C-Town Visit

My visit to C-Town resolved many of my problems.

 I got my Cafe Bustelo instant coffee for $4.99 like it's supposed to be! I got Bumble Bee Chunk white tuna for $0.99. It's regularly $2.09. I don't even ever buy it because I've never seen it so cheap. I restocked my tomato juice can stash because I had a weekend of a lot of bloody mary pitchers. And I got more vehicles for thousand island dressing. Oh, and the Cannellini were on sale for $0.80. Usually you see only black beans, kidney beans, and garbanzo beans on sale. Now I can make my tuna salad and enjoy lent.

Employees

Lately when I go to Associated, I am not shopping for much and that has been causing employees to ask me if I need help finding anything. The first time I was just trying to find something that cost about $1 so I could break a $20 bill so I could do laundry. Yesterday I was just checking the price of some coffee but I got a phone call and wandered around the store answering questions about signing up for Ally Bank.

After I checked the price of the instant coffee and found it to be $6.39 and wanting to find it be $5.49 or $4.99, I walked to the door. A cashier said "were you looking for something?" My first reaction was to tell the truth: "I was looking for Cafe Bustelo instant coffee that costs either $5.49 or $4.99, but you have it for $6.39," but instead I said "no, thanks."

Earlier in the day, some guy tried to sell me electricity from a different company by knocking on the door of my apartment and talking to me. I hate that and I'm not going to switch electricity because of a person. I'm sure he's trained to deal with objections people like me have, so I told him that I like paying higher bills to Con Ed. You can't argue with that. And then he left me alone.

I guess the moral of the story is that I'm nice to grocery store people and not nice to people who invade my time and space.

Dreams of Baltika

Last night I had a dream I was interviewing at Gourmet Garage and was asked why I love groceries so much. It was a very exciting dream. I talked a lot about a new commercial Pepsi had that compares how good Pepsi tastes compared to Baltika. I thought it was funny because Pepsi is the American distributor of Baltika. (None of that is true in real life.)

In real life, Western Beef raised the price of a bottle from $1.88 to $2. It's still a good deal for 51 oz of strong beer if you are ok with the taste.

My brain was apparently thinking about Pepsi's distribution deal with Stolichnaya vodka in the 70s which was how Pepsi got to distribute Pespi in the Soviet Union.

Grocery Violence

This is my Key Food. Well, I'm not the Foursquare mayor anymore. Whoever is taking care of it now is doing a bad job.

http://gothamist.com/2012/02/13/teen_fatally_stabbed_in_brooklyn_pa.php

Onions

I was just at Western Beef where they had a 2lb bag of yellow onions on sale for $0.79. I've never seen such a price. For comparison, loose yellow onions were $0.79 for 1 lb. That's what I call free onions.

Here is the best song I know about onions. It's by Lou Christie's sister. She's from Pittsburgh.

Healthy Ham Salad Recipe

My brother posted this on Facebook.

People in New York don't seem to have ham salad. They're missing out. I love it, even the mayo kind. I love mayo though.

Dumpling Night

Ridgely reminded me to have a dumpling party, so I am going to do that tonight. Yesterday I went to Hong Kong Supermarket in Chinatown and bought ingredients. (Then I walked around and now my feet hurt so much that I don't think I can get to Key Food to buy pork.)

I bought 4 packs of dumpling wrappers (which makes 160-200 dumplings I guess. $1.50 each), a big Napa cabbage ($0.59/lb) , a bag of bok choy ($0.99/lb I think), 2 8oz containers of white mushrooms ($1.19 each. What a deal!), 2 bunches of scallions ($0.50 each), a bottle of Squid brand fish sauce ($1.19), a leek at a price I forget, and maybe that was it. I was running late so I didn't get to peruse. I spent about $18, which isn't bad for getting to feed 10 people or so.

I have been thinking about fish sauce a lot lately. I use anchovies when I cook pasta a lot. Maybe fish sauce, which is made of anchovies, salt, and water, would be easier or cheaper. I'm going to find out. I have no experience with fish sauce though so I don't know what brand is good. I bought Squid because it wasn't the cheapest, wasn't the most expensive, had an ok color, and had a squid on it.

I think I might fill some dumplings with ricotta and spinach and call them raviolis.

