Saturdays

Saturday is a special day... isnt' it?!!? It is for me and my cute hubby. Anyone that talks with Tony for any length of time soon realizes that he has a lot of ideas and plans - as well as excitement to share these ideas and plans with others. I am the benficiary of his excitement - being his wife - since I get to go about with him visiting interesting locations. Often we have these types of adventures on Saturday - the only day of the week that we truly get to spend completely together. We tend to be protective about our Saturdays since we love being together with nothing more important to do than run errands, head out to a faraway country fair, or take a drive up the Delaware River. Every Saturday is fun since we're together.

This week, Tony decided that we were going to visit Illg's Meats (www.illgsmeats.com) - a German meat wholesaler about 20 minutes away from our home. It was perfect weather, and Tony put a cooler in the Jeep with some ice so that we could purchase things and keep them cold until we got home later in the day. The place was as farmy as you get in the extensive Philly suburbs, and you get to drive down a country lane to get to their store. Inside this little building is just a huge meat counter and some various imported (mostly German) specialty foods. The meats we got were as follows: some amazing canadian bacon (which I don't usually like), all-beef weiners for the 4th of July (ostensibly our reason for going to Illg's in the first place), black forest ham sliced for sandwiches, and some sweet Italian sausage. I was perusing the specialty foods (not as much of a meat-eater) and found a Kinder bueno chocolate bar and a Milka Noissettes bar - both of which were very yummy (even Tony said so) and reminiscent of my time in Romania when we would search out the best imported chocolates on a regular basis. All of this stuff was less than $25 which I thought was a pretty good deal!



Tony then thought it would be fun to go to a fish market he had heard about that wasn't all that far from Illg's, so we went to Heller's Seafood. This ended up just being a store in a strip mall and it wasn't that large and it definitely wasn't cheap. I do think the fish were fresh though - I just didn't think we could afford them! Tony got some nice looking medium-sized shrimp (the cheapest shrimp they had) and I got one piece of Canadian farm-bred salmon (the cheapest salmon they had) and these two things came to much more than everything we got at Illg's! I was eyeing a gorgeous tuna steak, but it was over $20/lb. No thanks! I grilled the salmon for dinner with a honey-mustard and parsley marinade and it was downright yumminess. I didnt try the shrimp which Tony offered to share - I just can't get past the fact that you have to tear the poor creatures legs off before you eat it!

We ran a few other errands before running home, and Tony then did some much-needed weeding in our garden (thanks to the torrential rains of last week) while I ran out to do some MORE errands. I know my dear, wonderful husband will have something else exciting planned for us one of these Saturdays... and it's always fun to go along for the ride!