After his week of camp, Alex promptly fell sick. In fact, he was sick the whole of last week and is actually still recovering at the moment. Since I was cooped up in the house with him, I finally decided it was time to make space for my ever-growing vintage cookbook collection, instead of just letting them pile up…er…everywhere. Well, one thing led to another, and I ended up organizing almost the entire house. Whew! I so wasn’t planning on doing that! On top of that, I came down with a cold earlier this week and am still dealing with it but thankfully, it is nowhere as bad as what Alex went through. He had at least three days of high fever, along with cough, congestion (the works). He was totally miserable! We are all glad he’s feeling much better now. :)
Anyway, back to our last day of mini-vacation – after our glorious dim sum feast, we checked out a couple of the Asian stores downtown. We saw familiar Asian fruits, spice mixes galore (we stocked up on our favorites – Tean’s Gourmet Chicken Curry Paste, Tean’s Gourmet Curry Laksa Paste, and Maesri Tom Yum Paste), and a huge variety of Asian tableware and cookware at reasonable prices. Of course, there were plenty of other Asian grocery items but we didn’t linger to explore as we wanted to stop by West Side Market next.
It was so busy at West Side Market that day, and it was a Friday! Was everybody taking a day off or something? :) There were bountiful produce in every stall. The berries – blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries were especially cheap. We didn’t buy any though since we had plenty at home. We went more for the fruits that weren’t easily obtainable in our local stores. Hence, we bought papayas and baby bananas. :) We also purchased a bottle of garlic olive oil (for dipping mainly) and some pierogis for friends. Seeing that I’ve never eaten pierogis before my whole life, we also bought half a dozen of the garlic potato to try. I’ll let you know what I think once I try them. We bypassed all the pastry stalls in West Side Market since we were planning to stop by Farkas Pastry Shoppe to get their famous napoleons. Of course, it helped that we were still super full from our dim sum. :) The sad part was that Farkas was closed for vacation that day and we had to do without those delicious napoleons. I think our stomachs were a little thankful for that though because we had eaten way too much that week. We’ll get our napoleons some other time. FYI, all the places we went were extremely packed and I normally try to take pictures without including the surrounding people (out of respect for their privacy). So here are the few I managed to take. Enjoy!
