Adventures in Grocery Shopping

I don't know how many of you remember our little mishap at the grocery store when we bought the $24 cheese. Well, I have a couple more adventures for you this time. A common food here is falafel, which, according to Wikipedia is: a fried ball or patty made from spiced fava beans and/or chickpeas. We've had it a couple of times at restaurants and it's quite tasty. Well, we were in the frozen section of our grocery store and saw frozen falafel patties (we thought), and so we bought some to cook at home. They didn't taste quite the same as what we had tasted before, but still they were good. Good enough that we bought them a second time. This second time however, I thought to get out my Hebrew-English dictionary just out of curiosity. Instead of falafel, these were fish cakes! At least this incident didn't cause us any disgust, as we all like fish. Unlike our next mishap; which did cause us disgust! This past Sunday we were shopping and we needed some ground beef. The ground beef here isn't very good, and it's pretty fatty; yet we still have to pay about $5 a pound for it. We were used to grinding our own beef before, so we decided to do that here as well. We were looking through the frozen section again and noticed a beef roast that was a very good price; so we picked it up. When we got it home I decided to look up the words on the package just to be sure of what we had. The few words I could pick out were: roast, shoulder, heifer, and beef. That sounded okay; so we got ready to grind our beef. Taking it out of the package we noticed that it felt very slimy and it was very red for something so that had been frozen and was so inexpensive, but we went ahead. Our first major clue that something was wrong was when it came out of our grinder as a gelatinous glob. Hmmmm, I don't think beef does that. We decided to cook a small piece of this substance and see if it tasted like beef when it was done. My husband got to be the guinea pig (lucky him); was this going to be beef.......? He spit it out just about as fast as he had taken the bite. He said it felt rubbery and he couldn't even describe the taste. We came to the conclusion that I must have missed a few important words on the package. It must have said something like, "Beef Substitute" or "Beef By-Product". We now refer to it as "Bef", since it fell short of being "Beef". Our parents would have a heart attack, but we had to toss it in the trash and count it as a loss. I think we'd both rather go a week without beef than to eat that.
Then there are those mistakes that were just funny. Like the time my husband was picking out yogurt. He found one that had a picture of bananas on the side and picked up an eight pack of it. He tried one the next day and told me it was the best yogurt he ever had! So, I let the kids have some the next morning at breakfast and they too were singing it's praises. Well, by now I had to have a taste of this yogurt to see what all the commotion was about. It was very good....however it was not yogurt. This "healthy" cup of goodness that I was giving my children was actually pudding! At least this was a very tasty mistake.
I have had a lot of misinterpretations with the breakfast cereals as well. I try to buy healthy, non-sugary cereals for my children. At least 4 times that I can think of I have picked up something that looked nice and plain but then brought it home and found the little bit of English on the package that reveals a name such as "Sugar Squares". I have since learned to look much closer at the packaging for that little bit of English. There have been many other mistakes such as black olives in a vinegar brine, pickles that are barely palatable, and tomato paste instead of sauce; but we are slowly learning. All in all, it has been a fun (and expensive) experience!