#111: From Corner Market to Cookbook Author: An Interview with Carol Ann Kates

In this special episode, Roni and Riley sit down with Carol Ann Kates, award-winning author, former grocer, and expert in all things food and shopping. Carol Ann shares her story of growing up in her family’s grocery store, co-owning a chain of markets in Northern Colorado, and turning decades of experience into practical tools for home cooks.

You’ll hear about the real-life challenges of running a family business, her favorite childhood memories at the store, and what inspired her to write Grocery Shopping Secrets.

This conversation is full of heartfelt stories, practical wisdom, and good laughs. Don’t miss her tips on avoiding common shopping mistakes!

Find Carol online:

Website: https://www.carolannkates.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolannkates/

Get Carol's Blog Recipes!

• Banana Pancakes: https://www.carolannkates.com/post/cooking-for-aiden-he-loves-buttermilk-banana-pancakes
• Grilled Artichoke Hearts: https://www.carolannkates.com/post/grilled-artichoke-hearts

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Contact us: podcast@plantoeat.com

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Transcript

Carol Ann Interview
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[00:00:00] I'm Riley and I'm Roni. And this is the plan to eat podcast, where we have conversations about meal planning, food, and wellness. To help you answer the question what's for dinner. 

Roni: Hello and welcome back to the plan to eat podcast. Today we have a very special interview with Carolann Kates. She is the award-winning author of Grocery Shopping Secrets that we have been breaking down and that we still have a couple more episodes to break down. So just a quick bio of who Carol Ann is. She is an award winning, award-winning author, former grocer, and an expert in all things food and shopping.

She grew up, in her family's corner market here in northern Colorado, which is where Plan to Eat is based, and she learned from her father that great meals start with great ingredients. She went on to co-own and operate the supermarkets that her dad started, for multiple decades and gained deep [00:01:00] insight into American cooking and grocery shopping habits.

She's the author of not only grocery shopping secrets, but cooking seasonally in Colorado and secret recipes from the corner market. She also talks in this episode that she's working on. She's been working on a memoir for several, several years, and she's just an expert in saving money, buying better food, and making the most outta your grocery shopping trip.

Riley: This interview with Carol Ann is just, I don't know, so sweet. I just enjoyed speaking with her, hearing about, her childhood, her funny jobs and funny things that happened. And it's just so neat to get to interact with a woman who lives nearby and is just. Chockfull of so much information. There's a little funny segment in the, show where we talk and she says that she wanted to bag her groceries, but the girl at the store says she's been trained to do it.

And I just have to laugh because this woman is an expert in all things grocery store. And so it's just, it was lovely to get to speak to her and hear, um, more of her knowledge. And just to plug this book [00:02:00] again, it is such a guide to the grocery store. It has everything you could possibly wanna know about.

The groceries you're buying, how to store them, how to choose them. Uh, so go and buy her book and just like absorb all of her knowledge.

Roni: we hope you enjoy this interview with Carolyn Kates. 

Hi, Carol Ann, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Carol Ann: It's my pleasure.

Roni: Why don't you just give us the quick snippet of who you are and what you do.

Carol Ann: Uh, well, I was born in Fort Collins. My father had a grocery store in Fort Collins. The first one was at one 13 East Oak. Uh, he opened another one on the corner of Mountain and Howes, which is across from where the Catholic Church is. 

So I grew up in the grocery business. I graduated from high school and went to [00:03:00] college. I started at CSU. I ended up transferring to the University of Washington. I got my degree in anthropology, which was very fascinating, but totally useless on the job market. I, uh, when I got, when I got done with college, I worked for an oil company and, uh, started as a land secretary in advance to a landman.

Uh, my father died in 1979 and my mother died in 1984, and then I inherited, co-ownership of Steel's Market. Uh, my husband and I lived in Denver at the time. He was selling, uh, real estate and owned jewelry stores. In fact, if you remember the jewelry emporium in Fort Collins, he founded that and Su, Susan Harrison bought it from him.

When we opened the Harmony Store, that when we inherited the grocery [00:04:00] stores, we moved back to Fort Collins. We, uh, closed in 2001. Uh, at that time we had six grocery stores, nine pharmacies, and we owned and operated our own bakery production facility, which was picked, uh, as the in-store bakery of the year by Retail Bakers of America in 1991.

It was a pretty darn good. We had at the time we closed, we had three stores in Fort Collins, one in Windsor, one in niwot, and one in Fort Morgan. We opened a big news store on the corner of Drake and Shields in 1999, uh, December of 1999. In February of 2000, the city closed the road in front of it. Our customers had trouble getting to it.

We did about a [00:05:00] hundred. We were doing $390,000 a week after the road closed. We were doing 190.

Riley: Whoa.

