another shopping spree, then meal prep

My back is killing me, and I don't know why. I think it may be because of the super-heavy load I dragged to my apartment from Costco last night, but I've lugged heavier without suffering this problem. Anyway, I'm taking aspirin to combat the pain, and it's helping a bit. (Too much aspirin, and I start bleeding out of the wrong holes.) I can also move around, albeit slowly and delicately, so I'm good to go with today's shopping and the beginning of today's cooking.

I plotted it out last night: I've got six things to make ready today, and if I don't get them all done, I can work on the remainder tomorrow without destroying my schedule. The six thing to prep today are:

1. Hot dogs, and by "prep," all I mean is "buy"; true prep will be super-simple.
2. Shack Sauce: this will be from a recipe by Kenji López-Alt.
3. Chili: pretty much self-explanatory. Con carne, with beans.*
4. Corn salad: a medley of corn, bell peppers, chili peppers, and onion.
5. Baked beans: beans, bacon, hot dogs, BBQ sauce, brown sugar, and a bit of mustard.
6. Corn bread + butter: to go with the chili.

So: I'm off to visit, for the first time ever, John Cook Deli Meats near Apgujeong Station to pick up some andouille so I can finish off my gumbo broth (to which I'll be adding some filé powder, which recently came in the mail). After that, I'm going to another local grocery to get most of the remaining items on my shopping list: my own building's grocery is closed today per the stupid, anti-capitalist regulation that big-brand stores must close every 2nd and 4th Sunday to give littler stores a chance to compete. I would be off to the local No Brand store (yay! one just opened up a couple weeks ago in the Daechi neighborhood!) to buy hot dogs, but No Brand is part of E-Mart, so it's closed today as well.

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*In a stroke of awesome luck, I discovered that my downstairs grocery is selling 750-gram plastic bottles of Canadian Great Northern beans, which go well with chili. I started soaking a batch last night; unlike chickpeas, Great Northern beans absorb water at a shockingly fast rate (but the two beans' absorptive capacity is about the same). Adding them to the chili ought to be great fun. Oh, yeah: the reason why I went hunting for dried beans in the first place is that I needed four cans of baked beans for my chili recipe, but the grocery had only three, which caused me to go into MacGyver mode and root around for beany alternatives. Stumbling upon Great Northerns was a huge stroke of luck: these beans are often used alongside of, and can be used in place of, the more classically Tex-Mex pinto beans. (I'd have to travel to Itaewon to find cans of kidney beans, and I can't be arsed to do that.)