Fresh & Easy

Okay, my post today is about my new favorite place to shop. Those who know me know that I have a bit of a grocery store obsession. I LOVE grocery stores. I love roaming the aisles, looking for new products, thinking about things I might make, planing future menus. So when a new store opens I get excited, REALLY excited. So last summer when my friend Jaysen told me a new store was coming to Las Vegas I was thrilled. I looked it up on the Internet. I Mapquested the locatons. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, just before Christmas, the first five Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets opened. (Six more have since opened and five more are in the works - I'm really excited about that because one of the new locations will be much closer to my house.) I went to the new market and checked it out.

They are small stores, about the size of a free standing drug store. At first I thought it was going to be a lot like Trader Joes. I like Trader Joes, they have lots of gourmet products at really reasonable prices. But I can't do all of my shopping there. I have to go to Trader Joes and the to the 'regular' grocery store. But Fresh and Easy is different, I can do all of my regular shopping there. Now I'm not going to lie, they have a good but limited selection. You can get pretty much everything you need there but you aren't going to get a bunch of choices. There aren't 14 kinds of toilet paper, 600 different cereals, 8 brands of coffee. There is one, sometimes two choices. Need canned peas? They have them - but only the Fresh & Easy brand. Ditto for most items. Which is good in that you don't have to agonize over which one to buy but bad because they may not carry your favorite brand, or in the size you want, etc.

They specialize in really fresh, health food. Their quality is really high. Their selection is slightly upscale. And their prices are reasonable (better than the 'regular' store in many cases). What's not to love? They have a tasting area where you can sample their products. They don't have checkers in the regular sense but they always have people to help you and everyone who works there seems really nice. The aisles are wide, and the shelves are short - only about four and a half feet high for the top shelf. (Which may not be a big deal for you but my 4'9" mother loves the fact that she can get something off of the top shelf without climbing up or asking for help). The stores are always clean and seem to be stocked well (although several times I have seen their frozen section dwindle down. I don't know if this is an ordering problem or a supply problem but it can be annoying when their selection is limited to begin with.)

I love their meat department, it carries a HUGE variety and everything I have gotten there has been top notch quality. They have some interesting things in the meat department too, like chorizo seasoned ground pork. I have read a zillion recipes that call for chorizo but I have never made any because of the ingredients in chorizo. (Have you ever looked at the list of ingredients on the chorizo package? Ugh, it's full of really gross parts) But I may rethink some of those recipes now that I can get the chorizo flavor without the lips and snouts. (They also have dried Spanish chorizo in their deli section for less than half the price of Whole Foods.)

Now here is my super secret favorite part about Fresh & Easy (shh, don't tell anyone). Because they specialize in really fresh food, most everything is labled with an expiration date which is only a few days at the most away. So on the day the food is set to expire, they mark it down. Now I'm talking about still good food here, nothing that is slimy or gross and they are just trying to get rid of it. I have bought a lot of their marked down goods and they are great. Some of their markdowns are on food that is just reaching it's peak, like in the produce section. I've bought cucumbers and green peppers and lettuce that was in better shape that at some other stores but because of it's freshness date it's marked down. I've gotten shrimp that were fresh and sweet and lovely for only a dollar twenty-five a pound. Pork loins for half price. Grapes for seventy-five cents a package. Scones for less than a quarter of the regular price. It is a bargain shoppers dream.

So in the spirit of lists that has been going on in the blog world this month, here is a list of my favorite things at Fresh & Easy.

1. The English muffins. They are so good it's indescribable. Fresh & Easy is a division of the grocery giant Tesco from the U.K. so I guess it only stands to reason that the Brits know their English muffins. They are the best English muffins I have ever eaten. And I was never a big English muffin fan but now I am a devotee. Try them, I swear you will love them. And if you don't, I'll eat them for you.
2. I ring up my order but somebody else bags them. I don't mind ringing up my own groceries (I was a checker for 10 years after all) but I hate bagging them. So I love that even though it's self checkout, there is a very nice person who will bag my things for me. (They aren't called checkers, they call them customer assistants. Nice.)
3. The spinach salad with the beets, blue cheese and candied pecans. Those ingredients alone would sell me but the pomegranate-raspberry vinegrette is the clincher. So delicious. And though the salad says 'serves one', we easily get three salads from it.
4. The cut up apple slices. I hate most bagged cut up apple slices because whatever they put on them to keep them from turning brown tastes awful, so they don't even taste like apples anymore. But whatever Fresh & Easy uses doesn't change the flavor at all. The apples are sweet and yummy and since they are already cut up and in my fridge I'm way more likely to eat an apple as a snack than I ever was before.
5. The pork loin. Someday I'll post my oh-so-easy and delicious pork loin recipe. But to buy one for less than two dollars a pound makes it even better.
6. The cinnamon rolls - or any of their danishes really. They use a puff pastry instead of a yeast dough. Flaky and delicious.
7. The blueberry scones. So full of blueberries and really moist, like a big fruit filled biscuit. Anyone who has ever eated a dry commerical scone will know how terrible they can be, but these taste like you just pulled them from the oven. Again, leave it to the Brits to make a great scone.
8. The organic lemonades. Strawberry and mango are sooo good. And the ginger limeade is puckeringly tart but so refreshing, I'm going to make some type of adult beverage from it this summer.
9. The eggs. Jumbo eggs for the same price as large eggs at most stores. I love jumbo eggs, they are so worth the extra 20 calories. And Fresh & Easy eggs are cage free.
10. The tasting area (they call it the 'kitchen table'). They put our several things for you to try and they really want you to try them, they encourage it. I've tried potato wedges with chili, bagels and cream cheese, meatballs, cookies, juice, crackers. All good.

Okay so that's my Fresh & Easy story. If they ever need a spokesperson, I'm the gal. I'm in love, truly. Please shop there, we really need to support stores like this. I don't want them to go out of business like Raley's. I have converted my family and now my friends. The Gospel of Fresh & Easy as told by Shae. Go. I go every day. I'm not obsessed. Much.