Carol Ann: It was a significant hit to our business. Uh, the road was closed for six months. Uh, the day the road opened, our supplier tried to take us over, which was really a fun experience. Uh, they sent a guy in, we had never met before, named Jack had a key, and he said, give us a million dollars or Give us your keys today.

Uh, we spent from 10 in the morning till midnight. Uh, negotiating with them. Every time they'd make an offer, they would call their CEO and he would rescind it and make the offer worse. By midnight that night, we hadn't made an offer. Uh, so they went home, they went back to Minneapolis, we slept on it and decided to fight them in federal [00:06:00] court.

Uh, we did, we hired a firm in Denver. We fought them in federal court and won because they had RICO violations, but it cost us a million dollars, and it was just difficult to recover from that. We filed for chapter 11 in February of 2001. We had our plan approved in August. Then Super Walmart opened on the corner of Lame and Mulberry, and it takes three months for a grocery store to get their sales back.

So our creditors forced us into chapter 11. It was pretty painful.

Riley: Oh, sounds like it.

Carol Ann: three years of stress. Um, I know you had a question. What was my favorite job? As an adult, and that was creating recipes for our ad. So if we had pork chops in the ad, I did a pork chop recipe, and as time got on and I got a little better [00:07:00] at doing recipes, then I would try to include three or four items that were in the ad in that recipe.

So when we closed, I had hundreds of recipes. I, um, started writing my memoir at that time. Busted but not broken. And I drove my husband crazy. He said, you have all these wonderful recipes. Why don't you do a recipe book? So I wrote Secret Recipes from the Corner Market. Uh, it won three national awards and was picked in the top 10 favorite by the Denver Post.

I sewed that in craft fairs and um. Farmer's Market. I believe I'm the only award-winning cookbook author that is a former grocer. So to set myself apart in that cookbook, I did include some grocery insider wisdom on how to select and store perishables. after I wrote my cookbook, I did [00:08:00] manufacture food and sell it in farmer's markets and craft fairs, and I did that for several years.

Our daughter fell and got a closed head injury and so our granddaughter came to live with us. I found it really difficult to, uh, manufacture food, do farmer's markets, craft fairs, and raise my granddaughter. So I retired in about 2013. I have, uh, found I love writing. I had a food column for the Colorado and for a while and I did do the Boulder County Farmer's Market, so I, uh, had a food column for them.

And so I really started loving going to the farmer's market and buying what is seasonal and combining the seasonal ingredients into recipes. So I do have enough recipes for another cookbook. I want to get my memoir out [00:09:00] and. I have written a historical fiction novel, which I want to get out, and I was a little leery of social media, so I started doing social media before COVID.

Uh, and the young man that helped me was named Bobby Crew. Bobby writes horror and he likes snakes, so we have nothing in common. Uh, but during the process I started doing recipes with shopping information in, in my blog, and then COVID came and food prices started rising. So Bobby asked me to write. A blog on how to, uh, save money at the grocery store.

So through Bobby's encouragement, I put together grocery shopping secrets. Some of that information is in my cookbook, but I actually did spend about a year and a half expanding it. So it is much more detailed than my [00:10:00] cookbook. It's won 10 national awards, which I'm really proud of. And I did my Amazon bestseller campaign and it was number one in the us, um, Australia and France in my categories.

So I was pretty excited about that,

Riley: We've been so impressed with, how thorough it is. There is nothing you have left out. I don't think there's anything you've left out of this book. It has been such a joy to read and, um, I've learned so much about how to select the right produce and every chapter that we go through, I learn something totally new that I never, had heard before about selecting produce or the right dairy product.

And so I, I'm really impressed with the book.

Carol Ann: Oh, well thank you so much. I did, I did spend a lot of time on it

Riley: You can tell. I can tell. I can tell. It is, it's incredibly thorough.

Carol Ann: and I, one of the things I was really pleased to add was how to freeze things. [00:11:00] So like when eggs, they say the price of eggs are coming down, but I don't see it at King Soupers unless you buy their, their brand.

Riley: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: Especially when eggs were so high, I was really happy to have that tip in the book because like if you make a creme brulee and you only use the yolks, then you're throwing away egg whites

so it's really nice to know you can freeze them. I was only able to listen to your first podcast, but you did mention the Engine two Diet and my daughter did.

Learn of another diet, which is called the Whole 30 Diet and a woman. Have you heard of

Roni: Mm-hmm.

Riley: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: Um, so I didn't include that in the book because I didn't, I hadn't come across it. That's the one thing that if I do a revision, I will add,

Riley: If that's the only thing you left out, I think you're doing incredibly well.

Carol Ann: oh, [00:12:00] well thank.

Roni: We, we've been talking about it for the last couple episodes and we've, Riley and I both just keeps telling everybody, you need to buy a copy of this book. We've learned so much. I feel so much more empowered at the grocery store. Even just the simple things of. You know, how to pick a watermelon, how to pick a cantaloupe.

