Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Shallots at Trader Joe's

posted by lizzie    « No Comments »    tied to Uncategorized   

We went to Trader Joe’s yesterday. And I kind of like that place. I will tell you why. Micah and I were standing in the produce section looking for shallots. We didn’t see any. An employee approached us with some green onions and said, “I’m not sure I read your lips right, but I thought you were looking for these.”

We were a little puzzled and said, “No, we’re looking for shallots.”

And he said, “Aren’t these shallots?”

And we said, “Aren’t shallots bigger than that? I don’t know we’ve never actually bought them before.”

But we were pretty sure green onions were not shallots. He said he was sorry, he didn’t know what we were talking about and that he didn’t think they had them if they weren’t the green onions. I was a little disappointed because the whole reason we were getting shallots is because I said to Micah last Sunday, “Name an ingredient we’ve never used and I’ll find a meal to use it in.” And he said shallots and I decided to make this macaroni with carmelized shallots and goat cheese. So not being able to get shallots kind of took the point out of the meal, but we would probably live without them. We went on shopping and I totally forgot about the shallots.

Then, as we were pondering the frozen chicken enchiladas, somebody interrupted us rather loudly and after I jumped and realized he wasn’t telling me to get out of the way or that my child was making a nuisance of himself (which has never actually happened, thankfully), I realized it was the green onions guy offering me a little bag of shallots. He had mistakenly thought of scallions when he heard shallots, which explained his previous mistake, but he had taken his mistake seriously and gone out of his way to find us and deliver the shallots to us. And that made me happy. And we felt special. Which generally doesn’t happen when you are grocery shopping in Brooklyn.

Hint: people who leave the first comment are cooler.

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