he was able to need something that Hechingers, a regional home-supply chain, couldn't satisfy. They had a rep for having everything; you had to reach to exceed their stock. Wegman's supermarkets are the same way -- so much stuff in one place that you think surely they'll have anything you could reasonably want. Our daughter's French teacher goes home to the south of France about every two years, and always brings back a supply of "can't get this in the States" foodstuffs -- though, she added, since the local Wegman's opened, that doesn't happen so much.

In today's trip, we were just taking advantage of the store's proximity to the Bed Bath and Beyond in the same shopping plaza. We'd bought a ten inch saute pan there about a week ago. It's "Emerilware", which is to say "All-Clad". That's a pretty good name. We chose it because of the four or fine acceptable pans, that was the only one with a comfortable handle. Calpalon's handles were particularly bad, and All-Clad wasn't too great, either. Good pan, bad handle. It's as if they assume that a) the pan will be used by the help, not you, so who cares, or b) you'll always be wearing some kind of mitts. Or, perhaps, simply that your hands are so calloused from years in the kitchen that the different is meaningless to you. Regardless, for us, the difference did matter, and so we got it. We've been happy with it, but we did think It'd be nice if this pan had a lid. So we went back, finding that none of the acceptable fry pans (we call them both 'frying pans', but apparently a frying pan has vertical sides, whereas a 'saute pan' has sloped sides to encourage the evaporation of juices when reducing a mixture. Who knew?) came as single units -- they were all sets. We just weren't willing to do that. I noticed, though, that Calpalon, alone, sold lids by themselves, so I said why don't we just buy a ten inch lid? Which we did. It pretty much fits, and I'm sure it'd fit an, ahem, actual frying pan. You know, with the vertical sides.

The other differencebetween All-Clad and Emerillware, which they don't mention on the outside of the box, is that All-Clad is made in Pennsylvania, whereas Emerillware is made under licence to All-Clad, but in China.

Anyway, when we were done, we went down to Wegmans, bought some fruit and one or two other things (I bought some Joya brand halvah; I used to get it as a kid, and I still like it, though in lesser quantities than I'd eat then), and then looked for sausage. We were hoping to find the kind of local sausage we'd bought in Harrisburg a few months ago, though much, much smaller (each of those patties was about three or four inches across and a three-quarters of an inch deep). We couldn't. We did get some generic spiced sausage, when my wife said These guys are so big, they must have chorizo. So we asked, and they did. Tomorrow, chorizo with peppers and onions!