I feel like we, we talked in, in the last episode a little bit about how I feel like there's like a lure around like, oh, you, you know, you knock on it to see if it's hollow or you do the things, but you never know which one is the right one. So it's really nice to have just a single source of truth of somebody who really has experience with it to be like, now I can go to the grocery store and I know that the thing I'm doing is not crazy and it's actually the right thing to do.

Carol Ann: I. Think, particularly since COVID, the quality of the produce we get is not as good as it used to be. And it, it's really frustrating to me. [00:13:00] I know, my husband loves cauliflower, so I was at the grocery store trying to buy some cauliflower and they all had brown spots on them, which means they're starting to decay.

Roni: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: And I said to the produce clerk, do you have any other cauliflower that doesn't have brown spots? And she said, no, this just came in. It's just off the truck. So it's, I think it's harder to get good produce and you know, I go in sometimes and there'll be peppers that are just very wrinkly, you know, and you just don't want that.

So I think it's good to know those things.

Riley: I think it's, if that's the case, that produce is lower quality across the board, it's even more important to know what you're looking for because you can't just trust what's there. You have to have your own knowledge in your back pocket and say, I can't just hope for the best. That this is the right thing.

I need to know for sure that these brown [00:14:00] spots indicate this, or wrinkly peppers mean this, or, or whatever the case is for whatever, grocery item you're buying. It's even more important to know. Yeah.

Roni: So with your knowledge of grocery store and how all of the supply chain and everything works, what's, what do you think is the cause of not getting as good a produce in the last few years? Is it just supply chain issues?

Carol Ann: It was during COVID. I don't think it's that case anymore. I, I did ask one of the produce managers in King Soupers why he thought that was the case, and he told me because there's more people to feed.

Roni: Hmm.

Carol Ann: I don't think that's necessarily true. Um, that food should be worse because there's more people.

My son-in-law is a king, super store manager, which has been really fun to have them in the. Uh, he doesn't notice that it's lower quality, [00:15:00] but I certainly do.

Riley: Hmm.

Carol Ann: I did notice one time, uh, when I was in buying avocados, because you shouldn't refrigerate avocados until they're ripe, because that slows the ripening process.

They were cold, and so produce manager told me that they shipped them in the refrigerated truck. So when we bought our produce, the avocados didn't come in a refrigerated truck. So I think some of it may be, um, deterioration in shipping procedures,

Riley: Fascinating.

Carol Ann: trying to save money.

Riley: Yeah. If you're okay with going back in time a little bit, I would love to hear about, just like your favorite memory of growing up in a grocery store. I know there's gotta be some unique things about growing up around and in a grocery store that other people did not experience. , so if you'd love to talk, I'd, I'd just like to hear you talk about that.

[00:16:00] And maybe in that your favorite and least favorite jobs that you had.

Carol Ann: Well, my very favorite memory was wr writing cardboard boxes down the conveyor belt. Uh, the very first store we had was very small, and all the back stock was kept in the basement, and there was a long conveyor belt that went from the back door to the top of the basement, and then a conveyor belt that went down the basement. I grew up in a very, I had a very humdrum, humdrum childhood that was a little boring. So my father worked every Sunday and on Sundays my brother and I would tag along to the grocery store with him. And our big treat was to get a raw hot dog out of the meat department and eat that. And then we would go find empty cardboard boxes and.[00:17:00] 

We would put the box at the very top of the conveyor belt and he'd get in and I'd push him down and it was very dangerous. You would have to lean into the wall or the box would just fly off. Uh, so that was my favorite fun memory. Um, the very first job I had, um, I wasn't tall enough to reach the counter, nor was my brother.

My brother was two years younger than I was, and at that time my dad sold potatoes in brown bags, so he would fill them up with potatoes and stapled the top shut. My brother wasn't old enough to print, so I would print red potatoes, 10 pounds, 29 cents. We'd standing on the milk milk crate. He would stand on his milk crate and put the potatoes in.

Then I would put them on the scale and weigh them, and then we'd staple it shut. And I [00:18:00] was just so proud of my handwriting. My dad put the sacks out to be sold, that there was my handwriting.

I do have a story about my dad that, a couple of stories I'd like to tell you about my dad.

When I was a little girl, he said, I want to show you my secret place. So we had a bunch of boxes stacked. Um, his office was upstairs, sort of on a mezzanine level so he could look out and see everything that was going on, the going on in the store. He, he had this place where he had boxes and he moved them away and they were mostly what he called the then cash paid outs or invoices.

So he moved them away and we crawled into the attic, and the attic was two by fours. He had stretched, uh, long boards across the attic. So we walked [00:19:00] across the boards and he had laid plywood down over the check stands, and he said, lay down here, and looked through this hole. So I looked through the hole and there with a check stands.

