Fat Guy

A word on fresh vegetables. My biggest concern going into the project was that I'd be depriving my three-year-old of fresh vegetables for a week. Not that it would really matter -- a healthy person going a week without vegetables is hardly a significant event -- but I felt bad. Now that we're into it, I'm realizing that my fears were utterly unfounded. We still have enough ingredients left for small salads through Thursday. Some of the vegetables -- carrots, celery, onions, potatoes -- are very long lived and will be with us for several more weeks (unless we run out). The radicchio seems quite sturdy -- it should still be around this coming weekend. I also have a box or bag each of frozen broccoli, spinach, corn and peas in the freezer -- that's just what I've discovered so far. The lentil soup I made has carrots and mushrooms in it. The lasagna I reheated had spinach and mushrooms. I don't really know how to count tomato sauce (perhaps it's a vegetable, like ketchup) but it contains many of the nutrients that people seek in fresh vegetables. Speaking of nutrients, it seems that hardly a year goes by without a variant of the "frozen vegetables more nutritious than fresh" story running is some newspaper somewhere: Mark Bittman has written compellingly about the flavor benefits of frozen vegetables: I'm sure I also have some pickled items kicking around. Then there are all these things in the pantry that live at the vegetable-starch-protein crossroads: chickpeas, etc. For most of history, if you lived in a climate with a real winter, you didn't get much in the way of fresh vegetables during winter. What is available to me this week, just from my larder, is far superior -- nutritionally and culinarily -- to what my ancestors had available at this time of year.

There's usually a range of reviews and a few outliers, but overall I'd say Shang has been a critical bomb.

We actually had a last-minute change of plans with respect to PJ's lunch. He requested an egg sandwich. This is one of his favorite breakfasts or lunches to eat on the way to school (he rides in the stroller and the walk takes me about 40 minutes, so it's a leisurely meal opportunity for him). PJ discovered the egg sandwich one day a year or so ago after a Music Together class. I had to feed him something so we went to the deli near the church where we went for the classes. I ordered each of us an egg on a roll. He loved the sandwich, but even more so he was enamored of the way the deli guy wrapped the sandwich in aluminum foil. The next day he asked me to make him an egg sandwich so I did, and PJ was like, "Why didn't you wrap it in foil?" So I wrapped it in foil. Now, all egg sandwiches produced in our home need to be wrapped in foil prior to service. So, one of the three remaining kaiser rolls in the freezer got used up, as well as one egg, as well as a tiny pat of our dwindling supply of precious Anchor butter. I love how Anchor butter is considered fancy in America but is probably just some cheap generic product in New Zealand. The incredible shrinking supply of Anchor butter: Yolk intentionally broken, for portability of the sandwich: Ready for professional-style deli wrapping: On the dinner front, I spent the afternoon in Philadelphia judging this Philly Cooks! competition. When you see what I had for dinner today you'll see why it's not a challenge for me to go a week without shopping. (When you see tomorrow night's dinner, you'll just be disgusted with me.) My dinner: Actually my team of judges was only responsible for 14 of those dishes (there were other teams too), and we ate them in tasting portions rather than the presentation portions you see there. Still, it was a ton of food. Some of the dishes were not easily divisible so the tasting portion would be something like one entire double-cut pork chop, or a whole lobster tail. There was also a ton of wine and other snacks after the judging.

Day 2 As I mentioned, I'll be out of town for most of today. I have to go to Philadelphia to be a judge at the "Philly Cooks!" event. If the rules allow me to, I'll post something about the event when I return but on a separate topic. The reason I'm mentioning it is that I won't be here for dinner. I also have a dinnertime event tomorrow. I was looking at my "pantry" today and thinking, wow, this week isn't even going to make a dent in our inventory. Day 2 - Breakfast As I mentioned, we are out of fruit-flavored yogurts. PJ and I prefer the fruit-flavored ones, whereas Ellen tends to eat plain. So for this week the workaround we've come up with is to mix fruit preserves into the plain yogurt to create what is essentially the same thing Dannon gives you with "fruit-on-the-bottom" yogurt. Today we busted out an inhabitant of the preserves shelf (more of a quadrant of a shelf): IKEA lingonberry preserves. This product combined with yogurt turned out to make a very good breakfast for me and PJ. I also had an orange. Day 2 - Lunch The lingonberry preserves will also get used for lunch, which will be peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Eli's frozen bread (defrosted, of course). I'm making one for PJ and one for me. Normally on a day like this I'd just make lunch for PJ. I'd assume, since I'm judging a restaurant competition this afternoon, that I'll just not eat anything for lunch. Then I'd be commuting on the Acela (trying very hard not to make any Joe Biden references) and I'd want a snack, so I'd spend $5 on some junk in the awful Amtrak snack car. This week, because I'm spending $0 on food, I'm bringing a sandwich just in case. I don't plan to eat it but you never know. Day 2 - Dinner The lentil soup I made yesterday will form the core of PJ and Ellen's dinner. Beyond that I don't know much.

