groceries and shopping

On Saturday morning (March 15), we went to the grocery store. Since I was going to cook an American-style brunch sometime during the week, we couldn’t just go to any supermarket. . We went to Robinson’s Supermarket, as we thought it was more likely to have the ingredients I needed, as well as normal Filipino groceries

When we first came in, I saw fruits, and I immediately gravitated towards the strawberries, which were imported and exactly the same as the ones I’d been eating a few weeks earlier in Virginia. I later saw that they had smaller strawberries, which were local, so we bought those instead. Since I hadn’t been eating much fruits and vegetables, except for mangoes, during my first few days here, I was tempted to buy the fruits that I would normally buy in the US. I had to remind myself that I was in the Philippines and that I should eat the local fruits since I can’t have them in the US. So instead of buying cantaloupes, we bought papayas and bananas.

I had planned on making a mushroom and avocado omelet for my brunch. We thought that this supermarket would have ordinary button mushrooms, but that wasn’t so. They had enoki, shiitake, and other Asian forest-type mushrooms. They also had portabella mushroom. I really just wanted plain mushroom, and I was disappointed. But as I didn’t have much choice and after much uncertainty, I decided to just get the portabella. At first, I didn’t think that there were any avocados either, but we found them in a different section. Originally, I had thought of using the cheese the Filipinos generally use. They are actually processed cheese spreads that come in a box and don’t have to be refrigerated. But I decided I wanted real cheese instead. We found some shredded Australian cheddar cheese in the chilled section.

I had also planned on making French toast. Instead of using plain bread though, I wanted to use croissants. I had eaten those in Los Angeles ages ago and I had always wanted to try making them. I found croissants easily enough. The hard part was finding the milk! Unlike in the US where milk can be found in the chilled section, “fresh” milk here are in boxes and is stored on the shelves. How can fresh milk not be refrigerated? I balked at the idea of using this milk but, since the only other choices are canned or powdered milk, I had to go for it. But, as I only needed a little bit of milk, we had to go the juice box section to find juice box-sized milk.

We also had to find maple syrup for the French toast. We had to ask a couple of employees to find the correct aisle. But there really isn’t any maple syrup here. Even those that are labeled maple syrup are really just caramel syrup with maple flavoring. So I opted for one that wasn’t selling itself as maple syrup, but as hotcake syrup. I figured that that’s close enough to our fake maple syrup in the US.

That grocery shopping excursion was a lesson in things I take for granted when shopping. I’m sure I’ve run into this problem when I was here before, but I always forget. You may wonder why I’d even want to make American brunch if I’m in the Philippines. Well, people are obviously much better at making Filipino breakfast, so I wanted to make something different. And I wanted a change from the meat/egg/rice breakfasts that I’d been eating everyday. Anyway, all’s well that ends well...