Good Food Hunting

While in Minneapolis last week, we had some really tasty sheep’s milk cheese purchased from a local cheese shoppe (more in a later post).  Attempting to do something nice for my boyfriend, I thought I’d use my lunch to zip over to the Cheese guy at the Lansing City Market to see if they had this stuff (they didn’t but if I knew the actual name, could probably get it).

I would have walked, both to save gas and for the exercise but its 80 degrees with humidity near 90%; I really didn’t want to get that sweaty and the distance is such that I would have needed a pretty brisk pace to make it roundtrip in my hour break.

Ha.

After swinging by the postal boxes by the Capitol building, I planned to continue on to Grand Avenue. Turns out you can’t turn left there, at all, due to the CSO project.  The CSO project will be tearing up city traffic until 2020. Long-term benefits are probably great but in the meantime, it sucks. Especially when the lane closures change from day to day.  I turned around to go down Washington, not an easy drive at lunchtime and even worse when some spacy girl doesn’t know how to drive her stick-shift.

I finally get down to Grand and Shiawassee where I intend to slide over the bridge to the market.  Except its closed! This time, due to Common Ground activities, which started last night.  I thought this was an evening event so I was suprised to see the parking people already looking to collect fees.  After yet another completely out of the way detour, I finally made it to the market.

No cheese but I stopped at the East Lansing Food Co-op mini-store and bought some whipping cream from Calder Dairy (in Lincoln Park) and a packet of sunflower seeds from Country Life Natural Foods of Pullman (near South Haven in Wester Michigan).  As I’m paying, the manager asks if I had an trouble getting there due to the construction and rerouting.  Ha Ha.  She then tells me that a lot of vendors aren’t coming in this week since its too much hassle.  And she was right.  The fish people were gone, the local meat company was off until Friday and there were only a few fresh produce vendors in the East Wing. 

Since Shiawassee was still closed, I had to find an alternate route back to the Hall of Justice.  By the time it was all said and done, I should have just walked. 

I’m really looking forward to using my cream in tonight’s dinner that will include morel mushroom risotto.