good deals

Some new and exciting updates. I got a haircut and now have about 5 or 6 inches shorter. I like it. I also went to LiDl and found almost everything I needed and some more. Now I have some baking sheets, a loaf pan, a cooking thermometer (very hard to track down here), and a wonderful heat proof 1 liter glass measuring cup with metric units! I couldn´t find a cake pan or a cooling rack though....
I never realized Lidl had such a variety of products, they have a lot of German things, which is fantastic cause Germans use stuff I was raised on (oat meal, etc.) The most exciting of the German stuff I found was some really cheap baking powder, ¨vanilla sugar¨ (since there is no vanilla extract here, this helped), and I bought some wonderful German Christmas chocolates, and Stollen bread. I´m still giddy over my unusual finds. I happened to even stumble upon cheddar cheese in their dairy department (wooohooo!) although it´s authentic, which means it´s made the way they make it traditionally in England...it´s very gourmet tasting, not like the Kraft flavor I´m accustomed to, but still good. I also found some great deals on French cheeses like Brie and Camembert. I love feeling like I have superfancy gourmet ingredients in my fridge that normally I wouldn´t be able to afford in the states.
With my bakeware I made chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin pie.
I went to the Sunday market today and stocked up big time on fresh produce, it´s where I find the best deals and I like to support local growers. I found starfruit and merlitons which are called chayote here, but they were white and warty and were 1€ a piece, not such a good deal. Here´s what I picked up, 1 kilo of avocados, white grapes, oranges, plums, brocoli, guayava, tomatoes, 2 kilos of swiss chard, sweet potatoes, bananas, a bunch of parsely, a head of purple cabbage, a head of green cabbage, coliflower, a huge pumpkin. I was really excited to find such great deals- I only paid €16 for everything. I guess that´s the upside of the recession.
My house looks like a vegetable stand, so next on my list is doing a major cleaning and organizing of my fridge and pantry and storing it all cleaned and prepped for cooking. I´m excited. It´s relaxing to me to find a place for everything. Sounds like a project!
Upcoming project= washing and vacuum sealing summer wardrobe for storage until next May.