Free downloadable PDF: The Ultimatest Grocery List!
NEW! Grocerylists.org is proud to present a free, pre-formatted grocery list available for download.

This kick-ass templated grocery list features hundreds of common — and commonly forgotten — grocery items and a few helpful shopping reminders, too.

The Ultimatest Grocery List is an 8.5x11" Letter-sized PDF (just 220k) formatted for all home and office printers (A4 is available too!) and is a completely free download. Posted at 6:07 PM Central Time

Happy Halloween!
It's Halloween, so have a listen to the original radio broadcast of War of the Worlds available at The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The hour-long MP3 is available for free.

"The finest radio drama of the 1930s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them... All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format)." Posted at 8:11 AM Central Time

Make creepy-crawly cakes for Halloween
From Not Martha: "I had planned to bake a Halloween dessert this year, but an unrelated baking accident left me with a burned thumb (poor me), so I had to look to easier options. I turned to Hostess and Little Debbie snack cakes for the bodies of crawly spider like creatures, and used Pocky to form legs. I managed to find Pocky in a variety of colors and textures, here is what I used: regular Pocky, coconut and milk chocolate Pocky for the texture, Kurogo (poppy seed) Pocky because it is black (!!) and Goka (fruit and nut) Pocky because it somewhat matched the orange Halloween edition Hostess Glo Balls." Posted at 10:54 PM Central Time

Shopping for olive oil? Here's guidance
"Olive oil isn't a no-brainer. Flavors change a great deal from one region to the next, with Spain being the world's largest producer, which makes a big difference in the way your dishes taste. Keep the following shopping tips in mind when in a store, and you'll have your guests coming back for more of your fabulous cooking..." Posted at 7:56 AM Central Time

Putting the wash before the cart
"That grocery cart you're putting your food, handbag and toddler into? It's teeming with germs. Consider the handle. It's been touched by untold numbers of hands that have changed diapers, mopped up runny noses, picked up packages of raw chicken and meat, and been coughed on, sneezed in and drooled on... A start-up company in Green Bay, Wis., believes it has a remedy. PureCart Systems, a sort of drive-through washer that sanitizes grocery carts, made its debut last November at a Festival Foods store in De Pere, Wis., and was installed recently at another Festival in Oshkosh. It works by coating the carts with a safe mist of a peroxide-based disinfectant. The same solution is used to clean dialysis machines and poultry processors." Posted at 8:19 AM Central Time

Woman injured by falling grocery cart
"When Ralphs employee Shantie Muraj prepared to raise the flag outside her store early Saturday she was hit on the head by a grocery cart pranksters had hoisted to the top of the flagpole, police said." Posted at 8:16 AM Central Time

Learn How To Plan Your Meals To Free Up Your Time
"Meal planning and bulk cooking are both wonderful techniques you can utilize and modify to fit your family's needs. The idea behind this is simple. The principle is that you cook and or prepare your meals ahead of time and then preserve them by either freezing or fridgerating them. Also, meal planning you can cook one large meal and get 2-3 other meals out of it! The key here is to make every meal you cook count!" Posted at 1:39 PM Central Time

Trolley good show: Metallic art
"Dumped supermarket trolleys litter our rivers and canals. Now one artist is rescuing them... to create these incredible wire sculptures that celebrate our water wildlife..." Posted at 8:09 AM Central Time

100 more lists, 1 new book
To celebrate the fact our awesome new book based on this site, MILK EGGS VODKA: Grocery lists lost and found, is available for presale -- we added another 100 lists.

One of them, #1301, is a gem. Note the item about 2/3 of the way down. Yes, it says "coochie wash." Found in a Wal-Mart in Niagara Falls, New York (thanks pyrcedgrrl!). Have you found a good shopping list lately? Send it in! Posted at 8:16 AM Central Time

LifeHacking Your Grocery List
"'The cupboards are full and there's 'nothing' to eat'. Has that phrase ever echoed through your kitchen? Do you have stacks of food items that don't really go together taking up space? Do you throw away food items in your refrigerator because you didn't get around to making the item you bought it for or just plain forgot about it? Do you have 3 jars of peanut butter or 5 bottles of ketchup because you forgot you already bought some?" Posted at 9:35 PM Central Time

Down the Other Aisle
"I've heard single friends say that the grocery store is a great place to meet someone new. Apparently, the meat market can be just that, and the contents of one's cart offer a revealing peek at potential compatibility. But I believe they stock married bliss in grocery stores, too. Sara and I got to know each other while sharing a shopping cart. She likes hot dogs and applesauce -- together. I married her anyway. I can't make tuna salad without sweet-pickle relish, chopped pecans, and curry powder, so I'm not exactly one to talk." Posted at 9:50 AM Central Time

Source of Deadly E. Coli Is Found
"Cattle manure collected from a California ranch under investigation by federal and state authorities contains the same strain of E. coli that killed three people and sickened nearly 200 in a recent outbreak linked to tainted spinach, federal and state food safety officials said Thursday." Posted at 2:50 AM Central Time

Shopping tips help cut cost of going organic
"Good news for organic consumers: A 10-year surge in sales of food has made buying organic cheaper. Five years ago, consumers paid up to 50 percent more for tomatoes, chicken, milk and other organic foods. Today, smart shoppers can convert from conventional to organic foods without taking a night job." Posted at 8:25 AM Central Time

Free books: It's the October GLC giveaway!
UPDATE: The books are gone! | It's fall. Halloween is just around the corner and I've got a super-creepy food book and a warm and comfy science story about wine. Yay for you!

The first person to write in and request one of the books linked below gets it for free during our 10th Monthly GLC Book Giveaway of 2006. Limit one per person and you must request a specific book and send me your mailing address -- although we won't use your email or postal address for anything other than sending you the book. Email me for a free book while they last!

