Gourmet food items, really cheap

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I once read an interview with the late Tammy Faye Baker where she announced that when she was depressed she liked to go shopping at T.J. Maxx! I have another friend who fights her depression by going to all the mark-down emporiums in one day: T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s, Tuesday Morning. She combs the aisles for bargains: “It has to be marked down from the mark-down price,” she told me.

OK, so I was game to go along on a couple of her outings. She spent way too much time looking at clothes (her taste is similar to the late Tammy Faye’s, if that’s any clue), so I wandered around and found that most of the stores have a gourmet food section with a lot of imported coffees, teas, cookies, mixes and such that are cheaper — not always a lot cheaper — than at traditional retail shops. Since my mother has a yen for Walker’s Pure Butter Shortbread, I was happy to find an 8.8-ounce package for less than five bucks at T.J. Maxx, where I also bought a package of Stonewall Kitchen Snickerdoodle Cookie Mix marked down to $3.50 and a really cheap package of Sticky Fingers Bakeries Cranberry Orange Muffins mix.

I’m not crazy about baking with mixes (they’re loaded with sugar and, typically, preservatives), but the Cranberry Orange Muffin batter wasn’t too bad after I tarted it up with fresh orange juice and a lot of fresh grated orange peel. I have some of the finished product to my friend Lorraine, who is fussy about sweets, and she liked them a lot, so I guess they pass muster.

I think I bought the bottle of Marsala marinade — for chicken — at Tuesday Morning, considerably marked down. It was more mushroom-y than Marsala, but it made for a pretty decent and inexpensive chicken dinner. Still, I was so hungry for real Chicken Marsala that I went out for dinner the next night to have some. Not so cheap, but, hell, I didn’t have to cook it.