In which I stare at a wall of jams and have a cultural disconnect. An experience from this afternoon.

Employee of Cardullo's: Hello, can I help you find anything?

Me: (holding a jar of apricot jam already) Yes, please. Do you carry prune and poppy?

E.C.: I'm sorry, we don't sell poppy seeds, but we have prunes right over here.

(The prunes are in a plastic container with a Cardullo's sticker on them and otherwise indistinguishable from the significantly less expensive kind I have at home already, waiting to be made into prune filling if I can't locate any of the storebought kind. Which I was hoping to do at a store with a wall of jams.)

Me: Thanks, but I was looking for prune preserves. And poppy seed paste. I'm making hamantashn.

E.C.: Oh. (after showing me the shelf with tins of almond and pistachio paste, which is not what I'm looking for, either) We only carry those around the holidays.

Me: (mentally) What holidays? What other holidays are there where people buy up stores of poppy seed paste? Bake Mohntaschen? Do you have a run on hamantash fillings around Passover? Do you only celebrate the Latke-Hamantash Debate in this town? And while I'm being incredulous, the holidays? (aloud) Do you know anywhere else around here that sells them, then?

E.C.: No. They're specialty items.

Me: Thank you.

(I purchase a jar of damson jam, because it is plummy and unusual, and my original jar of apricot jam, resisting the employee's hard sell on a different brand, and a couple of caramels because some of them are the salt kind I like and others are made with balsamic vinegar and that's either a stroke of genius or a terrible idea—it's the former, fortunately—and I leave.)

Ask nineweaving; she was there.

On the bright side, even though I had to go to Lexington because we still don't have a functioning oven at home, I made nearly six dozen hamantashn tonight. The flavors are apricot, damson, strawberry (only a few, because the jam liquefied while baking), homemade prune (needed more soaking time, but the taste is good—sweetened with honey and cinnamon), and homemade poppy (totally unsuccessful, but I ate one as soon as it came out of the oven anyway. Tasted like a bagel. Not enough honey. Next year with more prep time). Some of them are coming to phi's birthday tomorrow. derspatchel ate one of the apricots when I got home and involuntarily patted his tummy.

So my day was, ultimately, emotionally and traditionally satisfying, and as a side effect of baking at my parents' house, I got to see the completed redecoration of my ex-bedroom into a nursery for the days every week my mother is babysitting her grandchild (it has a violet accent wall, a crib my father built, and art from four generations), but seriously, I didn't think either prunes or poppy seeds were that obscure.