Funny looks at the supermarket

Yesterday was a bit of a write off.  Aaron was sick.  Hannah was sick. Or tired or something.  She was crying and throwing tantrums whenever she didn’t get her way.  Sounds like typical 2 year old stuff, but she only does that when she’s sick or really tired.  Daniel didn’t want to sleep.  Maybe he had a belly ache too.  Everyone but me.  Sigh (for them, not for me, I’m quite happy I didn’t have a belly ache!).  I never spend an entire morning at home, unless it’s when Aaron’s home and he takes Hannah somewhere so I can have a rest.  But yesterday, in addition to all the sick people, it was pouring down rain.  Pouring.  The kind where you look out the window and no matter how bored you are, you definitely don’t want to venture out there.

I must have gone soft.  I am, after all, from Washington State.  It’s always raining there….  Anyway, by the afternoon the rain had stopped.  Hannah and I were making cookies, but I didn’t have any baking powder, so we decided to venture to the supermarket, and finally get out of the house.

After walking around the supermarket for a little bit, in search of chicken soup for Aaron, and baking powder to finish the cookies, I got a bit hot.  They always crank up the heater on cold days and the aircon on hot days.  It’s never the right temperature…  I unzipped my jumper and kept shopping.  The supermarket was packed.  Seems everyone else was waiting for the rain to finish before venturing forth too.  People kept looking at me funny.  I thought maybe it was because I was wearing a backpack (nappies, spare clothes, and all the stuff you need for two kids just doesn’t fit in my purse, and a nappy bag hanging from my shoulder whilst carrying an infant and holding the hand of a toddler just doesn’t work.  So, backpack it is) and pushing around a double pram in the supermarket.

Then I got home, stepped out of the car, looked down for some odd reason, and it hit me.  I hadn’t actually pulled my shirt back down after breastfeeding Daniel before we left for the supermarket.  Sigh. Lucky for me I was wearing a breastfeeding singlet (tank top) under my normal shirt, so my belly wasn’t just hanging out, but I still looked very odd.  I’m sure one day I’ll forget to put my boob away after feeding and go out like that.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  I’m just that awesome.

Where’s the simmer sauce?

butter chicken simmer sauce

I knew I should have brought a jar of Butter Chicken simmer sauce (huh, googling that from here gets me to Amazon.com which says they have new from whatever price, and used from whatever price.  How can they sell a used bottle of simmer sauce????) from Australia.  I really wanted to make some for my parents as I assumed they hadn’t had it before.  I didn’t think it would be popular here in Washington, but I thought I’d at least be able to find some.  Yeah, yeah, I could have made some, but have you seen a butter chicken recipe?  There are heaps of different spices in it, it takes a while, and all the recipes are different, so after all that preparation, who knows if it would be good anyway.  Plus, by the time I bought all the spices and herbs that go in it, I might as well just take my parents out to dinner at an Indian restaurant.  If I could find one around here.

Humph, no Indian food (India Indian, not Native American Indian, in case you were confused) in the “international” aisle in the supermarket.  Alright, no problem.  Chicken Tonight has some butter chicken simmer sauce.  It’s not the best butter chicken in the world, but it’s better than nothing, and since my parents have never had it before, they wouldn’t know the difference anyway.  So I went to plan 2.  I stopped searching the aisles of the supermarket for the non-existent Indian section, and went instead in search of the simmer sauce section.  I dragged Hannah around the entire supermarket, practically kicking and screaming since she refused to be in the shopping trolley (seems she doesn’t like being buckled into tight spaces ever since the plane ride), and when I let her walk, she chose instead to run away giggling, like we were playing a game of chase-y.

I couldn’t find the simmer sauces anywhere.  “Excuse me,” I asked someone who worked there, “can you tell me where the Chicken Tonight is?”  She looked at me like I had just wet myself right there in the aisle.  She had no idea what the heck I was talking about.  “Chicken Tonight.  You know, ‘I feel like chicken tonight, like chicken tonight, like chicken tonight….'”  Yeah, I sang the jingle right there in the supermarket while wrestling with a wiggle worm toddler.

Now the worker looked at me like I had wet myself, then pooed myself and flung it around the store.  Seriously, I can’t be the only one that remembers that ad.  I saw it here in the U.S. when I was young.  Ok, so maybe she didn’t know specifically about Chicken Tonight, that’s fair enough.  “Can you tell me where the simmer sauce section is?”  Blank stare.

“You know, you brown the chicken, add the jar of sauce and then simmer until it’s cooked.”  Still no clue.

“We have sauce packets in Aisle 9.”  She told me.  I went to aisle 9.  They were sauce packets alright.  Powdered sauces, like hollandaise, that you reconstitute and pour over things.

Honey mustard chicken simmer sauce

I tried a different supermarket.  Went through the whole thing again.  They didn’t know what I was talking about either.  “What if you want to make honey mustard chicken quickly after work without starting it from scratch?”  I asked my parents.

“You don’t.”  They told me, again like I was going mad.  Why does everyone here think I’m a crazy person?

“We have nearly an entire aisle dedicated to simmer sauces in our supermarkets.”  I told them.  “Butter chicken, satay chicken, tandoori chicken, honey mustard chicken, mushroom chicken…”  Yeah, I sounded a bit (okay, a lot) like Forest Gump.

To make sure I wasn’t going mad, I looked up Chicken Tonight on Wikipedia when we got home from the supermarkets.   Seems it did originate here in the U.S., like I thought, but then it failed and still lives on in Australia, where we love our simmer sauces.

At least I’m not losing it, simmer sauces just don’t seem to exist in this country.