Fresh & Easy IV: Shrimp Ceviche

For a couple weeks those $6 coupons from Fresh & Easy disappeared from the website and the mailbox. It's still gone from the website but my mailbox has been inundated with coupons; on the same day I got a coupon for $6 off a purchase of $30 or more, and a $5 coupon off a purchase of $20 or more. (Perhaps these rumors I've heard about Fresh & Easy missing their projected sales numbers by hundreds of millions of dollars have some validity to them.)

On my recent trip I purchased several things. My friend Mick is a fan of their dungeness crab, but the crab I saw at the Arcadia location did not look very good, and the expiration date was that day. Never one to mess around with the expiration date of seafood, I opted to get some shrimp ceviche instead. (Years ago I got food poisoning at a seafood restaurant in Pasadena and it was one of the 5 most unpleasant experiences of my life. I won't mention the name of the place. Let's just say it rhymes with McCormick & Dicks.)

I also cooked one piece of their garlic bread - just bread with garlic butter, nothing special - and opened a bag of their "light" Caesar salad. Last month I had their regular Caesar salad and loved it, but this one was on sale for $1.99 so I figured I would try it. It was nowhere near as good. Unless you really need to save the calories or $1.50, I would recommend always getting the regular version.

The ceviche was good, much better than I had expected. Before I opened the package, the shrimp looked like they might be rubbery. But they were quite fresh. I would have liked a bunch of cilantro to chop up and add to the bowl, but I did not have any. There was about a quarter of it left over the next day, and it still tasted good.

So far the rule at Fresh & Easy seems to be that their uncooked and prepared items are good. However, I have had several things from their freezers under the Fresh & Easy label, and they have been lousy (egg rolls, potstickers and empenadas; I will probably post them all together under a title of what not to get there.)