So he, he told me, because having money missing. In the grocery business, there's always theft and it's can damage. You can knock out all your profits for the year. So when money was missing, 

he would pretend he was going home for dinner and he would go into the alley and when no one was looking, he would climb the telephone pole and go into the attic through the heating unit and he would. there and see who was stealing money. Now, as I got older, I came home from high school, early one day, and if I hadn't have come home early, I wouldn't have known this [00:20:00] story. But my dad was sitting at the table eating his lunch and my mom went to the mailbox, which was on the front porch. She came back and she said, dad, there's a letter for you from an attorney.

And she put it down on the table. And my dad didn't like attorneys because they were always costing him money. So he let it sit there for a long time. And finally he opened it. And he said, why now? Why after all these years? I said, what happened, dad? What's wrong? And. My mom who had read the letter over his shoulder said, well, she's old enough to know.

So finally he said that when in the thirties he worked for Op sks in Denver on First and Broadway, and he was the store manager, which meant that he worked. Six days a week from five in the morning till 11 at night. And on Sundays he had to go up in the mountains and work on Op Skaggs Ranch. The [00:21:00] Skaggs started Skaggs drug.

I don't know if you remember that and also Safeway. But if you ran a grocery store and made money, op Scags would give you 50% interest. You had to make money for five years. Well, one morning my dad. My dad told me he went into the store at 5:00 AM to put the cash in the bank and he opened the cash register and all the money was gone and there was no sign of a forced entry.

He called the police since they couldn't find a sign of a forced entry. Op Scaggs fired him and he ended up in Eaton, Colorado, working in a little grocery store for a man named Longley. So the letter that he got was from the attorney of a man who had died, and he wanted my dad to know that he was the one who had, um, [00:22:00] he'd gone in through a skylight.

His wife had cancer and he needed the money to save her. And when he died, he wanted my dad to know. So that would've been in the sixties. So for 30 years. My dad lived with being falsely accused, and I think that's why he went into the attic and waited because he wanted to be sure. He wasn't falsely accusing anyone.

So when this, I, I did a, recently I did a, a story for my blog about that story about my dad, which after the stores closed, it was so painful. We had to personally guarantee. All the loans for the businesses. So we lost everything we had. We got sued. People said nasty things. So holding onto that story was really important to me.

It gave me courage [00:23:00] to go through a whole lot of yuck.

Riley: Wow, that is, uh, I feel like I have tears in my eyes just thinking about that. Uh, and just like what you, what he went through, what you went through. Um, is that part of your memoir? Is that stuff that you've written in your memoir?

Carol Ann: I'll have all those flashbacks in my memoir, but my memoir will be about what it was like to go through an attempted corporate takeover.

Roni: Hmm.

Carol Ann: I have really loved writing as I've gotten older and I finished my historical fiction novel, but sent it to a content editor who doesn't edit for punctuation or spelling, but for character development and plot development.

And so I have, uh, some of my comments back. Uh, some were good, some were bad, which isn't that the way life is, but I. Editing that editing to go back to the editor again. So I wanna, [00:24:00] I wanna get that book done before I finish my memoir. I have about 60,000 words done in my memoir in the process. I've been in the process of trying to rearrange it.

So all my little flashbacks, like the story about my dad will come in at the right time.

Riley: I can't wait to read it.

Roni: I know me too.

Riley: Yeah.

Roni: circling back to the grocery store a little bit, I would assume that it's pretty hard for you to be satisfied with a grocery store having lived and worked in one for so long. But is there a, a chain or, or grocery store now that you trust? I know you've mentioned King Soupers a couple of times, but is that where you, is that where you have found like that you.

That you like that grocery store chain?

Carol Ann: Yes, that's, that's where I shop, when my dad opened the store on Foothills and College 

Safeway went across the [00:25:00] street. Uh, they didn't last there.

Riley: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: And Safeway resented that quite a bit. And when they came to Windsor, we had a store in Windsor and then they opened and our goal was, or Safeway's goal, was to push us out. So I have, I haven't had really positive feelings about Safeway. I am in a program called National Authors in Grocery Stores, and Kroger is a part of that.

So it is a nationwide program where authors can go into grocery stores and sell their books. Uh, so I haven't, I haven't done it since, uh, December because my husband's been pretty ill and I haven't wanted to leave him, but I, I like to support King Soopers because of that program, but also I just think they're.

A little bit better. The grocery store, the Safeway in Windsor, which is where we would [00:26:00] shop, isn't real busy, so they don't turn their produce over. So their produce, uh, tends to not be as good.

Riley: Yeah, that's a big factor. Yeah. It's how busy the store is. Yeah.

Roni: That was an interesting thing that I learned from your book is that, you know, to think, we tend to think like, I don't wanna go to the busy grocery store. It's kind of a hassle all the people, but realizing that there actually is a benefit to going to the busier grocery store means that things aren't sitting on the shelves forever and you're getting stuff that's not very good, or maybe closer to its expiration date.

