Smith's report

We went to Smith's today to buy some cottage cheese and bone-in chicken breasts.  As usual we found a couple of other deals.  They are minor deals but deals nonetheless.  All the Kroger mustard is on sale for a buck a bottle.  That's a good price, especially for the Kroger Dijon.  Despite the marketing hype, 99% of taste testers can't tell the difference between the pricey Dijon and the store brand dijon.  That's because a mustard is a mustard.  There's so little wiggle room in a mustard recipe that pretty much all mustard made with the same basic recipe are going to taste just like all the other mustard no matter what type of mustard it may be.  Spending extra money on a mustard is equivalent to throwing the money up into a stiff wind and watching it sail over toward Wyoming.

I don't typically buy jarred pickle products.  However, as a summer holiday approaches, I have a primal urge for a piece of pickle.  The dill spear variety of Mt. Olive pickles is on sale for $1.67 for the medium large jar.  Today I noticed a flavor I've never seen before: "Mexicana."  Now that's a new one on me.  So, I bought the variety and immediately took it home for a sample.  WOW, we're talking HOT here, folks.  Way too hot for average people.  Most people would spit that pickle out in a heartbeat.  Well, we like hot stuff and it's hot enough for us.  One spear chopped up goes perfect with a scoop of cottage cheese and I can hardly wait to put some in a potato salad.  This is a whole new pickle experience for me.  The cost of each spear works out to be about 10 cents, by the way.

OK, we took a look at the sweet corn and bought 3 test ears for a dollar.  it's bi-color and the kernals look good and the tip fill is excellent.  We asked the produce manager where it came from and he invited us into the walk-in cooler for a look-see.    He even gave us the tag off the plastic 48-ear shipping trays.  This batch of corn is called "LoJo." and comes from a grower, packer and shipped in Holtville, California--E. Schaffner.
Holtville is a few miles east of El Centro and barely north of the Mexican border.  If you look at the temperature map below, your can estimate Holtville's location by looking just to the upper left of the "98" degree number.  Corn LOVES that hot weather and it's been nice and toasty down that far south. We will provide a taste report on this sweet corn SOON!