Dec
5, 2002 — The
holiday season is upon us and with it the inevitable stress of
having too much to do and too little time to get it all done.
Between the fun bits — family gatherings, gift exchanges and
parties — come the preparations: buying presents, baking,
lingering in lines, tackling traffic and so on.
I've found the secret to taming the terrible side of an
otherwise delightful time of year: your local grocery store.
Sure, grocery stores offer convenience after gift shopping
when making dinner is the last thing on your mind. And we all
know they help cut corners when you're expected to bring three
different side dishes to Aunt Betty's annual holiday hoo-ha.
But what I did find surprising was the quality of the
offerings in our area markets — whether you're looking for a
quick meal for your family, an entire pre-prepared meal, or an
impressive salad or dessert to add to a party buffet.
Haggen's Market Street Café offers far and away the most
extensive selection of prepared foods in the area, with a
service deli, salad bar, sandwich shop and self-service soup
station. Its Orient Express and sushi section is my personal
favorite, although it's not offered at the Meridian Street
store.
A growing trend in recent years at grocery store convenience
counters has been rotisserie chicken. At Haggen, you will be
faced with a selection so vast it might stump you. Try any of
its five flavors of rotisserie chicken, roasted fresh every two
hours, from an Asian Oriental rub with Szechwan sauce, barbecue
rub with honey bourbon sauce, honey lemon pepper rub with lemon
glaze, savory garlic herb and butter rub, or country Dijon with
honey mustard glaze. Eating solo? You can also buy fried chicken
by the thigh, breast or leg.
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Grocery delis |
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Haggen
Barkley Village, 2900 Woburn St.
Meridian, 2814 Meridian St.
Sehome Village, 210 36th St.
Ferndale, 1812 Main St. Red Apple
Fairhaven, 1401 12th St. Swans Cafe/ Community Food Co-op
1220 N.
Forest St.
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Haggen's deli makes 20 different salads from scratch every
day, so you can easily grab a side dish to go with your chicken.
Inventive pasta, potato, vegetable and protein salads are all
sold by the pound at varying prices, so you can take home a
little or a lot.
My favorite side dish at Haggen is the baked potato salad, an
interesting twist on traditional potato salad. Cubes of soft
potato are mixed with sour cream, slivers of cheddar cheese,
bacon bits and scallions.
Sushi at Haggen is an affordable luxury. I recently stopped
on my way home and grabbed a package of eight bay shrimp rolls.
Sushi rice is hand-rolled around a thin layer of dried seaweed,
tightly hugging bay shrimp, avocado and cucumber. The outside of
each roll is then punctuated by sesame seeds.
Other sushi varieties include California rolls, orange rolls,
futomaki, Inari, smoked salmon, and more. Each package comes
with fiery wasabi, salty soy sauce and pickled ginger.
If you're not raring for raw food, Haggen's Orient Express
serves Chinese takeout that lets you choose three-, four- or
five-item meals or entire family packages that can easily feed
six people. My personal favorite is its chicken chow mein, which
can be purchased pre-packaged in the sandwich area of the store
or hot at the Orient Express counter.
The sandwich counter at Haggen is also phenomenal. I have a
vivid memory of being impressed by it when I first arrived in
Bellingham — we certainly didn't have sandwiches like that back
in Iowa. The grab-and-go case holds 32 different varieties of
traditional sandwiches, hoagies, wraps and paninis, all built
between slices of breads made from scratch in Haggen's bakery.
You can also custom-order sandwiches with an endless array of
fresh veggies, meats and cheeses.
And at the Barkley Village Haggen you'll find the Chef's
Counter, serving up chef-prepared meals from chicken cordon bleu
to beef stroganoff. The menu varies daily for lunch and dinner;
a menu can be picked up at the store. Meal combinations include
your choice of entree and sides plus a roll and a fountain
drink.
Admittedly, not all areas of Haggen's impressive Market
Street Café hit the bull's eye every time. You might get
tripped up by the jo jo potatoes, chicken strips, corn dogs,
bean burritos and the like. You have to hit them at the right
time. When the food is fresh and hot, it's tasty. But sometimes
the items sit too long and may not taste as tempting as they
look. Just take a minute to ask if it's a new batch; the
employees at Haggen are always friendly and helpful.
On-the-go dinners
Red Apple Markets also offer more than a few options for
on-the-go dinners. The Fairhaven Red Apple is less than a block
from my home, so I'm there often. I relish the strong community
feeling of the store and its warm, welcoming employees.
I was astonished by the homemade dinner entrees at Red Apple,
which include lasagna, mushroom tortellini, chicken parmesan,
shrimp alfredo, manicotti, pot pies, quiches and much more. So
often, these sorts of heat-it-up dishes are bland and
flavorless. Not at Red Apple.
The chicken enchiladas are packaged in differing sizes,
enough for one or two people, at $5.99 per pound. The two rolled
enchiladas were stuffed with tender white meat, green chilies,
slices of black olive and spicy enchilada sauce. The soft
tortilla rolls were then covered with an additional scoop of
flavorful enchilada sauce and crowned with freshly grated
cheddar cheese and a surfeit of scallions.
Lighter and healthier than a restaurant serving and
infinitely more fresh-tasting than a frozen entree, Red Apple's
chicken enchiladas won me over in a big way. I'm looking forward
to trying its other entrees.
Amy Pelham, assistant deli manager at the Fairhaven Red
Apple, regularly teaches cooking classes at Whatcom Community
College — and they always fill up fast. The popularity of her
classes is testament to the varied and interesting salads in Red
Apple's deli case.
Although on a smaller scale than Haggen, Red Apple serves
some of my favorite side salads. Its sesame noodle is a
favorite, swirling spaghettini in a soy sauce and ginger
dressing, threaded with red bell pepper and scallion, then
sprinkled with sesame seeds, black sesame seeds
Quick
chow
If you find yourself in need of a quick dinner idea after a
bout of downtown shopping, Swans Cafe inside the Community Food
Co-op has a variety of options that will make you look like a
celebrity chef with minimal effort.
My favorite make-it-quick option in the Co-op's deli case is
chicken fajita fixings, combining pieces of chicken breast and
thigh, onions, bell peppers and spices — plenty of spices — for
a lightning-fast stir fry.
Simply buy a container of the fajita mix, a bag of tortillas,
and you're set.
We also add a bit of grated cheddar cheese and a dollop of
sour cream for extra oomph. A head of green leaf lettuce rounded
out the meal and in less than 10 minutes we had a satisfying,
interesting dinner that won raves.
Other ready-to-cook Co-op offerings include tandoori chicken
breasts, sesame beef, two-mustard chicken, corned beef, gouda
spinach chicken, meatballs in marinara and cornbread-stuffed
pork loin. You can also buy whole ranger chickens, stuffed with
cornbread and ready for the oven.
This hectic time of year needn't cause headaches. Take
advantage of grocery store shortcuts to alleviate time-crunch
stress and find your way back to the spirit of the season.