Carol Ann: Yeah, they turn their product over faster. Busy grocery stores.

Roni: I'm curious, uh, on a personal level, if you have like a one ingredient that you always keep in your kitchen, like that you use in all of your recipes, that you just something that you really love.

Carol Ann: I have a really extensive. , dried herb, uh, section. I always have [00:27:00] olive oil. I always have butter. My favorite foods are either French or Italian. My mother once told me, you don't. Eat to live. You live to eat. So I've always, I've always enjoyed food. That's a pretty hard one for me. There's only one thing I don't like and that is prune.

Riley: Well, everybody has something that they don't like. You know, you said, you mentioned French and Italian cooking. Have you traveled, um, have you done cooking classes? Like do you, is that something you enjoy to do? Do you enjoy cooking? I mean, obviously you've written a lot of recipe books, um, and you, you've written recipes.

It sounds like you wrote them. Just to be a helper, like, you know, here's the sale ad. I'm gonna include a recipe, I'm gonna help my customers in this way. Do you actually enjoy the process of cooking also? And have you taken many cooking classes? I.

Carol Ann: I have taken some cooking [00:28:00] classes. Uh, we went to Italy. There was a lovely woman there named Andrea who took us to the farmer's market and we shopped at the farmer's market for our dinner and we cooked the whole entire day. And then we had dinner. She taught us how to make lemon shovel, which I have never made, but I did buy a bottle of grain alcohol to do it. I just haven't done it. I have taken a couple of classes with my daughter at Ginger and Baker. I took a cooking class in Chicago. I learned to cook from my mother and my aunt and my grandma. Uh, I think the one who influenced me the most was my Aunt Burl. She would stand at the stove and she just nurtured her food.

She didn't whip it or beat it. She just nurtured it and I really. I [00:29:00] like nurturing food as my Aunt Burl did when I first had my cookbook. I used to sign, let's see, cooking and it is in my Grocery Shopping Secrets book. It's in the very beginning. Cooking is an art that requires fresh ingredients, careful shopping, and a nurturing spirit.

It also requires love, love of food, and love of those you invite to your table. And I really cook deplete to please people. We have friends over and uh, one of them likes, Jim likes Italian, so I would make lasagna or something like that.

Riley: Cooking from the heart. Is the best way to cook, I think you don't even need a recipe. Sometimes when you cook from the heart, you just put it all in there and it, it comes out

Carol Ann: yeah. Yes. And I've noticed when. I am having a bad day [00:30:00] or I'm not in a good mood. Things don't turn out the same as when you're in a good place.

Roni: Yeah,

Carol Ann: Have you found that?

Roni: absolutely. Yeah. When you cook, when you cook with Love it. You know, they say like, love is a secret ingredient in cooking. Like it really, I think it really is.

Do you have any advice that you would give somebody who wants to cook more? Just based off of your own experience and having written recipes?

Carol Ann: Cooking is like playing the violin. You have to do it and do it to get good at it. My first dinner party I gave before I got married and I did a Chinese theme. Let's see, I made egg rolls from scratch, chopped soy, chicken fried rice, and I had one other thing which slips me. Now. I started cooking at 10 in the morning and everyone came at about six 30 and I didn't [00:31:00] finish until 11. And so of course we were young, so people were drinking and playing cards. They loved the dinner, but I think it was probably because they were so hungry. So I think just keep at it.

Roni: I think that's really good advice. I think that cooking is one of those things that it's hard for people to think of it as a practice, right? Because we just think, well, we eat three times a day. I should be good at cooking. And yeah, it really does take a lot of practice and that just feel for what is good and what you like and what your family likes.

'cause everybody's different in that way too.

Carol Ann: I think if you can read, you can cook. If you can read and follow directions, you can cook, but it doesn't come easily. When my husband and I were first married, his grandfather passed away and he went to Chicago for the funeral, and so I wanted to [00:32:00] have a special treat for him, and he loved brownies, so I made brownies to have for when he came back and he took a bite out of it.

And got this really weird look on his face and I said, well, is it any good? And he goes, well, it's the only thing I've ever eaten. It tastes too awful to spit out and I think I forgot the sugar. So you know, everybody is gonna have those times.

I, I've started ina Garten's, uh, memoir. I haven't finished it yet, but I don't think she was perfect in the beginning either.

Riley: No one was. No one. No one when they started cooking. None of us were perfect. I can think of things that I cooked in college, just to eat, to live right. And I remember my roommates would make so much fun of me 'cause it was just bizarre and it was inexpensive and I was trying to eat as healthy as I could on the lowest budget [00:33:00] possible.

And they would just think that what I ate was so weird. And I think that. Now if they knew what I do for a living, just like I cook all the time and I love to cook and I work for a meal planning website and all these things, they would think, wow, she's come a long way. So everyone has stories like that.

