You’ve probably heard of Costco, one of those warehouse type stores that sells stuff in bulk. We buy stuff there for the office and have used it for stuff at home too. Good prices on most items if you can use the medium to large size quantities they typically sell. The downside to shopping there is that they rotate a lot of items and so you’ll see stuff that you don’t expect – something cool or interesting – and there’s another $10-$1000 in the cart! Impulse buying is rarely a good idea unless you have already decided in principle to buy something and just find a good deal on it, but I think they are pretty good at driving that behavior.

To offset that, I try to limit myself to one “extra” per trip. Most recently we browsing their fresh vegetable area (refreshingly cold in Fla!) and they had a large flat of blueberries, about 4 pounds worth. Sudden craving for blueberries, it was $5, why not?

My plan was for blueberry muffins, but 4 pounds of blueberries is a lot of muffins. The upside to that is it encourages tinkering in the kitchen, a definite bonus as things don’t always turn out well. I started with a recipe similar to this one and they were ok, maybe even good. Good enough to eat! My wife was grading them as ok, not thrilling. Tried a second batch with the same recipe, about the same. Dug around some and found a recipe in Cooks Illustrated (my favorite cooking magazine) that had an interesting twist; they created a blueberry jam/syrup to add some extra flavor. Definitely a step up, and the aroma of cooking blueberries was nice too! I think sharing the recipe probably pushes the limits of the copyright, so you have to pay up to get the details (hint: if you start to register and cancel they offer a one day free trial).

The lesson, if there is one, is when you do any type of project it’s not entirely reasonable to expect the first one to turn out perfect. Even if it does, there’s a lot of value in doing in a couple more times to reinforce lessons learned.

Next Friday we’ll talk about cheesecake!