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The Food Blast: What to Do with It

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So the kitchen still overflows with produce after yesterday’s serendipitous visit from the food rescue charity. OMG, you never saw so much food in this kitchen!

Yesterday evening M’hijito came over for dinner: a kind of “hot dish” lasagne that was not lasagne; sliced eggplant layer + cheese layer + sauce layer + different cheese layer + Costco pasta layer + cheese layer + different cheese layer + sauce layer + grated Parmesan layer. Made the sauce from some of the tomatoes.

Pretty good.

So far today I’ve made a tomato soup, using six more of the gigantic cardboard-flavored beefsteak tomatoes and a couple of summer squash. It’s pretty good, having been saved by some pork broth that I stuck in the fridge after cooking up a bunch of muy cheapo Costco pork for the dogs. And by the dregs of a bottle of wine M’hijito brought over last night.

TomatoSoup

Mostly it tastes of onion, celery, carrot, garlic, pork broth, and red wine. But it looks pretty, eh? I also added a little Pomì brand packaged tomatoes — Italian tomatoes that really are very tasty, indeed. But it wasn’t enough to goose the essence de tomate much.

The result has a nice enough flavor now, even if it doesn’t taste much like tomato. 🙄 I figure it’ll be good to add things TO: heat a handful of shrimp in a pan of it, for example. Once it’s packed away, it should also provide the basis of many light meals.

LOL! I won’t have to buy groceries until that outfit comes back around next month!

A half-dozen giant flavor-free tomatoes are still sitting on the counter. Those need to be converted into gazpacho, but to do that I’ll need to pick up a bell pepper, a bottle of tomato juice, and maybe some more cheap red wine.

As soon as I backwash the pool again (! …we’re having a little maintenance issue today…), I’ll go out, get those things, come back into the sauna that is my house, and build several quarts of gazpacho.

Then put a couple of the summer squash to marinate so as to grill them for dinner tonight, and then refrigerate the rest and the two pretty eggplants to be made into ratatouille tomorrow.

It is just. too. bloody. HOT in here to spend any length of time running the stove or the oven.

Food FRENZY!

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So the dogs are walking the human this morning when we come upon the gay guys who live up the street. They’re dragging a garden cart behind them, filled with full recyclable shopping bags.

I say, “Did they make you walk home from the airport with your baggage?”

They laugh and say they just came from one of those migrating food sales — the sellers are camped out in the church parking lot at the corner of Feeder Street East-West and Conduit of Blight Boulevard.

Hot diggety!

What happens is that grocery stores will take produce that’s reached the end of its (brief!) shelf life and, instead of throwing it away, donate it to organizations who distribute it to neighborhoods at an outrageous discount. They dispatch a semi truck filled with produce to a distribution center — usually a church or nonprofit — and set up shop for all comers.

The men got 60 pounds of produce for $10. Apiece.

The moveable feast was to be there from 7 to 9 a.m., said they.

As soon as the dogs had perambulated their daily mile, I flang them in the house, jumped in the car, and shot out the door.

WHAT a mountain of food I came back with! Videlicet:

• 8 yellow squash
• 8 zucchini squash
• 4 eggplants
• 16 (!!) big, ripe beefsteak tomatoes
• 8 beautiful little orange acorn squash
• 2 honeydew melon
• 2 mini watermelons

And it’s gorgeous produce. Can you believe this?

Produce

The bag of lemons and the artichoke came from the Sprouts, where I went to pick up some onions and things so as to process this bounty. But the rest of it: hand0uts.

A gigantic pan of eggplant lasagne awaits in the fridge: my son is coming over this evening to help eat some of this stuff.

Made a marinara sauce for the lasagne with some of the giant tomatoes and some of the frozen hamburger found at the bottom of the recently shoveled-out freezer. That’s going to be very nice.

Also cooked one of the little acorn squash and stuffed it with some of the hamburg: breakfast. I’m thinking the rest of them (eight of the things!) can be fixed the same way and then packed in baggies and frozen. The summer squash and the beautiful eggplants can be made into a mountain of ratatouille. The rest of the tomatoes: soup! Hey: gazpacho!