Carol Ann: Yeah. I had a roommate in college that would make chicken and it would always be raw, and I didn't want to eat it. You know, you would just kind of have to take off the top layer and it was, yeah.

Riley: Yeah, I, I think my chicken was cooked, but it was maybe not the most appetizing. is, uh, while we're on this topic, what's your favorite thing to cook and do you cook regularly at home now?

Carol Ann: Yes. Um, my favorite thing to cook, when we have, we, well, when we have Christmas Eve, I love making. I make chapino every Christmas Eve. Uh, for Christmas I make [00:34:00] prime rib. My Uncle Eddie was a butcher in the first store and in my cookbook there's a recipe for how he cooked prime rib. And you cook it for an hour or turn the oven off and then don't open the oven door.

And then the last 45 minutes you cook it. I really love, if it's something I want to eat. I love to cook.

Riley: I can relate.

Carol Ann: My grandson, we've had my grandson every morning. Um, both his parents work and he has, he's playing baseball, so he needs rides to practice, to games, to batting cages. So we've had him and he'll come at six in the morning, which is a bit early for me, but he's 15 and so he is always hungry. And I would wanna do something simple like bagels or oatmeal or.

And finally I said, well, when you're at your grandma's, you should have your favorite breakfast. What's your favorite breakfast? And he said, pancakes. I said, oh, [00:35:00] blueberry buttermilk. And he goes, no banana. So I did a recipe for banana pecan buttermilk pancakes. That was one of my recent blogs. So I cook for people.

Yeah.

Roni: Yum, he sounds like a lucky grandson that he gets to go to grandma's house. And have butter p and b, banana pecan pancakes.

Carol Ann: I think grandparents are to spoil their grandkids. He and my husband went to, is it Murdoch's that was new in Fort Collins, and he came back with a sign. What happens at grandma stays at grandma's, so. What kind of grandmas you have, but I'm not a good one.

Riley: No, it sounds like you're the best

Roni: Yeah.

Riley: That is so kind, and again, just demonstrates your heart. , I, I mean, I said this earlier, just that you did that to be a help to your customers, but [00:36:00] ultimately just comes down to the fact that you just, it sounds like you really love the people around you and you wanna serve them.

And, uh, so yeah, just cooking him his favorite breakfast, just, it goes to the heart of who you are.

Roni: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: he did love the pancakes. I did have my grandson from Ireland was here, Calder. My son and his wife live in Ireland, and Calder struggles to be, he, he's very picky about what he eats. He says he's a vegetarian, but I think the only vegetable he was eating for a while was potatoes.

Riley: Oh.

Carol Ann: So my son bought him a book.

Um, I don't know if you've seen it. There's Every Night is Pizza Night. Have you heard of that book?

Roni: No.

Riley: not.

Carol Ann: It's about a young boy who would only eat pizza, and so he started going traveling around his neighborhood and visiting his neighbors. And he had one neighbor that ate green Pioli. [00:37:00] so when Calder came to visit, he wanted me to make green pioli, and since he's a vegetarian, I had to use jackfruit.

Riley: Fascinating.

Carol Ann: The jackfruit made it rather bitter, so I did make Calder his green poli, but he was not fond of it, so I made it in with chicken and it was really much better with chicken.

Roni: Oh,

Riley: That sounds like an awesome book. I don't know many kids who wouldn't love to have pizza night every night.

Carol Ann: Yes. 

Roni: Are you okay if we circle back around to the grocery store?

Carol Ann: sure.

Roni: I'm just curious if you can think of any common mistakes that shoppers make that maybe end up costing 'em more money or the reason why they end up wasting more food after the, they go to the grocery store.

Carol Ann: I watch people shop and some people just grab even tomatoes. They just grab one off the top without really looking at [00:38:00] it. So I think people make mistakes by not, ensuring that what they're taking home is, is really good quality. If you get home with something that's bad quality, it's gonna deteriorate quick more quickly, I think, uh, not checking date. Uh, when you buy milk, you know, it used to drive me crazy when we had the stores because I could go into the milk case and if there was a backdated milk, it just popped right up to me. But if you, if you know, if you're buying things like dairy, you need to ensure that it's got plenty of days on it. Bothers me is some butchers will tell you that when beef starts getting brown spots on it, that it's not deteriorating, but beef with brown spots on it, is going bad more quickly. when we had our delis, everything [00:39:00] was made in-house, so everything was fresh. Uh, we, we would give it three days in the case and then it would have to go out.

