This year’s Thanksgiving meat: beef ribs. We discussed other choices, with the more standard fare rejected, though I wouldn’t have minded brining a turkey again. Obtaining the last of the items for the meal on Wednesday night meant visiting the new Mariano’s Fresh Market at Golf and Barrington roads, which has been open about a month. It’s the latest Chicago-area store by the chain, which is owned by Milwaukee-based Roundy’s Supermarkets.

I hadn’t been there before, but I’ll be back. It can’t quite replace Ultra Foods, since Mariano’s isn’t a discounter, but it’s a good combination of an ordinary grocery (around here, that means Jewel and Dominick’s) and an upmarket chain like Whole Foods, without Whole Foods prices. Or so I thought on first inspection. We’ll see if that holds up. Also, there are plenty of interesting brands I’ve never seen before, so the place merits further exploration.

Best purchase: a coconut cream pie for Thanksgiving dessert. Pretty much like the pies you can get at Bakers Square, but without the ordering in advance for a holiday, and at roughly the same cost. Best product that we didn’t buy: canned Spotted Dick, in the section selling British products. Enough to make me laugh, since I was once a 14-year-old boy, and he hasn’t completely gone away.

Hub-UK.com tells us that “Spotted Dick is a steamed suet pudding usually made with dried currants, hence the ‘spotted’ part of the name, which is traditionally served with custard. Why it is called ‘Spotted Dick’ is not exactly clear. There is a similar pudding called Spotted Dog which is made using plums rather than currants but it would seem unlikely that Dick is a corruption of dog.”

I wonder how I never saw Spotted Dick at the grocery store we used to patronize in Ealing years ago, where I did see Mr. Brain’s Pork Faggots.