Just a recap of yesterday's "sweet-and-sour franks" hors d'oeuvre from the Elegant but Easy cookbook. Again the full explanation and discussion of that book are here. But these are the photos, for completeness of the current topic. Again, this is a very retro dish, and it's not for everybody, but for people with a sense of humor the flavor is pretty great. It also happens to be an excellent week-without-shopping recipe if you have a surplus of frankfurters. The original recipe calls for, I believe, currant jam. At time she prepared the recipe for the above photos, Ellen used blueberry preserves. This week, however, we were digging in the pantry and discovered these: This product was actually a great substitute for currants. Who would've thunk?

Six quarts of lentil soup ready to go, two containers in the fridge and one in the freezer. Tomorrow I head to Philadelphia midday and won't be back until late at night. I need to feed myself and PJ breakfast, and he'll need lunch (which will be something portable consumed on the trip to school -- school starts at 12:30 tomorrow). For dinner Ellen and PJ will be having lentil soup, salad and perhaps some leftover hot dogs, or lasagna. I guess I'll know when I return home.

Some follow-up on dinner. Our last head of lettuce turned out to be an incredibly productive one. I washed the leaves in two batches: for the dinner guests I selected the nicest inner leaves, and then I took the rest and trimmed them of defects before washing. I wrapped the non-company leaves in paper towels and put them in a plastic bag. I don't know what their longevity will be exactly, but quantity-wise we could be looking at several days worth of small salads. The company lettuce: Arugula and radicchio (the arugula is almost gone, but there's a good deal of radicchio left and I think it will have good longevity -- so for the end of the week maybe I'll be able to do something like that just to get a fresh vegetable in the diet). Crunchy sprouts (end of box): Cucumber and tomato (still have some of each left, just not sure how well they'll hold): Presented that way, then dressed with a mustard vinaigrette. Reheating frozen lasagna can be tricky and you really need about an hour and a half to do it right. There are two seemingly contradictory problems with reheating frozen lasagna: 1- it can be soggy, and 2- it can be dried out. Starting in the microwave, covered with plastic wrap, is in my opinion the way to go. This defrosts all the way through (stick a knife in the center to be sure). It's okay if the center is still cold, but if it's frozen that's no good. Then I think it makes sense to cover the top of the lasagna with some extra sauce, to keep the exposed top from drying out. Then it gets about 45 minutes at 350 covered with foil, followed by about 10 minutes uncovered. Top with Parmesan after uncovering. Then I gave it about a minute under the broiler, just to finish off the cheese. The banana-apple bread slices went into the microwave for 30 seconds to make them warm, then we topped them with vanilla ice cream and peach sorbet. This dessert came out exceptionally well, I thought. Had sort of a bread pudding quality to it. And the random inventory of vanilla and peach frozen confections couldn't have been better if we'd chosen those flavors.

Some supplemental Day 1 info. For lunch we did indeed have tuna sandwiches. It had been my hope to wash the lettuce this morning for tonight's salad, but there wasn't time or space in the kitchen to pull that off. So we had our sandwiches ungarnished. On the left, PJ's sandwich and on the right mine, which I did open-face: Ellen reports that she had yogurt, cereal and some of the leftover pineapple chunks for brunch -- she didn't really join us for breakfast or lunch. The banana-apple breads are done. One will be consumed tonight. I won't be surprised if the other goes in the freezer to become an albatross to be dealt with in a couple of months: I also utilized the weekend day to lay in some product for the week. Namely, a big batch of lentil soup that can fill in for any meal where I don't have time to make something to order. I used one of my four remaining onions. Also found shallots kicking around, and used about half my remaining garlic. There was some celery nearing the end of its usability, some so-called "baby carrots" needing to be used and a box of mushrooms edible enough for soup. The only fresh herb available was some aging thyme, but dried oregano, marjoram and bay leaves went in as well. All that together made for the mirepoix, then I added almost two pounds of lentils plus chicken stock plus water to top off. I have a bunch of stock in my freezer but I've had this packaged chicken stock around for a while and in a hearty soup like this one I doubt the difference will be noticeable. You actually don't need any stock for this soup, but it contributes a little flavor and texture. Later on I'll add some vinegar to the soup and puree it about halfway with the immersion blender.

