Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Tuesday's Shopping



I make a lot of my own spice and seasoning mixes and the base of many of them is paprika. I used to be able to buy gigantic jars of it at Kroger, for a reasonable price, but now they only sell it in small jars like everyone else. Since I can easily use most of a little jar in one big batch of taco seasoning or seasoning salt, I had to find a better option. Penzeys has it of course, but it is quite expensive there. A pound bag of California paprika costs $17.60 from Penzeys and the Spanish variety would be $20.40. Yikes! So, this morning I looked at both Food Town and HEB in hopes that they might have the large jars. Neither one had anything other than tiny jars but then I remembered that HEB sells spices in their bulk food department. I'm so glad that I thought to look there because the Spanish paprika was only $5.99 pound and I could buy as much as I needed! I bought a little over half a pound and it only cost me $3.23, which is not much more than I would have paid for a little 3.75 ounce jar or tin at Kroger ($2.69). I just did the math and Kroger's paprika works out to almost $11.50 pound!

HEB has a nice selection of bulk spices so I'll definitely go back for more. I'd forgotten that I'm running a little low on allspice because of all the pickles I've been making lately so I'll pick some up next week. I did buy two other things to try. I got 26-cents worth of mixed dried vegetables to use for something. I have no idea what but they looked interesting. The mixture is carrots, onions, tomatoes, spinach, celery and bell peppers. If I had to buy that in a little jar in the spice aisle, there's no way it would have only cost 26-cents. I also bought 27-cents worth of garam masala. Again, it will easily fill a small spice jar that probably would have cost me at least $4.00. You just don't see exotic spices like that except in the premium spice brands like Spice Islands and they're very pricey.

As you can see, I didn't buy any meat today. It's just as well that my freezer is full because they didn't have anything marked down this week anyway.

 

2 comments :