It's kind of unfortunate. I love fresh produce, as does my husband, and we eat a ton of it. But whatever SP articles try to say about eating healthy not having to be expensive...produce can be very pricey! My bag of grapes was $16 today! $3.79/lb ain't cheap. I try to mostly buy produce when it's on sale, but I can't live without my grapes. Or mushrooms. Mushrooms are pricey, too. And bell peppers!

I really need to get a garden going here, once I clear out some of the jungle in the backyard. (Apparently the previous owners didn't care to make any real use of their land and just let it get overgrown with ivy and various viney creeper weeds.)

On the plus side of the produce situation, sometimes that expense comes from trying something fun and "exotic" to me. I still have yet to try the fresh quince and the rambutan I got the other day, but I was at a different store today to pick up some staples to fill in the holes in our pantry (milk, bread, spinach for salads, rice, dried chickpeas, that kind of thing), plus I also stopped by this Hispanic grocery/convenience store that I'd never been to before but had wanted to check out, so I came home with some interesting new things! Got some "pure cane" from the store - like a stick of sugar cane. Supposedly you just peel it and chew on the insides for a while till the sweetness is gone and spit the residue out. It sounded fun to me. :) The Hispanic store had this tamarind-flavored powdered drink mix for not too many calories and no sodium per serving, so I got a pouch of that since I really liked the fresh tamarind pulp I tried a few weeks ago. It makes a quite tasty drink! They also had some very odd frozen stuff, things I'd never heard of. Various frozen flowers, for instance. So I bought some frozen nightshade leaves, and some frozen cashew apples. No idea what one does with nightshade leaves, and never heard of a "cashew apple" - but both sounded intriguing, so they are now in my freezer!

I swear, other women hobby-shop for clothes and acquire massive shoe collections. I couldn't care less about clothes and shoes... I want to buy and try ALL the weird produce I can get my hands on! :)