This post is out of order, it tells the story of shopping I did before the Pork Tenderloin with Burghul meal.
I stopped in at Lincolnwood Produce (Lincoln and Touhy in Lincolnwood) on the way home last week and picked up some stuff for a Veggie Millet pie. The store is a supermarket-sized independent grocery, full of great produce, meat and eastern European, latino, and asian food. The produce is good quality with a huge variety, the deli case is full of great cheeses and greek stuff like octopus salad. There’s 5 or 6 types of feta alone. The meat case has whole legs of lamb for reasonable prices and a growing seafood selection.
But the really great thing about a store like this is the stuff you never see anywhere else – everything from strange foreign candy and soda to bulgarian sheep’s milk cheese. The freezer case is full of whole fish and has things like quail and rabbit. The refrigerated section is chuck full of eastern European smoked meat and cheeses.
I used the basket only method of shopping (wheeling a cart around this store is dangerous on the wallet, and probably on the suspension of my jeep when hauling it all home) I spent just over $37 and here’s a rough list of everything I walked out with:
1 chinese okra
2 chinese eggplants
2 regular eggplants
a wrapped package of fresh okra
a wrapped package of portabello mushrooms
5 vine ripe tomatoes
2 large onions
a package of millet
a package of bulgur wheat
1 1/2 lb. of feta cheese
a 1 lb tin of bulgarian sheep’s milk cheese
Some cool bread that I’ll have to look up when I get home
1 lb of Kolozsvari Hungarian bacon
4 cans of gaunabana juice
a small can of sardines
a jar of anchovies
a can of squid
a can of fava beans
a can of garbanzo beans
a tube of wasabi
mediterrenean sea salt
dried chiplotle peppers
vanilla soy milk
On a sad note, I’ve noticed that two of the best food places on Dempster in Skokie are closed. Greenwood Produce, which apparently had a fire, looked like it might reopen, but the building is demolished, and last week I noticed the E&M Fancy Foods (or E&M Meats), a great butcher, is gone. There still is another good independent store on Dempster – Village Market Place in Skokie (4034 Dempster), which is another place full of great produce a good meat department and tons of eastern European food stuff.