Saturday, December 17, 2005

The quest for pie crust and my prosciutto deja vu

Tonight after work I ran around trying to find frozen pie crusts. I have come to the conclusion that people must not make pies in Japan because no one had pie crusts ... and I looked at every shop I knew over the course of 3 hours. I eventually just gave up and bought instant pie crust mix. I didn't really want to roll it out because I don't really have space to do it, but I don't have any other options at this point.

At one point in this search across Tokyo I even went into Dean & Deluca on the off chance that they had something - unlikely, yes, but I was desperate. They didn't have pie crust... but they did have prosciutto. So, a quick digression here before carrying on...

A few weeks ago I had this really weird dream. I was shopping for all kinds of things because I was putting on a big dinner, and I happened to be in a specialty store buying crusty bread, cheese, olives, etc. I was at the counter talking to the clerk and noticed the prosciutto... and was talked into buying some. Not wanting to skimp on the ham and appear cheap, I made sure that I had enough for everyone and ended up with a package of ham costing something like $50 ... on top of a hundred bucks of other stuff that I had bought. And I was suddenly worried and upset because the groceries cost so much and I had spent way more than my budget, but I couldn't lose face by telling the nice man at the counter that I couldn't afford the prosciutto.

Ok, so back to Dean & Deluca. I'm talking to the cheese guy about a nice cheese... and look over and see prosciutto... and get talked into buying some... and not wanting to skimp because it was Christmas dinner, I got 2 slices for each of us (8 total)... and ... it came to 2200 yen for those 8 slices. ($22 CDN). And suddenly that dream came back to me full force and freaked me out. Beacuse, what the heck was I doing spending 22 bucks on ham??!! I expected it to be expensive, but not 2200 yen worth! And of course I was too embarrassed to say, "oops, sorry!" Besides, figured it was a special thing and might as well splurge on something. I also found spices on sale while I was there, so I "saved" lots of money when I bought them ;) Anyway, I thought it was quite weird that I ended up having this prosciutto experience extremely similar to what I dreamt just a few weeks ago. (Christmas dinner edit: the proscuitto was awesome and everyone loved it - delicious!)

So, in my three hour quest for pie crust, I ended up with a bunch of cheese, some special crackers, 22 bucks worth or proscuitto and instant pie mix. All this time spent shopping means that we are just cleaning off the table now (Hirohsi needed some prompting to clean his side off) and I won't be able to start cooking tonight. Yikes! This means tomorrow is going to be a day of extreme time management. Speaking of which, my turkey still seems to be rather frozen. Unless there is some miracle defrosting overnight I'm going to have to go with the water dethaw. Things are starting to get stressful...

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