So if you're buying chef prepared items in the deli, which is, not very often, I think most everything comes in already. Made, but those really, really need to eat those either the day you buy 'em or the next day. Because if, if they stay three days in the case, uh, you know, they could, could be at the end of their life. The, I don't know if you read that in my book. I have it in my, I don't think I did put this in my book. Perhaps I did. One thing we worried about every day was that your refrigeration, a refrigeration goes out and if you don't catch it, you can lose the whole case. So every day, I don't know if [00:40:00] you listen in King Soopers, sometimes they'll have announcements, check the temperatures, but if you buy anything from a cold case that isn't cold, chances are they're having refrigeration issues.

So you should pass on that item. The marinated meats is another thing. In the grocery business, when things would be at, at their prime, getting ready to go past their prime in the meat case, we would either marinate them or put a rub on them, raise the price. We call that value added. And if you're gonna buy that, I'm not saying don't buy it because they're still good, but you should eat it that day.

Roni: That's really good to

Riley: really, yeah, really helpful. Yeah. On the refrigeration Tobi topic, this is a bit of an anecdote, but I remember as a kid, I can't remember if it was the ice cream shop or if it was the grocery store in my hometown, but. Somehow we found out that the refrigeration had gone out. And so people were just, they just said, come and get free ice [00:41:00] cream.

We've gotta get rid of it because it's melting. And we, I, I think it must've been an ice cream shop, and we went and just got free ice cream because all their freezers had gone down and they just needed to, they needed to give it away because they couldn't. Do anything else about it? 'cause it was all just gonna get thrown away otherwise, but I, I imagine that's a very important job for somebody at the grocery store.

So I hope someone's, wherever you are, refrigeration, temperature, checkers. Thank you for what you do.

Carol Ann: Yeah. Yeah. Really important.

Riley: Did you work in the grocery store? Like all through high school and like as a job or did you have other jobs?

Carol Ann: Uh, in high school, my first, my first job was doing the payroll. I would have to go in and they would have their number of hours. I think that's an awful big job to give to a teenager. But, um, they had their hours and I'd have their hourly rate. My father paid in cash. He had little white envelopes.

You'd write their name on it. You'd figure [00:42:00] out how much they had. If it came to like, just say that they were due $59 and 50 cents, we gave them $60. Which my father was later fined for, but because he didn't pay to the penny. But that was my first job. I worked in the office. I remember my dad's books were off 1 cent. Nobody could find it, but I found the one penny and he said to my mom, Mr. Hickman couldn't find it. And Marilyn couldn't find it, but Carol Ann found it. So I worked in the office and did the books. I checked, I will tell you about, my first day checking was July 3rd, and, uh, back then we were closed on the fourth.

And the people would line up from the cash register all the way to the back of the store. We [00:43:00] had, we had five checkouts. It was very busy and I started at nine o'clock in the morning and at nine o'clock at night, my dad said, Carol Ann, come help me do the deposit. And I said I have to go to the bathroom and get a drink of water.

I haven't been to the bathroom all day. And he said, why didn't you call for a relief checker? And I said, you never told me I could.

Riley: That's impressive.

Carol Ann: being a boss's daughter was not easy. He thought you knew things that maybe you didn't know. But that was a 12 hour day. That was a long day.

Riley: Mm-hmm. You're almost at an anniversary for every, everyone listening, we're recording this on July 1st, so you're almost at a big anniversary.

Carol Ann: And now they would call that child labor, but back then we, [00:44:00] we didn't, you know, we had buttons we had to push. So it was like 19 cents, uh, 29 cents. So you, it was all with your fingers. I don't know if you guys remember those kind of check stands.

Riley: Mm-hmm. I can see that. That's a muscle memory. She, if for everyone listening, 'cause this is a podcast, she's in the air, she's typing the numbers. I can see that that's, that's a muscle memory even these years later.

Roni: Yeah.

Carol Ann: But I did, I sat before I checked and my father was very, he gave me very strict instructions that you only use a bag that's big enough for the product.

Roni: Mm.

Carol Ann: So we had a bag that would have fit a loaf of bread perfectly, but the customer was an older woman and she got very angry at me, said, you're, you're mushing my bread, you're mushing my bread.

So she wanted it in the very biggest bag and that was something I learned [00:45:00] about pleasing customers.

Riley: I imagine that was a big learning experience.

Roni: I bet there were a lot of those times where the thing that the customer wanted was not the thing that you had been told to do by your father.

Carol Ann: Yes.

Riley: And it being your father and your boss, that's, uh, that's a hefty, hefty one sometimes. Do you now, like when you go and check out at the grocery store, do you sack your groceries very particularly?

Carol Ann: I like to stack my own groceries. I don't like to have someone else stack them. Yeah, I like to have all the refrigerated stuff together. I like my bread and my tomatoes on top. I don't think that they, my dad used to have competitions for the sackers to see who could sack the most square bag of groceries, that it wouldn't tip over and he would, you know, pick the [00:46:00] winner.

