SALE!

My name is Sarah, and I have a shopping problem.

Pinned here.

Let me tell you a story.  When I was a child and my family was living in Chicago, my mother proposed two ideas for the upcoming weekend: Would you like to go with daddy to the Bulls game (he had box seat tickets and this was during the Michael Jordan era, mind you) or would you like to go shopping with me?

What the curse word do you think I chose? And off to the mall we went.

Well, not much has changed. I still like to buy things I don't need and read fashion blogs and magazines like they're going out of style. But one thing is slightly different {oh, how the tables have turned}: I'm a twenty-something young professional whose paycheck goes straight to her one-bedroom apartment and car payment, leaving pennies for expanding my wardrobe or buying fancy things.

{I like to consider myself young, fabulous and broke.}

What does all this have to do with my food blog? Everything.  I'm a sale shopper now; it's my new favorite word: sale! {Music to my ears.} Why buy something full price when it will inevitably be discounted to move it off the shelves? {Thank you in part to this "recession", but mostly due to basic retail-onomics. New goods come in, older goods gotta go.}

So as I shop for new sunglasses, swimsuits and jewelry, I always keep in mind the laws of retail. I also keep it mind as I do my grocery shopping every Sunday.

Sale shopping at the grocery store in particular is two-fold.

1. You save money.

2. You get creative in the kitchen.

Pinned here.

The first time I bought tofu I was so incredibly broke. I saw that it was on sale for little more than $1 and I had to have it. I thought to myself, a lot of people eat tofu. It's kind of a "thing" right now, anyway. Buy the tofu. Be one with the tofu. First came tofu tacos, then thai tofu, and the rest was history.

What I really love to buy on sale is greens. What a bargain. I realize a large bunch of collard greens or kale looks like enough to feed a family of fifteen, but it's really just the perfect amount. When you get home with your $2 bunch {the size of a small tree} of greens, here's what you do: place it in a sink full of water and splash of vinegar, peel the leaves off the stems and discard the stems, allow the leaves to dry and chop them into smaller pieces, then divide it up into two gallon ziploc bags. Pop those bags in the freezer for a rainy day. You can use greens {collard, turnip, mustard...} in soups, sauteed as a side dish, steamed with a little seasoning or cooked in a crockpot all day.

Something else to consider: fruits and vegetables go on sale all the time.  Notice that when it starts to warm up, the strawberries are dirt cheap. Or when the temperatures fall, the price of hearty greens drop as the crops become more abundant. Needless to say, if you're flexible with what you "need to buy" at the grocery store, you may be surprised to find that you just adore nearly every fruit and vegetable in the produce department.

See that? My shopping addiction is actually quite useful after all.