Recipe #333 - Pissaladiere - Shopping Trip

Well that was a traumatizing shopping trip. I usually enjoy grocery shopping. I relish it actually. I find it quite peaceful.

That was not how I felt on today's particular trip. Why, you might ask? Because I had to buy some truly miserable ingredients for this challenge.

Now, I have bought olives before, specifically black olives to put on skewers with tortellini and salami as appetizers. Even then, I won't eat the olives. I make them for other people. Out of the goodness of my heart. So I've never bought olives with the intent of me eating them. This was a new thing. I've also never bought Niçoise olives before. They are particularly ugly and smelly. Or maybe I am just bitter.

I walked into the store entrance closest to the olive bar. Might as well tackle it head on, right? Wrong! My nose was immediately assaulted with the scent of brine. So disgusting. I circled the olive bar, all the while trying not to breathe, trying to find Niçoise olives. Oh. There they are. Damn they are ugly. Here, let me show you.



Regardless of their stench and wretched appearance, I had already resigned myself to the fact that I was purchasing these badboys. There was a slight problem though. There was no vessel for me to put them in! This was a huge olive bar, shouldn't they have had some type of container for you to fill with these little bastards? Well I circled again trying to find something to contain my vile purchase, but to no avail. I decided to look and see if I could find them in a jar. I was not spending another minute next to these foul demons.

I was moving on to bigger and better things right? Wrong again, my dearest readers. Wrong again. I had to go find the anchovies. It was found in the aptly named "canned fish" area. I'm not really a fan of canned fish of any type (even tuna, it smells like cat food. Or cat food smells like tuna. Either way, I am not a fan) so this is also a foreign section of the supermarket for me. I had the option of flat fish fillets or whole fish. Martha was not specific, but I did not want to have to deal with the whole fish. I can maybe pretend they are something else if I don't have to look at their little anchovy faces.

No, my thumb has not been replaced with a poorly drawn smiley face. I do, however, bite my nails and didn't want to subject you to the sight. Next time I will get a manicure. I promise. Maybe.

But really, the most embarassing part of the whole trip was the tomatoes. I don't ever really buy fresh tomatoes either. I'm not a big fan of raw tomatoes and neither is hubs, so when I need tomatoes for something I buy them canned and then cook them into something. This recipe calls for plum tomatoes. Is it really sad that I had no idea what a plum tomato was? Thankfully, I have an iPhone and was able to google "Plum Tomatoes" and see what I was supposed to be looking for. But the store had no plum tomatoes! I had to think on my feet. I found that there is apparently some similarity between plum and roma tomatoes, so the romas came home with me.
The rest of my shopping trip was not nearly as scary or eventful. I did decide that since I am making this horrible recipe that I needed to bake something nom nom nom to make up for it. I snagged a ton of lemons off my in-laws tree yesterday and decided to make a lemon meringue pie. I am not using Martha's recipe since I'm assuming that one will get chosen for me. I'm going with Alton Brown's LMP recipe which also calls for a frozen pie crust (OH THE HORROR!!).

When life gives you lemons, give them to me so I can make you a pie.

I think the Pissaladiere is getting made tonight and the pie will wait until Wednesday. I will probably post my adventure with that as well, but it will not count towards my challenge. That will just be for fun and yumminess.

Look for my final post on Recipe #333 tomorrow!