Supermarket Surprise!

Lately, I've noticed that I eat a lot of the same things, over and over again. It's nice to have favorites, but variety is the spice of life! While I usually take the opportunity to try something new when the chance arises (like when I ate alligator in New Orleans), my kitchen isn't a place where that often happens.

There IS such a thing as too much mac and cheese.

Making the same things is easy (especially when you know the recipe by heart) but it gets boring. No matter how delicious something is, after the fifth or sixth time you no longer look forward to it. In the spirit of livening up my cooking, I've decided to start a new segment called Supermarket Surprise!

I'm fortunate to live near a grocery store that has a great selection of ethnic and Kosher foods, but I hardly ever venture into those aisles. I make a list of what I need and just go to the aisles where list items reside. Very little adventuring involved. But no more! There is a fantastic wealth of food stuffs in those aisles, and I haven't heard of most of them.

So once a month, I will be preparing a dish made with a "surprise" ingredient. Here's where the surprise comes in. I'll look for something that I haven't heard of before and I'll buy it, whether or not I have any idea of how to use it or prepare it. Then I'll go home, research it a little bit, try a recipe I found using that ingredient, and tell you about it.

Sounds easy enough, right? I already bought my first item. It's something a littler "safer" than I could have otherwise chosen, but I didn't want to throw myself into the deep end of new foods right away. I'm making it in a few days, so look for the follow up with my first Supermarket Surprise!