Saturday Stuff - World Market

It's no secret that I love to shop but you're never going to find me waxing poetic about high end clothing stores or way too expensive purses and shoes being hawked by the latest celebutart.  I'm not that kind of a shopper.  I love exotic and unique stuff (even if it's an "exotic" chain store) and it's even better if it's cheap a good value.  My favorite Saturday afternoon activity is to find a store full of stuff to poke around in for hours, hopefully coming home with some small treasure.

One of my favorite stores is World Market which reminds me of Pier One meets an international grocery store meets a wine store meets Crate and Barrel.  It's one of those places we go when we're bored, with no particular item in mind and we invariably come out with some new food product or a great gadget/plate/pan/thingy for the kitchen.  They have cute aprons too!

Not too long ago we were hanging out in World Market and found a great wok.  We had an old wok that worked ok but we could immediately see that this one was better quality, more manageable size and, best of all, it was cheap a good value!

Now that he has his new wok, T loves to stir fry things, I think he must spend his free time thinking up new combinations of ingredients and spices and they always come out looking amazing, smelling wonderful and tasting totally delicious.



The Eiffel Tower bottles in the background are from World Market too.

The wok we bought is the natural finish version which means there's no non-stick coating, just pure carbon steel.  It takes a little extra work when you get home, a little elbow grease with some steel wool, but the results are totally worth it and you end up with a perfectly seasoned wok which should last for years and years.  Apparently the natural finish wok can handle higher temperatures than the non-stick version.  Considering that the smoke alarm routinely goes off when T is wokking, this is probably a good thing.

So run, don't wok, down to World Market and pick up one for yourself!