Day 1 We had another unanticipated setback leading up to the start of my week without shopping: my wife and son ate the pineapple. I had been counting on that pineapple to be our main fresh-fruit source for the last few days of the experiment. But now it's mostly gone (there are a few chunks in the fridge still, but not a lot). I could have said, "Hey, let's save the pineapple," but 1- I've been trying not to allow the observer effect to influence the coming week too much, and 2- they cut and ate the pineapple before I even realized what was going on. Here's the general outline of the day: Day 1 Breakfast The breakfast ritual with PJ (our 3.5-year-old son) is that I say, "What would you like for breakfast today, PJ?" and he says "Can we see what's in the refrigerator?" So we stand in front of the open refrigerator, with the ambient temperature of the unit rising steadily, while he points to stuff and says, "What's this?" "What's that?" and finally "I want that." Today I got lucky. My fear has been that we will be heavy egg consumers early in the week and run out. I don't know why I'm worried about that, because we have enough eggs to get through most of my hypothetical scenarios, but still I worry. I was also worried that PJ would start plowing through some other limited-inventory products. But he chose pasta. This was a great piece of inventory control for us, because it utilized something that routinely goes into the garbage. A couple of nights ago we had meatballs and pasta (De Cecco cavatappi, a corkscrew-shaped pasta) and of course I made too much. So as I usually do I put the rest of the pasta (the unsauced portion) in a zipper bag and stuck it in the refrigerator. I never actually make a pasta salad or any of the other things I'm supposed to do with leftover plain pasta. But today PJ wanted to eat some of it. Without even knowing it, PJ got into the spirit of the experiment. As his beverage, PJ had expired milk-in-a-box. A couple of months ago we somehow acquired a three-pack of Horizon Organic individual-serving milk boxes, like what kids pack in their lunchboxes. I think it was a product sample at a trade show, maybe. I remember at the time I stuck it in the refrigerator even though it doesn't need to be refrigerated. When I discovered it this week, I checked the date and saw that it's "Best By" some date in January. But that assumes no refrigeration -- this is shelf-stable milk. Given that it has been refrigerated since acquisition, I decided that if it tasted okay and it didn't harm me I'd give it to him. So a couple of days ago I had part of a container of the stuff. It tasted fine and didn't trigger any reaction on my part, so PJ had it for breakfast. Me, I had yogurt and an orange. We're low on the fruit-flavored yogurts I like to eat, but we have a ton of the plain yogurt Ellen likes (plus we have the capacity to produce a seemingly limitless quantity of plain yogurt from powdered milk if we need to). So I mixed a couple of teaspoons of strawberry preserves into some plain yogurt. It was great -- it may have been better than the "fruit on the bottom" yogurt I was worried I didn't have enough of. As for the orange, we have three left now. So that should be nice for the next couple of days. I have no idea what Ellen had for breakfast. She was out early and left no forensic evidence. Day 1 Lunch We have a lot of bread products in the freezer. Lunch will be tuna-salad (for more on the burning issue of "Why do we call it tuna salad?" please see the define salad topic) sandwiches on Eli's multigrain bread, at least that's what I'll be having. PJ can have peanut butter and jelly if he prefers. Day 1 Dinner We're having company tonight -- Ellen's cousin and her boyfriend. I've already heard via Facebook, "Can't you start your week without shopping after we come for dinner?" So I want to make sure this meal is a good demonstration of what's possible. Four items in the freezer I've been thinking how to utilize this coming week are 1- a surplus of Hebrew National frankfurters, 2- several small bags of frozen bananas, 3- three half-eaten pints of sorbet and ice-cream, and 4- a whole spinach lasagna. The frankfurter accumulation occurred because somehow these stayed on the shopping list two weeks in a row so we wound up with four packs instead of two. The issue with the bananas is that I buy bananas every week and sometimes we finish them but sometimes we don't. When we can remember to do it, we freeze the last of the overripe bananas with the long-term goal of using them as an ingredient in something. We rarely eat sorbet or ice cream (except for the pops that PJ likes), so whenever we buy it with the expectation of having company over we serve about half of it and shelve the rest in the freezer where it sits and accumulates ice crystals and eventually gets discarded. Finally, lasagna is such a pain to make that when you make it you may as well make two or three. The lasagna we have in the freezer was made by Ellen during such a production, but then just took on the status of "the thing taking up a quarter of the freezer" for a few months. With the frankfurters, we are going to do Ellen's take on the "sweet-and-sour franks" hors d'oeuvre from the Elegant but Easy cookbook by Burros and Levine. Right now the franks are defrosting but if you want to see the whole recipe demonstrated start-to-finish Ellen did it a couple of years ago on this topic devoted to the book. This isn't a dish I'd serve to all guests, but I know Ellen's cousin enjoys the occasional retro-chic dish. It's also a delicious dish. The bananas are going to become banana bread. Actually, banana-apple bread, because in the refrigerator we have two extremely ratty apples that would normally get thrown out but that can just barely be salvaged for a baking project. We will garnish the banana bread with ice cream and sorbet, taking care to de-ice the top layer of each item prior to service. The lasagna I'll just reheat in the oven for a long time at a low temperature, until it's heated through. I may also put a little additional tomato sauce on top (left over from the other night when we did the pasta and meatballs) and a little parmesan on top of that. We'll see. Finally, I'll be putting together a green salad with the last of our salad ingredients. If we're lucky there will be leftovers. Day 1 Snacks I'm not going to chronicle snacks exhaustively, except to say that it would take us a month to plow through all the half-eaten boxes, bags and tins of crackers, pretzels, nuts and other snack foods we have around. Also there is a surplus of popcorn on hand, but we have so much in the snack-food department who knows if I'll even need to make any popcorn this week. Some photos (I'll have a few more as the day progresses): PJ's nutritious breakfast of plain cavatappi pasta and no-longer-best-by milk: The two aforementioned ratty apples: Bananas and frankfurters defrosting on the stovetop as the oven preheats: PJ using bananas as a cold pack. He's saying "I hurt my head!" again and again. You've already seen this photo but I wanted to point out the lasagna, bottom right of the main shelf just above the gratuitous baking soda: I'll file an additional report later.

