Super Mercado

I went to the supermarket today in South Texas and it was quite the experience. Since we are in south, south Texas most of the population is Hispanic and the stores and shops cater to their wants and needs. My visit to one of the local H-E-B supermarkets proved to be a very interesting trip.

When you walk into the store there are fruits and vegetables galore, just stacks and stacks of all kinds of peppers and right next to them are all the Mexican cheeses. I've never seen so many cheeses...and this was just the Mexican cheeses. What we would call 'regular' cheeses had their own section.

Of course there are tortillas, lots of tortillas!

There were shelf after shelf of tortillas. Stacks and stacks of them and they even had a tortilla making machine and oven and made them fresh in the store.

They had several warming chests that held the freshly made tortillas. Just take out how many you want, bag them up and take them home.

They had one aisle dedicated to the different flours and necessities for making tortillas and tamales. Corn meal, corn flour, masa and corn shucks all there for home use.

 Of course if you make tortillas, at least authentic tortillas, you need lard. And they had a little bit of lard for sale too.

 And the spices! They had one entire aisle of bagged spices from Mexico.

The meat department was just phenomenal! The fresh meat counter was the longest I have ever seen and the meat was just stacked upon itself. So fresh looking and so many different types of meat. A carnivores dream!

Beautiful briskets and racks and racks of ribs filled several meat cases.

Of course there were also some things that we don't always find in our typical supermarkets.

Rolls of pork skins.

Beef tripe.

And I know it's hard to make out, but it is what you might think it is. It's a whole pig's head. There was an entire cooler filled with these. Something I can say I have never seen before! I had to do a double take to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

Something else we don't typically see in our supermarkets are the sale of religious icons and statutes.

Where we have flower departments and balloons included in our markets they also have pinatas and the required candy.

It was quite an experience going through this store and I know I didn't even see half of their inventory. Guess that gives me a reason to go back and see what else I can see that I wouldn't see in my own stores.