They, I, but it is harder to do that in the, in the fabric bags. The fabric bags I think are guarded to, to tube sec, I don't, I had one little sacker that got really irritated because she said, I've been trained, I know what I'm doing. I will sack, but so I said, okay, fine.

Riley: If I had been standing there with you, I would've said, do you know who this is? She is an expert.

Roni: She's been sucking groceries since when your mom was a baby, you know?

Carol Ann: Well tell I was stacking groceries before you were born,

Roni: Yeah.

Carol Ann: before your mother was born.

Roni: Did we miss anything? Carol Ann? Is there any other stuff that you wanted to share on the podcast today? Either about the grocery store, about your books?

Carol Ann: No, I don't think so. I, I think it's a great little book and I really wrote it, uh, to help people during. [00:47:00] Inflation because boy, things went up. I think it was 2022. Grocery prices inflation peaked at 13%,

Roni: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: and I don't know if it'll ever come down. Do you guys notice it coming down?

Riley: I don't think so. But I'm also trying to do my due diligence of coupons and buying just what we need and things along those lines. And I would just say that your book has been, like, your book resonates so deeply with the values at our company and what we hope that people get out of meal planning, which is saving money, saving time, buying the right thing, saving money at the grocery store.

And so, so I just wanna say that we love your book, and I think it's actually really helped me bring my grocery costs down because I'm just choosing the right, uh, the right produce and it's not going bad. And, um, just like knowing what to freeze. And so it's been a, it's been an asset.

Roni: Yeah.

Carol Ann: I'm so happy to hear that.

Roni: I think particularly the information about [00:48:00] Freezing Riley and I have talked on the podcast. We've been doing this podcast for three years now, and we've talked multiple times about utilizing the freezer and just having it be a really good tool in your kitchen. And still we learned so much about what we could freeze from your book.

I didn't know you could freeze cucumbers. I think we had already told our podcast listeners a few years ago like, don't ever freeze a cucumber. Why would you do that?

Riley: Yeah, but then you gave us the advice of actually how to do it properly. So you helped us correct that. We always end our podcasts by asking our guests if they'd cooked something recently that they loved. And I know we've kind of talked about this a little bit already, but have you cooked anything recently that's worth noting other than those amazing pancakes?

Carol Ann: Recently I made a really delicious carrot cake. Um, I have been trying to duplicate the bakery. Recipes, which we've made them in, you know, batches of dozens and [00:49:00] hundreds. So it was really hard to break them down. But I did get the carrot cake, done, which was, I love carrot cake. It's my favorite cake. I love making grilled artichoke hearts.

I made those recently. If you've never made them, they're delicious. There's a restaurant in Denver called Hillstone that serves grilled artichoke hearts. So you cut them in half, uh, scoop out the heart and. Of course you, you, you cook them first. You can either steam 'em or boil them with lemon and garlic and uh, a little bit of olive oil and then we grill 'em, we brush 'em with olive oil and garlic and make a nice aioli for it.

So that's, we love to do that. I love making cherry chipolte salmon

Roni: Hmm.

Carol Ann: and. Anytime I have anyone over, uh, for my family, I make Pauline's potato salad, which was my [00:50:00] mother's potato salad. And it's like having mom there right with us. And so that's one of my favorite things to make when my family comes.

Roni: That's so special.

Riley: need to buy your cookbooks.

Roni: I think so too. Yeah. I feel like artichokes, artichokes are very intimidating to me, but you just made that sound really simple, so I think I need to give it a try.

Carol Ann: Well, the artichoke is on my blog, so you can find it on my website. Most of the recipes on my blog are new. 

Roni: well, this has been really lovely to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking your time to chat with us. We've just been really enjoying reading your book and it is really exciting to get to connect with you.

Carol Ann: Well, now you know my story. The good, the bad, and the ugly, just all our produce.

Riley: And you're local. I hope one day we run into you in person.

Carol Ann: you [00:51:00] know, I will, I am gonna be doing, uh, King Soopers again. Probably I won't start until the summer's over. My husband has had some injuries and I just don't wanna leave him alone. But it'll be on either on my Instagram. You might find me at a King Soopers. I think I'll try to do that new one on, uh, college in Drake.

I'll try to do, try to do that one so you can see where I'm gonna be at King Soopers on my Instagram.

Roni: Cool.

Riley: That sounds great.

Roni: We go there all the time because it's a really nice new grocery store.

Riley: Mm-hmm.

Carol Ann: It's, and they have, they have everything you need.

Roni: Mm-hmm.

Riley: They do.

Carol Ann: We did go on the whole 30 Diet and when we went there on that whole 30 diet, we were able to find more things we needed.

Roni: Mm.

Riley: That's great. That's great.

Roni: Thank you so much.

Carol Ann: Well, thank you. Wonderful to meet you ladies. 

Riley: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the plan to eat [00:52:00] Podcast. If you like this episode and others, please share these with your friends and we'll see you in two weeks.