Given that things like lawn mowers, edgers and weed whackers are widely available, I can understand that grass whips wouldn’t be known by nursery store staff.
Yeah, I don’t know any generic term for it other than “salad dressing.” It’s not the same thing as mayonnaise, but it’s similar enough that they’re almost invariably found together.
Oddly enough - at my store mayonnaise is found in the salad dressing aisle…
Same at the one I go to most frequently. But the salad dressings are down the aisle from the condiments, where the ketchup, mustard, relish, mayo and Miracle Whip are located.
FTR I’d also never heard of a grass whip or a cotter pin, and the latter at least is the same term in the UK, according to Google. The picture of it doesn’t look familiar to me at all. Though I don’t work in a hardware store or anywhere that would sell stuff like that.
WRT dried mushrooms I was once impressed with the staff when I was looming for dried porcini mushrooms (maybe eight years ago?) - same store as the parsnips thing, different staff. It’s not a term I’d necessarily expect everyone to know, so when they said they didn’t know what they were, I was fully prepared to just give up looking, but they asked someone else on the staff and they did know what they were.
They still didn’t know where they were because it’s one of those items that can be shelved in multiple places (which was why I couldn’t find them), so they looked it up on their store computer to find them for me. They turned out to be shelved next to baking items, which isn’t terribly useful for the staff or customers, but they are genuinely hard items to shelve.
Filled in a comment card to say thanks - for a moment the staff looked worried, because I think those cards were usually only used to make complaints, so I had to tell them that I was writing a compliment, not a complaint. Hope it got through as good feedback.
They don’t have grass whips at Tractor Supply Co. They do have several pages of horse whips.
I forgot if I heard of this from someone on the SMDB or a comedian say it, so sorry if this was an SMDB story I’m co-opting.
But the story was a few years ago that a guy wanted to buy his father a new HDTV since his previous one just died, but since this was Black Friday week basically all the HDTVs in the size he wanted were all sold out or weren’t in store you had to wait a week to ship only. So his father told him “How about we check Sears, the last time I bought a TV was at Sears 15 years ago.”
So they both go to Sears and of course Sears is a mess with nothing organized well. They track down a Sears employee who looked to be a teenager and asked him where the TV section is. The teenager arrogantly responded “Sir, Sears has never stocked TVs you may be thinking of somewhere else.” To which his father angrily responded back “YOU DID HAVE TVS, THATS WHERE I BOUGHT MY TV THAT JUST DIED!”
That was not my story, but it fits my father to a T, including his insistence on going to a Sears on Black Friday. 
Thank you Douglas Adams.
Here in Arizona we have tortillas that are thin and flat but also some thicker and more squishy, usually with “home made style” somewhere on the label.
They’re nowhere as thick as a pita would be and don’t develop the pocket in the middle but they’re not like the pitiful things Taco Bell wraps their burritos in.
Sounds like my local supermarket. One aisle starts with condiments, then goes to pickles and olives, then has salad dressings (including Miracle Whip) and mayonnaise.
Oh, cool. I did not know that! I feel like I should, since I used to eat a hell of a lot of the thing, but I guess I’ve never actually grown it or seen it grown. I was always wondering why it looked so nice and clean compared to other root vegetables.
It’s part of the cabbage family, only it was bred for it’s stems of all things rather than leaves like a lot of cabbage or flowers like broccoli. In the garden they look like little baseballs with leaves growing out of the top.
The comic strip Pogo by Walter Kelly had a repeated gag about a character who walked “on stage” carrying a box and announced: “I have a case of kohlrabi here.” All the other characters jumped up in horror and yelled: “A CASE OF COLD ROBBIES. ARGH. RUN. GET THE SERUM, THE COLD ROBBIES IS LOOSE.”
I guess that you had to be there.
I know they’re brassicas, and I vaguely remember reading about kohlrabi being grown for its fleshiness, but it never occurred to me that the bulb was not a root. mean, look at the thing! You’d think those tendrils with the leaves are stems and the bottom part is the root.
I wonder what the actual root, then, looks like. Google image search seems to make it look like not a whole lot of anything.
It’s not that we didn’t carry the product—we did. But up to that point, after working in the store for several years, I had never once heard someone refer to it as ‘dressing’.
Fortunately, the mayo and the salad dressing were in the same aisle only a few feet apart, so she found it anyway.
“Get the serum for Cold Robbies” could fit in very nicely with “Deck us all with Boston Charlie,” “Dunk us all in bowls of barley,” etc.
Yep, that’s pretty much what kohlrabi roots look like - like not much of anything. Just like cabbage, broccoli, kale, etc. roots.
I used to grow 'em in my garden, both the green and purple kohlrabi.
This just reminded of a time decades ago when my parents were probably “those people”. The pancake recipe they like to make uses this powered buttermilk product. And they always simply call this powdered stuff “buttermilk”. So when they couldn’t find it in the store and asked where the buttermilk was, the clerk of course took them to the dairy case where the fresh buttermilk was. I don’t think he was even aware the powdered variety existed. IIRC the powdered kind is typically found in the baking aisle.
Colonist here, pushing 70, been cooking for five decades or so, some of it with ‘root vegetables’… and never knew what a parsnip was.
I just googled it, and was assuming it’d be a case like an aubergine (“Ohhh, it’s an eggplant over here!”). But nope, never seen one before.
Aha! THAT’S why I don’t like cauliflower. It’s a dish that has even less flavor than mayonnaise.