As I’ve written (frequently) elsewhere, supermarket touristing is a vital part of any travel, for me. A micro road trip the other day to San Diego included not only a great dinner at Ruth’s Chris and a fab late breakfast at Tip Top Meat in Carlsbad, but also, as we wended our way home, a very small detour to a nearly brand-new WinCo Foods in Oceanside. We were low on at least two important things: Guittard chocolate chips, which WinCo has at an eye-poppingly low price, and individually-sealed teabags from the prodigious bulk department that are necessities in my travel kit. Plus, I, perhaps beyond reason, just plain ♥♥♥ WinCo. Their gigantic onions, e.g. Whether white, purple, yellow, plaid—they are absolute units of beauty and freshness.
This time, Mapie’s (as I call Gmaps’ know-all narrator, after Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec, the author of La Cuisine de France) typically slightly outré route sent us past a sweet little strawberry stand. If you know anything about California, you might know that while strawberry stands abound, they are not every one of them sweet. We said, if we come back by this corner, we’ll stop. And so we did, to buy what turned out to be some of the best-tasting and best-looking strawberries ever, with peak season months away, and also our first of the new year. Is this an off-to-a-good-start harbinger? MAYBE.