Cheeses Christ! The Resurrection of my Pecorino Romano

Know how when you have a lot of cookies, you put a slice of bread in with them so the cookies remain soft while taking moisture out of the bread, which gives its life up to become the stale waste instead? Well I hope you knew that because otherwise you probably have been eating a lot of stale cookies in your life.

Yesterday I made pasta (with hot peppers, onions, tuna, and capers--it was ok) and was grating some pecorino romano on it. I am down to the end of my block and it's getting hard to grate. While cleaning up, I dropped my cheese bag in the sink. Rather than get a new one, I decided to stick the rest of my block in my leftover pasta container. I wondered if it would absorb some moisture and become easy to grate again. (Note: I have brought cookies back from being too stale by using bread. I have made cookies moist after overcooking them by using bread.)

Today I tried grating my cheese. It was easy! You can take moisture out of moist foods and infuse them back into hard cheeses. I guess I will try this with bread next since that's what this whole post was about.

job

My brother has an interview to be a stocker at a grocery store tomorrow. I guess we'll find out if this world is set up correctly or not. A grocery store that doesn't hire us deserves to go out of business.

Colavita crushed tomatoes got more expensive

They've been 2/$3 at Key Food for as long as I have been buying them (and were 2/$3 at C-Town for a while when they started carrying them for me) but now they are 3/$5. I guess I'll adjust.

Rabbit Stock

I made rabbit stock with the rest of my rabbit pieces and bones and some vegetables I bought at Jesus. It's pretty good, but it doesn't taste very rabbity. I bought Andrew a stock pot for Christmas and this was the first time anyone used it. (What a self-serving gift, eh?) It tastes like good vegetable stock though. I used all the celery you see, the whole bag of carrots, the onion, another red onion, the shallot, the fresh thyme, and the cremini mushrooms. And salt and pepper. The vegetables/thyme cost me $6. That seemed pretty good.

Now I have to figure out what to do with all this stock.

Rabbit Cacciatore

For my birthday, my friends Bill and Gideon went to some place in Bushwick and picked out a rabbit for me by pointing at it and had it killed for me. Thankfully they answered yes when asked if they wanted to have the fur removed. I received this thing in a plastic bag.

The day after my birthday I already had plans. Same for New Year's. The next day, Ravi invited me over to eat lamb. I was starting to fret that this bunny would go bad. So I cooked it yesterday even though Bill couldn't make it. He can come eat leftovers if he's less tortoise and more hare about this whole thing.

First I studied this Saveur guide to butchering a rabbit. The main differences between their guide and my rabbit were that I still had a head on mine, I still had organs in mine, and they have sharp knives. They also give instructions like "then remove the bones from the leg." Easier said than done!

I decided to make rabbit cacciatore. I thought it was familiar, but later I realized it only sounded familiar because I used to watch so much Camp Candy. The other rabbit dish I could think of, hasenpfeffer, is thickened with the blood of the rabbit, according to wikipedia. I didn't need all that. Yes, I use wikipedia for recipes. It told me what goes in it so I do it. I decided to serve it over polenta with a salad and some bread. Into my cacciatore I put 2 red onions, 8 oz of quartered button mushrooms, a green pepper cut into chunks, a thinly sliced carrot, a can of whole canned tomatoes mashed up a bit, a few glugs of whatever wine we were drinking, as much turkey stock as was melted and pourable by the time I wanted to add turkey stock, garlic powder (I thought I had real garlic around but didn't), and herbes de provence that Callie gave me for Christmas. I should have added more salt. It tasted significantly better when I salted it and the rabbit didn't taste as much like chicken.

In the end, it looked like this. Not bad.

I know it's impolite to ask how much something cost, but I really was curious about how much a rabbit goes for so I could think about doing it again maybe. So I asked. Gideon told me about $30 for that rabbit. "I'm not worth $30!" I recoiled. But I liked the stewing aspect of the meal a lot so maybe I will stew some cheap meats. I will stew eggs. (Bill and Gid also got me eggs.)

I still have the bones and organs and the meat I couldn't get off the bones so I think I'll make stock tomorrow. I got Andrew a stock pot for Christmas and I guess I will be the one to break it in. I don't let things go to waste much. I'm also probably better at making stock than I was butchering an animal.