Gone! Sent to Jane of Jersey City, New Jersey!
Fierce Food: The Intrepid Diner's Guide to the Unusual, Exotic, and Downright Bizarre | "Is comfort food getting a little too comfortable? Then grab a plate at the Fierce Food buffet, where the world's most extraordinary foods are dished up for your pleasure. Start the meal with Mexican chapulines, or grasshoppers, and then move along to the Kazakhstan boiled sheep's head, where the eyeball is reserved for the most honored guest. And if necessary, ease your queasy stomach with dried clay. An alphabetical survey of the world's most amazing and unusual edibles, Fierce Food describes what these foods are and where they're from, and how they're captured, foraged, or, even putrefied. Readers also learn how the foods are traditionally served and eaten-and best of all, what they taste like, because if you can't actually bring yourself to eat Filipino embryonic duck eggs, reading about it is the next best thing. Fierce Food is a fascinating exploration of global cultures that definitively proves the old adage, 'one man's meat is another man's poison.'" —Amazon.com (List price: $14.00)

Gone! Sent to Lynn of Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania!
The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World | "In the mid-1860s, after countless centuries of bearing the fruit that would become wine, French grapevines began to wither and die in ever increasing numbers and no one knew why. It started in southeastern France, in the Rhone Valley, as Christy Campbell tells the tale in his masterful The Botanist and the Vintner. Within 30 years the inexorable rolling disaster that was the phylloxera infestation had reached into every nook and cranny of France's wine making regions, destroying nearly all. Everywhere the wine grape grew -- England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe, and even Australia -- phylloxera appeared and took no prisoners. Except for American grape vines. The little bug didn't seem to have much taste for the skunky wines of native American grapes. Christy Campbell, British journalist and, if The Botanist and the Vintner is any example, master storyteller, waltzes the reader into the middle of a fascinating tale of discovery and combat and never stops dancing. The book reads like a detective novel, a page-turner you can't put down. And it's about a bug, phylloxera, a root-sucking aphid that absolutely wiped clean the grand vineyards of France and thrived in defiance of both peasant remedy and all that "modern" science could bring to bear." —Amazon.com (List price: $14.95)

Love,
The GLC Crew and keaggy.com Posted at 8:34 PM Central Time

Number 1 among the plethora of lists?
"Want to put together an insider's rating for refrigerator magnets? It's been done. Hope to assemble the all-time most intriguing items that ever appeared on a grocery list? That's been done, too. In fact, it's a 240-page book. 'Milk Eggs Vodka,' by Bill Keaggy will be published by HOW Books in a few months, based around the author's collection of grocery lists he found abandoned in carts, blowing around in the Safeway parking lot or flapping feebly in the gutter. The enterprising Mr. Keaggy has assembled and organized 1,300 of these lists to reveal that a surprising percentage of Americans do not know how to spell mayonnaise, banana, anchovy and yogurt." Posted at 8:34 AM Central Time

How Much is Inside a Shopping Cart?
"Shopping carts are one of the simplest forms of herd robot. A single store can support a huge corral of shopping carts in a vibrant, active community. The shopping carts from a large store can make many, many migrations through the store each day, or rest outside within bounds of the parking lot, socializing and nesting with other carts. As new carts approach mating age, they will spend more of their days roaming the perimeter of the parking lot, away from the other carts, far from safety. Sometimes they are maimed or destroyed by delivery trucks." Posted at 1:06 PM Central Time

The top ten things food companies don't want you to know
"The giant food corporations have one mission: selling more food and beverage products to consumers. Succeeding with that mission depends on keeping consumers in the dark on certain issues such as the presence cancer-causing chemicals found in popular food products. Here are ten things the food corporations, whose products dominate grocery store shelves across the United States and other countries, absolutely do not want you to know." Posted at 12:55 PM Central Time

'The Cake Frenzy' in Philadelphia
GLC superstar contributor Nancy Bea Miller is having a food-themed art opening this weekend. If you're in the Philly area, check it out!

"My new body of work does not have an official name, but I am thinking of it as 'The Cake Frenzy'. Come to the show and you will see why. I have about sixteen pieces of new work, most of which involve cake and other baked goods. This is certainly not new subject matter for me, as you may know, but I think I may have taken it to a new level of obsession. Oh well! ... If by chance you are in town and you want come to the Sunday reception please be aware that cake will be served! Coffee and tea too and live classical guitar music. I'll be standing by the refreshment table, of course, admiring the food and wondering which pieces I can take home to paint."

"Recent Work"
October 4-29, 2006
Artists' House Gallery
57 North Second Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
www.artistshouse.com

First Friday: October 6, 5-8:30 pm
Sunday Reception: October 8, 1-4 pm Posted at 8:04 AM Central Time

A visual grocery list?
I got this email last month from someone looking for help making a grocery list that spans languages (to a degree). If you have any ideas, send them to me and I'll pass them along.

Hi

I live with my Russian mother in law who speaks no English... I struggle with Russian. One of our biggest challenges is when she gives me her grocery shopping list, hand written in Russian. I wish I could print out a pictorial grocery list for her to circle, etc. Any suggestions?

Greg

My idea was to save labels/cartons/etc from various commonly needed foods in two boxes or envelopes. One box is labeled "DON'T NEED" and the other is "NEED." The mother-in-law could move the desired product from the "DON'T NEED" box into the "NEED" box whenever she wants that product from the store. This would probably be easier than using clip art or something like that. For example, "Greg" could just rinse and cut out a panel from a milk carton, cut the front off a pasta box, etc... What do you think? Posted at 6:39 PM Central Time