It’s a good thing I don’t live closer to Kalona, or my budget would be in a world of hurt. For those of you who don’t live in eastern Iowa, Kalona has a huge Amish influence, which you can see when you drive from Iowa City to Kalona. Houses dot the highway, and you can tell, especially in the summertime, where the Amish live, as you can see the horse-drawn buggies, beautiful vegetable gardens and windmills in place of electric lines.

While I really enjoy visiting the Amish-run quilt shop in downtown Kalona, which has gotten a lot of my money over the years, the best place to shop, other than the quilt shop, the bakery and the meat locker, is the Stringtown grocery store just outside Kalona. It’s located next to the old cheese factory, which unfortunately closed a few years ago.

I absolutely love this store. If you love to bake or can, this is a dream store. They buy in bulk, and they pass on the savings. You can find homemade pasta (made locally). You can buy bulk macaroni, rice, spices, different flours, pectin and ClearJel for canning, raw honey – you name it, they’ve probably got it. They even have a produce section that carries local produce in season (it’s where I get my strawberries for jam). I even picked up farm-fresh eggs for less than $3 a dozen – they’re over $7 a dozen at HyVee! I’ve gotten other canning and butchering supplies there too, like large-sized freezer bags when we were butchering chickens last year. And they sell canning lids in bulk, something I forgot to pick up today, but I know I’ll making another trip there before canning season in the spring.

Today I got jasmine rice, macaroni, homemade egg noodles, lasagna noodles, bulk kidney beans, black beans, pinto beans (to make my chili beans). I found whole wheat pastry flour, high-gluten bread flour, dark rye flour, pumpernickel flour, ClearJel, dry pectin, organic rosehips (for my elderberry cold tinctures), bay leaves, Italian seasonings, hickory smoked salt (for smoking fish and other meats), dried chicken stock, ground cinnamon, raw honey, dark brown sugar, blackstrap molasses and jumbo pasta shells for stuffing. We also picked up some smoked horseradish cheese, a wheel of cheddar cheese and cheese curds (of course) – and all of this was about $100. Bulk shopping is the way to go, and this store blows shopping at Sam’s or Costco out of the water.

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