No More Chewing

After a grueling day of numbers today, I went for a walk. At the liquor store I bought 2 bottles of cheap whiskey and 1 bottle of cheap Scotch. At C-town I got a half gallon of milk, 2 liters of root beer, 2 liters of ginger ale, and 2 cans of chick peas. Lest you think I might chew them, I am turning them into hummus.

Fish and Bean Pasta. Pungent Pasta 2.

I have eaten a variation of this every week since I made it up. I usually make it with sardines, but I made it with tuna today. That's what you see in the picture. It turns out that everything you put in a sauce to make noodles taste good also makes beans taste good. And beans have protein and fiber. I rarely have whole wheat pasta around, but I think it would go well in this.

Here's how to make it.

Nouns:
2 tins of sardines or 2 cans of tuna, drained
1 can cannelini beans
1 lb/1 box pasta. every shape has been good so far
pecorino romano
olive oil
dried parsley

Optional nouns:
diced onion, a little crushed red pepper, a lot of black pepper, anchovies or fish sauce, fresh parsley

Verbs:
Boil some water with a lot of salt in it. Put in some garlic powder if you want.
Drain the pasta. Save a coffee mug of the flavorful water if you think of it. It can help thin/make your sauce.
Add olive oil to the pan and heat it and add the onions and anchovies if you're using them. Then add the sardines/tuna and beans and let it cook a bit. Stir it to break up the sardines and anchovies. Add the red and black pepper now.
Add about half the pasta to the pan and stir it. Add dried parsley and fresh parsley if you're using that. Add the rest of the pasta and grate a lot of cheese into it. Stir it. Serve with more grated cheese.

Note about the parsleys: As famous cookbook authors accurately point out, dried parsley is no substitute for fresh. However, dried has its uses. Namely, it's very small and coats the pasta in a way that makes it greener and nicer looking. Without the green flecks, you're looking at a food made of up of shakes of white and ecru. I used fresh parsley once in this when I had it, and it tasted good, but I didn't cut it small enough so I didn't like how it looked and added dried parsley too.

The cheapest cabbage I've ever seen.

Must be on sale for St. Patrick's Day. Apparently the Irish have a cuisine. The lowest price I had ever seen before this was $0.49/lb.

Tuna Microeconomics

My price of tuna went up, so now I eat more of it. How does that work?

I used to pay $0.75/can for tuna at Western Beef. That was the chunk light variety in water, though I'm not very particular. Then Western Beef raised the price of its store brand to $1. At first, I cut back on my tuna consumption, but now I see tuna on sale at every grocery store for $1. It's frequently higher, but with all my grocery stores and all the brands of tuna, I can always find it somewhere for $1. Now I don't have to make a special trip to Western Beef, so I tend to buy tuna frequently and I'm spending 33% more per tuna-unit.

Rich People Discover Grocery Shopping

In this article about insufferable whining of Wall St. rich types, I found this paragraph that warmed my heart. He learned how to grocery shop!

“They have a circular that they leave in front of the buildings in our neighborhood,” said Arbeeny, 49, who lives in nearby Cobble Hill, namesake for a line of pebbled-leather Kate Spade handbags. “We sit there, and I look through all of them to find out where it’s worth going.”

...

He reads other supermarket circulars to find good prices for his favorite cereal, Wheat Chex. 

It's so cute! I wonder if any of them are poor enough to read little ol' Grocery Chopin.

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.