Still here

This week an older lady, wearing a hat with a fascinator and a half-veil, got into a good-natured banter battle with another customer. "Who has been coming here longer" was the game, and she won.

"I been coming here since this store opened, in the middle '90s!" she declared with clear pride. Apparently every tile and shelf was brand new in the middle '90s, shiny and clean.

I bought the same toothpaste as this lady; we shared a little love for Crest 3D White Brilliance. "Works good" she said, and pointed out that she purchased two tubes. I mostly bought it for the price, but I like to make friends.

^Look, it's me and Abby, getting official at City Hall! This was one of three marriages we had this year: with friends in Maine, with family in Western Mass., and with one (1) cousin and one (1) friend on a recent Friday morning in NYC. Each mini-marriage had its own special sauce.

Did we tell you about the hurricane in Maine? The Turkish baths? The bean dinner? The Quakers? The explosive honeymoon? Probably not.

In other news, Mr. Pearse is champing* at the bit to do more surplus grocer posts so he might start writing for Alicia Kennedy's Substack out of pure spite (or because she has a million readers and doesn't pay in expired groceries?)

In other other news, I made a print magazine with my colleague Ali and a crew of super-talented freelancers. Email me to learn how you can get your very own, good-looking, thought-provoking, rootin-tootin issue in the mail!

xo,

Jesse

*correct spelling, also it's "homing in" not "honing in"

This is a new section (AIR HORN NOISE), to document all the wild and wooly Mad Max vehicles used to deliver surplus here to East Harlem.

I saw the driver shuttling some nondescript boxes inside but wasn't able to see exactly what was in them. Also I was too awed to actually ask. I bet flames come out of that van's tailpipe.

Another new section! This isn't technically a section for recipes, more of a "dining diary" for noteworthy surplus meals.

I cooked something I dubbed "carnitas carbonara" with these noodles. I used this recipe (Smithfield Foods sponcon - for shame, Food52!) but instead of pork shoulder I used hogs head cheese I bought awhile back at a grocery store in Georgia. For those unfamiliar, you could call this item "jellied offal with spices" — not for the faint of heart.

Abby told me if I ever served it to her in a dish, she didn't want to know. So I pretended I was making normal carbonara pasta with old bacon bits, then "pivoted" to a fusion dish to confuse her. She seemed to enjoy her first few bites, then I was like "can you taste the hogs head cheese??" because I couldn't resist.

Predictably, Abby was repulsed and barely finished one portion. I thought it was delicious! Creamy and intensely porky, with great spicing and peppers to flesh it all out. Reminds me of when I fried up 100 homemade "southwestern cheeseburger eggrolls" like I'm TGIHirschys and had to eat them all myself. Abby and I are an excellent match, but sometimes she has bad taste.

A few years back, me and Abby and a ragtag group of friends helped paint a community mural near our house. We didn't do a great job! Our task was painting stenciled shapes with primary colors, but we still managed to screw up.

This year, for the mural repaint, they didn't ask for community assistance. It's all professional/experienced artists, each with their own blank rectangle to play with. This one is our absolute favorite; I fanboyed at the artist when she dropped by for some touch-ups. She was kinda stoic, but I can be a lot to take.

I've had so many seltzer things happen since we last spoke, it's kind of overwhelming. Some bullet points:

• I started bringing communal seltz to the office, and created an office seltzer channel on Slack to spread my propaganda.

• We bought one-liter bottles of Polar seasonal flavors with dumb made-up names like this, but they were all flat (and the "Pink Summer Iced Tea" was flat-out disgusting). Betrayal.

• On the flip side of Polar disgust, this^ is one of the best flavors I've ever tried. We feel blessed to have purchased 5 cans at the surplus grocer.
• Some nice gents at work (hi Eric and Dylan) bought some seltz for the office recently, saying "Jesse shouldn't be the only one to supply us." My propaganda is working! Even if some of the seltz was Waterloo pineapple.

• Even in our wedding photos we are crushing cans. If you're curious, the Maine wedding had lots of Soleil brand seltz, which we had never tried before. Dece!
• The workers have started accusing me of drinking too much soda! I feebly tell them there is no sugar/calories in seltz, but there is maybe a language barrier.

Peanut oil is expensive! What a steal.

Who wants white meat hot dogs? BallPark is not a great dog (mushy, odd seasoning) even when it's pork, so this was a really unwise purchase. I tried one, now Lola is getting the rest as treats.

Seems like this was made in the '70s, then recently discovered in some ancient freezer. That said, this was fairly delicious. We cooked it on Thanksgiving but decided not to serve it because there was already so much meat. This weekend I used it in a root vegetable hash (beets, turnips, carrots) that felt quite virtuous!

Isn't the point of a Pringle how you can stack a million of them in the tube? This is just a bunch of Sun Chips tossed in there willy nilly. Also they are extra small for some reason. What is going on? (Abby put hers in a little ceramic dish to feel like an aristocrat.)

Who wants some sliders from washed-up sports star Nolan Ryan? Me, I guess. I was disappointed he didn't even write a fake letter on the back, comparing baseball to cattle ranching or some shit.

Update: Nolan wrote a dumb letter on the website instead.