This store is an epicurean and atmospheric fantasy for people like me. It KNOWS people like me. It is evil, but should not be destroyed.
H*M*NS is laid out with great attention to space and lighting and showing everything at its shiniest brightiest best. And baby, it does. You walk in and BAM! You get smacked right in the eyes with displays of richly hued, alphabetized, shined and polished produce – conventional and organic. And not your regular garden variety, um, garden variety. They’ve got everything from radicchio, endive, and bok choy, to orange beets, white carrots, and baby pineapple. With a couple of lychee, and Japanese persimmons on the side. Never mind the to-die-for blood orange Gelato or the cooking school upstairs.
Yeah. Cooking school.
And you expect me to resist this place.
When I get home, I never have any idea how my list has gone from $25-worth of basic groceries to $125-worth of delectable weirdness. Of COURSE I have to have the $85 a pound Spanish Fly Larvae cheese! Duh! And the Icelandic violet-sea-salt crackers to serve it on. Not to mention the squid-ink pasta for my Halloween dinner, and the little flower squash that look like tiny sunbursts, which will nestle along side the chestnuts roasted in boar-fat and toasted Milanese arugula. Why not buy the Hawaiian sea salt, or the smoked applewood salt, or the horehound drops? Like I can go ONE DAY without my black radishes, Brazillian pepper, or live-culture Greek acai and pear yogurt!
Places like this should be banned. They are a siren call to we who are addicted to the evils of funky shopping. And it isn’t limited to groceries. Same thing happens when I go into a clothing store with a bit of French rock music playing, avant-garde decor, hangly-dangly lighting, aroma-therapeutic candles, and lovely frothy skirts. My brain-cells freeze and I. Must. Purchase. Especially. If. There. Is. Hand. Painting. Or. A. Beaded. Butterfly. With. Sequins. Worked. In.
Something should be done. In a month. Or a year. Or so.
But not too soon. I still need some Dutch blue-eyed bovine cream to drink with my hibiscus and spearmint tea, whilst the light of the autumn sun shines, just barely, through the layers of my mosquito netting and silk ruffled skirt.
*sigh*
well, I'm feeling a bit sheepish after reading your blog. Because I just fine-dined my brood with LaChoy's chow mein, and rice. But I added shrimp and those noodle thingys for a gourmet flair…I wanted to culture them, because we grew up on LaChoy's and they've never had it…and probably never will…
Hey missy, I fine-dined my broodlet on LaChoy's about two weeks ago for the same reason: sudden nostalgia. It was then that I remembered the only thing I liked about it as a kid was the crispy noodles. You should have seen my kids' faces as they gazed upon the homogenous, glutenous mass that slorped out of the can into the pot, and then onto their plates. Yum.