Between this bounty and the several bags of meat I found hidden in the freezer, I shouldn’t have to go to the grocery store for a month! Except to buy some salad greens.

What serendipity! Couldn’t have come at a better time, eh?

 

What IS your freezer trying to say to you?

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So I was finally reduced to cleaning out the chest freezer that resides in a back room. It was due for a clean-up when the whole stupid boob thing arose. During the year of surgeries that ensued, that chore was relegated to such a back bar that it was forgotten. And since then I haven’t much given a damn about anything unrelated to staying alive from day to day without losing what remains of my mind.

But now that I’m well again — for the moment — it seems good to catch up with the 87 gerjillion jobs, chores, obligations, and minor survival tasks that have gone by the wayside. One of those was shoveling out the freezer.

Quite a job: but it’s now done, and to finish up all we’re doing right now is waiting for the thing to cool back down into the sub-zero range so we can haul the food out of the refrigerator’s freezer, where we jammed it, and put it away neatly.

It was a serendipitous juncture at which to take on this chore: just as I was thinking about whether I want to continue shopping at Costco at all, and if so, to what extent.

How so, serendipitous? Well, because this freezer, itself a Costco product, accrues Costco purchases as a closet breeds coat-hangers in the dark. Videlicet:

FreezerFood
Click on the image for its full detailed glory

Whenever I buy a lifetime supply of meat — say, steaks or pork — I cut up the contents into meal-size portions and freeze them in individual packets, which go into small ziplock bags to be stored inside larger ziplock bags. Very handy.

Problem is, after the late, great gut surgery, a physician’s assistant informed me that I would never again be able to eat grilled meat, fried meat, roast meat, crisply cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, or salads. Whatever I would be able to tolerate would have to be cooked into mush, puréed, or dumped out of a can. Since I had subsisted on grilled meat, grilled veggies, and salad for quite some time, as you can imagine this bit of news rather killed my appetite.

So a great deal of food that was stashed in the freezer has just sat there for the past year or so.

Recently, though, it has come to my attention that

a) salad greens make the belly feel better, not worse;
b) grilled steak, grilled chicken, grilled fish, and grilled veggies have no ill effect;
c) I no longer give a damn one way or the other, anyway; and
d) To avoid going broke at the Costco and the grocery store, I might as well eat whatever is in the house.

Hence, the freezer-cleaning frenzy.

When I shoveled the thing out, this is what I found:

17 pieces of steak
4 hamburger patties
2.5 pounds of ground bison meat
2 gigantic bag of sea scallops
3 open packages of fish, each containing several servings
1 serving of leftover barbecued spareribs
4 packages of doves
1 pair of lamb ribs from a deconstructed rack of lamb
4 pieces of vacuum-packed yellowtail tuna

All told, these came to 43 servings of fancy protein.

This doesn’t count any of the other stuff in there: the collected bags of expensive flours donated by a choir friend; the sacks of frozen veggies; the this, that, and the other.

Since I don’t eat meat or fish every day, 43 servings amounts to at least two months’ worth of dinners. Probably more.

So…what is my freezer trying to say to me?

Quit buying food at Costco!
Moron! Do not ever spend $396 on groceries in a single month, ever again!

Seems like a fairly clear message…

LOL! Clearly, I won’t have to buy any meat except the usual cheapo dog schlock for the foreseeable future (at my age, “foreseeable” does not stretch not very far into the fog).

Have you cleaned out your freezer lately? Does it have a message for you?

Caveat Emptor: Amazon as Consumer’s Pal

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All your base are belong to us!
All your base are belong to us!

So on the corgi forum where I hang out, I’ve read about this harness that hooks to the leash in front, instead of up at the back. The strange positioning of the leash clip discourages your dog from surging forward and dragging you down the street.

Perfect, think I, for Ruby the World-Class Iditarod Champion.

