Le Gourmet Chef & Woodman's Food Markets

Road trips are always an opportunity for use to explore which sometimes means taking side trips or little jaunts off of our route. We were making excellent time towards our destination thanks to Lucy the TomTom we borrowed from one of our kids. So we decided to make a couple of stops to do a little shopping.

Le Gourmet Chef

Our first stop was at the Prime Outlets at Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. The outlet is located at 111211 120^th Ave just off of I-294. My husband wanted to check the Nautica outlet so I headed over to Le Gourmet Chef. I love browsing through kitchen stores! Notice the word browsing because I still tend to be quite frugal in my purchases even though there are so many tempting goodies. I splurged on the KitchenAid® food strainer attachment at $49.99 but this will really help me in making sauces by reducing the strain of using the manual food strainer. I also bought a lemon zester and rosette maker but I displayed remarkable restraint at not buying a lot of other really neat kitchen goodies.

Purchases

Our next stop was at Woodman's Food Market located at 2919 N. Lexington Drive in Janesville, Wisconsin. Woodman's is an employee-owned supermarket chain in Wisconsin and northern Illinois. They have thirteen warehouse style stores. These stores are massive in the 200-250,000 square foot range, in comparison to the 50-75,000 square foot size of typical grocery stores. The one we stopped at had to be about 3 times the size of the Sam's Club we shop at. There is no way I could shop this size store on any regular basis. I found it too big, too massive, to over sensory stimulating just too big! I made it through about a third of the store before my husband rescued me.

What I like about stopping at different grocery stores is the variety of foods available. I tend to buy things I can't get at home, regional foods or foods I've seen on the FoodNetwork. When out of Canada I also have to be aware of what I can bring back into Canada. So it really is a very selective type of buying and while I do have a small list there is a bit of impulse buying.

My purchases (pictured): Morton's Tender Quick, pickling lime, rice flour, Thai sweet rice, green goddess deressing 100% pure key lime juice, Tahini and anchovy paste.

Note: The two fry coatings were bought at Cabella's not Woodman's but they insisted on getting into the photo shoot. :)