I’ve been on a quest this week. Two, actually. The March issue of Better Homes & Gardens offers a number of recipes featuring sorghum, which it describes as an ancient grain with a “lightly earthy flavor and satisfying chewiness,” “nutty and slightly sweet.” The recipes looked like an interesting change of pace, so I started collecting the ingredients for one.
Most items were easy to come by, or we already had in the pantry. Not so, the sorghum. Our usual grocery store doesn’t carry it, although if you’re looking for sorghum flour, you’re in luck. Same with Plum Market, the natural-organic-specialty-food-type grocery across the street. And several other groceries. It kind of makes you wonder what people are doing with all the sorghum flour.
Walmart’s web site looked promising. You can get sorghum there, packaged any number of ways. Or so the web site leads you to believe. The closest Walmart turns out to be in Saline. Where a man who works there told me that Walmart acts more like Amazon these days. All those listings for sorghum are items that may be ordered through Walmart, not items on the shelves.
A positive outcome of the trip there was, despite the dearth of sorghum, the store did fulfill my second quest, the one for frozen peas and carrots. Yes, that familiar staple, needed for the same recipe, is now hard to come by. The stores that didn’t offer sorghum didn’t offer peas and carrots either. Substitutes are available, of course, but when making a recipe for the first time, I like to make it as written. So on I went.
As my honey and I motored to Zingerman’s Bakehouse yesterday, he asked me to tell him about sorghum. In my spiel, I mentioned that the grain is used in Indian and Asian cuisines. Whereupon he, genius that he is, suggested we check at Indian and Asian groceries. We were passing East Ann Arbor at the time, which features one of each.
No luck at either one of them, but there were more places on the way home. Ann Arbor is deep in grocery stores. A quick check at Om Market, another Indian grocery, revealed the usual sorghum flour, but I didn’t see the grain. The store owner, however, said he was confident they had it. He didn’t even need me to spell sorghum, which made him unique among all the grocery folks I’d checked with.
Furthermore, he was right. He picked up his grandson, who’d been sitting on the counter helping him by pulling down and crumpling the paper sheet of phone numbers that had been hanging nearby. Carrying the baby, Grandpa led the way to the grain section of the shop and handed me a bag of sorghum. All hail, Om Market. Let the cooking with sorghum begin.
Outdoors, snowdrops are blooming, and more crocuses open every day. Two grape hyacinths put up flower tips for a bit of weather reconnaissance, one with three grapes showing and one with five. Daffodil buds are coloring up, tulip foliage is a couple inches high, and there’s a fat bud on a hellebore by the easement to the pond. Weeping willows are turning yellow, and red osier dogwood is mighty red.
Ice is off the river, but a thin layer remains on the pond. Canada geese are walking on it, but with tentative steps. More and more birds are back and singing and drumming for all they’re worth. Red-winged blackbird males are showing off the red and yellow on their shoulders to the recurring lyric, “Look at meee!”
Because of the recent deaths on the court, a couple houses are on the market. We knew that was in the plans for both places, but it hasn’t happened here in so long that we’d forgotten that for-sale signs increase traffic. More cars than usual are driving by, or stopping for open houses or appointments. We have so little traffic usually that even a few extra vehicles a day make a difference.
Yesterday, we stopped for lunch at a diner in East Ann Arbor, where my eyes were opened with respect to spinach pie. The other times I’ve encountered this classic Greek dish, it’s seemed kind of dry, like you must have to grow up eating it to really appreciate it. Those previous encounters turn out to have been incomplete: what spinach pie needs is tzatziki sauce. With even a bit of that bright, fresh-tasting, yogurt- cucumber-dill sauce, spinach pie is fantastic.
Lucky, lucky me. Two successful quests and an eye-opening experience in the space of a week, and spring is on the way.
19 March 2026
Curiosity abounds over this grain. I’m glad for a successful resolution to your quest.