Flavors 518

This weekend I was around the Colonie Northway Mall area and instead of making a separate trip to a grocery store, I decided to see if the Target food section could fulfill my modest shopping list. My list consisted of: brown sugar, molasses, tomato paste, Colavita olive oil (I know I couldn't realistically expect this), and a snack for myself to hold me over until dinner time. As I was hunting down these items I seemed to hear a lot of different people they couldn't find certain items, perhaps indicating that the section is hard to navigate. There are a lot of items where only the Target brand exists, which for me made items harder to immediately notice, but I'm hoping they will taste ok. While there is a small meat and produce section where I've found some good things in the past, I feel that the food section in general is mostly geared towards mixes and already-prepared types of foods. I did find star anise though (I've read some Indian recipes that include it re...

My coworker was really excited a few months ago when she heard The Meat House was coming to Stuyvesant Plaza. They had one up in Clifton Park, and her husband loved all the different marinades. Her excitement rubbed off on me, and when this one opened up I was pretty psyched for it. I'll start by saying the workers don't seem to want to let you browse. The fact that they market it "For the Foodie", well they think they have to tell you what a "foodie" would eat. The first worker at least let us kind of describe what we wanted, but then was really pushy about their house marinated steak tips. We cooked them up in a cast iron skillet and put them in a salad with a roasted shallot vinaigrette. It was pretty good, but Scott sort of felt like the mustard flavor was really strong, which would be ok if it was top quality mustard (which it wasn't). It was alright though. She should have backed off and let us decide on our own. The second time I went in there ...

It's definitely a great resource ; I feel like I don't get there enough, but I've always been impressed when I have.