Yesterday I happen upon a new-to-me locally owned pet store, which just opened next to my habituated Trader Joe’s. When I go in to shoof it out, I run across one of these exotic harnesses. Naturally, I buy it: size medium. The cost: $39.99.

I put this on Ruby early this morning, when it’s cool enough to walk — along about 4:30.

Amazingly, it works as advertised: Ruby walks right along with me. Right from the git-go! She does not try to haul me to Yuma.

But, even though I tighten it as much as possible, it just doesn’t fit Ruby. In fact, it’s so loose she manages to climb out of it.

Luckily, Cassie heels as a matter of course. So I take her collar off her and put it on Ruby, who would take off for Yuma on her own if she got free for an instant.

Back at the Funny Farm, I happen to look up these Easy Walk harnesses on Amazon, by way of seeing what commenters have to say. And there, what should I find but that the things are going for $23, and one vendor is offering it for $17.99! Free shipping, one and all.

Well sh!t. I am royally irked.

I take the thing back and tell the manager the it’s too large. She says do I want an exchange or a refund. I say a refund, I guess, since I can get it for $17 at Amazon. Not looking even faintly surprised, she says, “We match prices.”

I think, Isn’t THAT sleazy? You’ll rip off your customers as long as they don’t wise up, hm? But since I’d like to have one of these things and not wait several days to get it, I exchange it for a size small.

Can you imagine? They know they’re gouging and they have the effrontery to, in effect, admit it by dropping their price to the lowest bid…but only if you’ve gone and searched it out.

Brought the “small” size home. Doesn’t fit Ruby: way, WAY too small. So now I’ll have to traipse back up there again to return it.

Y’know, I prefer to shop local. Given a choice between a locally owned retailer and some faceless mega-chain, I’ll buy things like this from the local store. And yeah, I’m willing to pay a couple of dollars more for the privilege, understanding how business works.

But not twice as much!

Walmart & Work & Paletas

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So the only thing I’ve done today besides work, work, and more work is to run out to the Walmart just up the road from the ‘hood. After the Fall of the Bush Economy, the fairly shiny Food City in that shopping center (shiny as Food Cities go) was shut down as the owner of the local grocery chain struggled to keep his company in business at all. The anchor tenant’s space was vacant for awhile, and then finally a Walmart Neighborhood Market went in there.

I’ve stayed away from it because I get quite enough of the slum-parking-lot experience at the nearby Albertson’s (where a bum once actually chased me around the cars — did the same to a neighbor, too, I later learned) and Sprouts (where you can watch a hooker pick up a john). But the other day when I happened to be at the Walmart shopping center, I noticed they have a couple of pretty fierce-looking security guards patrolling the place. So, being in a hurry and not feeling much like driving way to hell and gone to the nearest safe Walgreen’s or Safeway, I decided to dart in there this morning.

And was pleasantly surprised!

The Walmart down near M’hijito’s house is just like the scene depicted in a YouTube video: dark, grody, and full of strange downscale specimens:

This store was more like a regular grocery store. It was clean, brightly lit, and didn’t have a single avatar of “Walmart People” as far as you could see. Staff were friendly and didn’t seem especially put-upon. And the shelves were well stocked.

Prices were not noticeably cheaper than other grocery stores around here. To my amazement, they carry Talenti ice cream — at exactly the same price as Sprouts charges.  That would be the stuff that ran up the $15 bill the other day. Picked up a fistful of fresh asparagus — about the same price as Safeway. And a couple of other things.

No money was saved, but I was pleased to find a place that seems reasonably safe to shop in a lot closer to home than my usual haunts.

One thing they do have is paletas — Mexican fruit popsicles — and the gringo version, which sell under the “Outshine” brand name. Made by Nestle, of course they’re sweet. But mostly because the fruit purée in them is sweet. The regular line has some sugar — pretty far down on the list of ingredients — but they sell some that contain no added sugar. I can’t tell much difference between them. They’re really good, and pretty light on the calories.

