Food, glorious food

Today, Molly and I went grocery shopping and we hope it is our last big grocery trip for this year. It's such a hassle to walk all the way across town for the cheapest store and then haul everything back to our apartment. We'll still have to make a few more small trips before we leave, but we only have 2 more weeks in Ireland before we go to Spain and Portugal for a week, so we won't need many groceries for then. We'll be back for a week, then away in Italy for the better part of a week, and then we leave, so we really don't need to have a ton of food in the apartment.

I've noticed some peculiarities in the food here, so I've decided to post them here, as a matter of interest.


I bought pomegranates today as a Wintery treat, but I hope they taste better than they look. Pomegranates in Ireland are tiny and yellowish. I almost didn't even see them in the store because I was looking for the big red things. You can see in the photo, a pomegranate is about the size of an onion, and the same color too. I plan on trying one tonight, hopefully it won't disappoint.


After weeks of noticing this on the supermarket shelves, we decided to try it. "White lemonade" tastes pretty much like diet lemon-lime soda. If it was a little more sour and less sweet, it would be pretty good, or at least worth seeking out, but as it is I don't think I'll be drinking a lot of it.


I treated myself to Tropicana orange juice a few weeks ago (it's extremely expensive...probably a one-time thing). OJ with pulp here is called "with juicy bits." I've also seen it "with bits." Varieties without bits are called "smooth." Interesting. We had a debate at dinner as to whether "juicy bits" or "pulp" sounds more disgusting. What do you think, America?


This one is so Irish. Molly and I bought a very big bag of potatoes last week (and we seem to be making good use of them) and on the back there is a list of twelve different ways to prepare the potatoes. Categories are mashed, roast, and chip. Mostly we just fry them up with onions like home fries, but I'm not opposed to trying one of the Irish recipes.


Finally, with all the food we buy, it would be helpful if we had a big freezer. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Our freezer is teeny weeny. Our friends upstairs have a major freezer complete with pull-out drawers. They also have TWO panini makers, a coffee maker, and a large screen TV. I think that the people without all these luxuries should at least get a freezer that's bigger than a microwave, but I guess this is not the case in Niland House.

(And, yes, you do see two gallons of ice cream. No comment.)