A Very Pearsey V-Day

By Pearse Anderson

Chicago correspondent Pearse Anderson here with a Valentine’s Day haul. Love is in the air! As is “wedding cake popcorn,” my newest 50-cent purchase. Imagine bringing this to a divorce hearing:

For V-Day this year, I bought my partner Monica the acclaimed bird gaming expansion Wingspan Asia, while she got me a $100 shopping spree at some of Chicago’s surplus grocers. A genius and gorgeous idea — I got to visit four establishments of varying secondhandedness and mirth. Together, they make up my growing Chicago constellation of reputable vendors. They are:

First stop was the brilliant Continental Sales “Lots 4 Less,” the only true, vanilla surplus grocer in this mix. I encountered more lovely corners of the store this time: a very clean bathroom, a lovely community event board themed for Black History Month, and the literal corner of the store, where chesty Ken dolls were sold next to garden gloves. Great one-stop shop for a thrifty serial killer.

Lots 4 Less reminds me how many curious ways corporations try to pump value into products that don’t really need to exist: Betty Crocker sold a “Suddenly Deli Salad” mix to make a “caramel apple” salad that required you to add apples and vanilla — all the mix contained was walnuts and sugar. Toll House sold a “kitchen sink” bag of chocolate, caramel, and tiny pretzel sticks, which seems like something you’d create if the pretzel factory accidentally cut the sticks too short. Aren’t kitchen sink cookies defined by being made out of whatever’s left in your house, not consumerist products bought to create them from scratch? Anywho, I bought two bags. Cinnabon showed up again, selling “brunch sets” with pancake molds, cocoa mixes, pancake batter, and unwieldy ceramic mugs. Who is buying this? How much clay was wasted at the ceramic factory for another Cinnabon L?

Next was Black Friday Deals Chicago, one of several “Black Friday” stores primarily supplied by returned packages, usually loose boxes of construction supplies and cases for last-gen iPhones. Customers paw through plywood troughs of unsorted Amazon and Home Depot returns — my searching was met with a surprise blender blade in my trough, exposed and sharp. I didn’t cut myself! Instead, I found some cheap N95 masks and a hilariously stamped container of 8 pounds of spaghetti. Last newsletter, one reader wrote-in curious if I ever consumed Amazon returns. Previously, only a bag of desiccated coconut, but as I exited Black Friday Deals with my spagett, all you readers were top of mind.

Last autumn, I wrote a piece in Eater about Chicago’s artisanal marshmallow scene, as I am myself a marshmallow maker (of limited acclaim). Unfortunately, this February was the last month in business for one of my top mallow sources, Nikki Darling Confections. Before they fully threw in the towel, the confectioners were hosting a closeout sale of equipment, ingredients, and final-batch mallows. With my spaghetti loaded into the car, I drove to a brick-heavy industrial district of Chicago to shop with a food-worker friend for marshmallowing supplies. Boy was it a win: restaurant-size gallons of corn syrup, quarts of Knox gelatin, half-used bags of Nuts.com mango juice powder, and a butane torch I can’t figure out how to use and am worried is going to explode my hand off. As I fumbled with my Venmo QR scanner to pay them, I also presented the confectioners with a V-day treat: hot pink marshmallows I made for them, embedded with surplus-grocer pomegranate seeds.

You can really put anything into marshmallows, which is why I mentioned them in my last correspondence as a healthy repository of near-bad or experimental ingredients. When I returned from my haul with a Lots 4 Less cream soda, I decided to turn it into marshmallows. I adapted a root beer marshmallow recipe from Shauna Sever and got . . . really uninteresting marshmallows. The brown soda didn’t give any color to the mallow, and the taste was almost nonexistent. Here, I served them alongside those Toll House kitchen sink cookies.

Back to the shopping: Against the brick wall outside of the mallow-maker’s sale, I traded with my foodie friend, Alex. They got a pound of the Amazon spaghetti, half a container of soursop agua fresca powder, and we split the Mtn Dew “voodew” can, a Halloween 2022 limited-edition bev. “It tastes like Sweet Tarts,” Alex said, trying to put the very artificial flavor into words. “You know when shitty store-bought marshmallows go stale? There's like a powdery sweetness on the outside? The problem is I’m a wine person.” The Mtn Dew wiki states it’s “Sour Candy Flavor.” It wasn’t actually too bad.

Alex promised to keep me (and The Haul readers!) informed about what they’d make with their pound of spaghetti. We parted ways and left our secondhand shopping spree, the car loaded with cans, masks, last-batch marshmallows, and a meat stick I misplaced in the back seat. Driving up Western Avenue, Monica and I spotted an ESTATE SALE sign and thought, why not, let’s pull off. As we entered the estate, we were met by one gorgeous horse tapestry and two people talking at us like they knew us. It turns out we entered a random estate sale at the exact same time as another member of our mutual aid society. Ahead of us, the cashier recognized me: I’ve been to so many estate sales by Chicago Estate Advisors LLC, I’m a known character!

For someone who moved to the city in 2020, this is a big deal — I’m finding a spontaneous community, and in secondhand sales, at that. I rummaged through the kitchen (I have eaten estate sale food, perhaps a discussion for later) and found an unopened Benriner from Joong Boo, Wirecutter’s favorite mandoline. I got the “friend-of-the-company” deal for it, meaning it was free. Yeehaw. The estate owner seemed to have been an elderly Korean woman who was roughly my size and shape; by the end of the sale I had 3 Merino wool sweaters and a two-piece dark olive “viscose” suit. She had hundreds of pieces, exquisite taste, and I felt very honored to try on the outfit as soon as I got home. Behind me, as you can see, is Wingspan Asia. I’ve come full circle.

Both medically important, just in different ways.

At least it’s the right year.

Finishing up this entry as I enjoy some Too Good to Go donuts, another surplus topic we haven’t really covered. I hope your President’s Day is fresher than these yeasted donuts. Chop down a cherry tree in my honor, or however you’re supposed to celebrate this holiday!

Warmly,

Pearse