One of my students contributed a bunch of paleta recipes — the alcoholic variety, actually. But that’s an extra embellishment. The real ones are basically fruit. Get a copy of the 30 Pounds/6 Months cookbook for the recipes!

Certainly lighter on the calories than the Talenti sea salt caramel ice cream I’ve been using to soothe the bilious belly.

Almost finished preparing Honored Client’s book to post at the print-on-demand press’s web page. Actually, I uploaded the contents and soon observed that, because the template we’re using has very narrow margins, the guy’s footnotes were getting truncated. He loves footnotes. {sigh}

So I set about converting those to endnotes after each chapter. Ducky. This process, naturally, fucked up all the work I’d done fixing 436 pages’ worth of widows and orphans, a chore that occupied most of yesterday. So I had to delete all the fixes I made yesterday and enter a whole new raft of fixes.

Then back to marking up page proofs for the current index. Needed to get to page 134 today. Didn’t make it.

But I have made it into bed…and now am about to go to sleep.

Try those paletas!

What Happened to Consumer Reports?

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Harveyballs_red_black_modificationY’know, I haven’t read a Consumer Reports in years. Occasionally I’ll look at Consumerist, a related website, but I do not pay to access Consumer’s Union product reviews online. A few days ago, The Atlantic commented on the apparent decline of the venerable magazine, noting that it hasn’t done well in the computer age. The Atlantic itself being in a bit of a decline (IMHO), the article wasn’t very deep, although its author, Paul Hiebert, did ruminate on a study that pointed out some rather obvious differences between CR’s involved, systematic, and highly comparative reviews with the off-the-cuff user reviews you see online and cited the public’s tendency to give undue credence to online reviewers.

More telling were the comments to the article, in which readers complained about CR’s political biases (and yea verily, many a review there is informed by one sort of political correctness or another), about the paywall blocking access to information that can be had for free elsewhere, about the drop in quality of CR‘s content… and in amongst those comments is a reply from one of the magazine’s former editors, pointing readers to two articles describing the dissatisfaction of the many former staffers and the disgust of a former reader.

To that I’d have to say “yup.” Consumer Reports lost me the time SDXB and I purchased the same model of high-end Hoover vacuum, enthusiastically high-rated in the magazine. At the time, he was living in a house a block from mine. He could get into the Base Exchange at Luke Air Force Base, and when he came home with his, I noted his delight with it. A week or two later I bought one for myself at Sears.

My standards for vacuum cleaners are high but not astronomical. I had a German shepherd and needed the thing to extract dog hair from Berber-style synthetic carpeting that was easy to clean. SDXB liked his house clean but was not what you’d call Suzie Homemaker (not if you wanted to live, anyway…).

I found myself not very pleased with the machine’s performance. It was sad compared with my old Hoover, which had died of old age. But I’d spent a lot of money on this top-rated machine, so I stuck with it.

A year or so later, within two or three days of each other, both machines dropped dead! It was altogether too clear that we were looking at planned obsolescence. He had figured out by then that the things left a lot to be desired (like, say, quality). I had never been nuts about mine but was amazed when both machines broke in identical ways. They were just shoddily made.

So are consumers crazy to put more faith in Amazon reviews than in the decrepit Consumer Reports?

I doubt it. Most of us know that a lot of 4- and 5-star reviews are written by shills. We all know that many of the 1-star reviews are actually complaints about delivery or customer service. As grown-ups, we can generally parse out a pretty clear view of the typical consumer experience by reading enough reviews and winnowing out the ones that don’t appear to be a) real and b) valid.

Many of Hiebert’s commenters enunciated what we said just a few weeks ago: they start with the 3-star reviews, then peruse the lower- and higher-rating reviews. With the most credible-looking of all these in mind, they form a kind of “big picture” of what consumer experience is likely to be for a given product. Scientific? No. As good as the OLD Consumer Reports‘ hands-on testing? Probably not. But just now it seems to be better than whatever else is out there.

Image:
Consumer Reports modification of Harvey Balls. By Stephen Schulte.