Trader Joes – My Shallot Hero

Tonight I am having a church supper club at my house for dinner. It is about time. My friend Sara and I volunteered to do this ages ago and it took us forever to find a date. As the host house I am cooking the main course. I opted for a dried fruit stuffed pork loin because it is easy, very inexpensive and fairly healthy.

Since pork producers have started raising very skinny, almost waif like, model hogs, pork can be dry, that is as long as you are not cooking a shoulder. To help counter act my potentially dry bland roast I decided I wanted to make a shallot grainy mustard sauce to go along side the meat. The only problem is that shallots, that light purple- but look like small onions, are fifty times more expensive pound for pound at my regular grocery store than the meat.

I’m not sure if my grocery thinks that a mainly French food ingredient can hold ransom over cooks with certain taste and training, but it make me crazy. There is no reason the small onion like plant is so out priced. It is no harder to grow than onions or garlic, which are in the same family, but are not exactly substitutable in flavor.

Yesterday while I was at Trader Joes stocking up on my wild arugula bags, I turned and saw a small display with bags of four shallots each priced at .99¢! Sacra Blu! That is at least 500% less than my regular market. They were not a special, nothing at Trader Joes really is. They were just the fair price of the fine flavored ingredient.

I bought three bags dreaming of the omelets and dressings I could make with the tiny purple sweet darling. So hooray for Trader Joes. You are so much more than a store full of already prepared fine frozen tika masala and hundreds of trail mix combinations. I know you got a bad wrap this week for arsenic in your wine, but shallots at a fair price redeem you and are going to save the day in my dry meat department.