PEPPER RED SWEET

Some days it just works out…

Upon driving to the supermarket this afternoon, I realized I forgot my wallet. boo. Then I remembered feeling a single bill in my coat pocket earlier in the morning. Please be a twenty, please be a twenty… It was! yay. I buzzed around the market in a way I typically don’t, paying attention to the price of citrus fruit and doing mental math. Then old habits kicked in and I chose a red pepper based solely on the variety of color it would add to my dish, though the cheaper green bell pepper would have sufficed. Two aisles later, I second-guessed my indulgent selection and impetuously plopped said pepper onto the fancy olive bar scale. Shoppers were definitely judging this action, the equivalent of putting Miller Lite in a champagne flute, but they didn’t realize the stress I was under—when is the last time they paid cash!? It was just over half a pound. At $3.99/lb, I was going to be cutting it close. I decided to take a chance, be spontaneous, throw caution to the perpetual Ithaca wind and head to the check-out line with an awareness that I may just have to be that shopper who needs her zucchini voided so she can foot the bill.

A perk of shopping at a high-end grocer with only 20 bucks in your pocket is that you are undoubtedly eligible for the 10-items-or-less line. There was no one else at that particular checkout as I embarrassingly spilled the beans to the cashier. She seemed pretty cool with my old-school dilemma and the game began. I handed her each item one by one. Once we got past 10 dollars, she graciously verbalized each subtotal. BABY BELLA MUSH puts you at $15.23, ONION RED—16.74, SQUASH GREEN—17.61. I tentatively handed over my last item, that prodigal red pepper. She set it on the scale, punched in the 4 digit code, and then said nothing… I peeked at her screen: BALANCE—20.00. Now THAT’S a sweet pepper!

I entered the store hoping that 20 bucks would cover the cost of ingredients for my hummus veggie pizza dinner. Somehow it also managed to buy a restoration of faith in the “life is good” notion that has eluded me for the past eight months. Definition of money well-spent :)

Cheers,
Heather