Yes, though I've always found "egg mayonnaise" to be a confusing description, mayonnaise being made from eggs and all. "Egg salad" follows the French "salade d'oeufs." Not that you ever know exactly what you're going to get when you order any of the above -- it could easily be potato salad with egg.

Another small snag: my potato and onion supplies are much lower than I thought they were. I have two large Idaho baking potatoes and four onions (two red, two yellow). I'm going to need to ration those carefully in order to accomplish all the cooking tasks I have in mind.

Four years ago I was on a panel at the Miami Book Fair with Ted Allen and Daisy Martinez. The last question the moderator asked us was "What's your favorite food." Ted and Daisy both spoke about stuff they had eaten growing up or whatever. I answered last. I said, "Bacon." Everybody laughed uproariously. It was the highlight of the day. The energy was great. Can you imagine anybody finding that answer shocking, funny or interesting today? In 2005 you could really catch people off guard by saying your favorite food is bacon. Today that would be the most predictable, tired answer you could possibly give. I love bacon today just as much as I loved it in 2005, but yes, the bacon-equals-subversive-hip trend has run its course.

I had a little bit of a setback this afternoon: I used up all the basil in the freezer. I was hoping I'd have basil for next week, but tonight I'm making meatballs for dinner and, in asking myself how much basil I'd normally add to the tomato sauce, I had to admit to myself that under normal circumstances I'd just use 100% of what was there. So, since my no-shopping week won't start until Sunday, I felt compelled to follow my normal routine. Bye, bye basil.

I showed you mine now you show me yours: let's see photos of those freezers!

I think for North Americans who live in houses in not-densely-populated areas there is no challenge whatsoever on the survival front. It's purely an issue of just how well you can eat without resupplying any groceries for a week (we can also, if there's interest, create a subgroup of people who want to go for two weeks). But if you participate, regardless of whether it's a challenge or not, you'll save a week's worth of grocery money.

Okay here's a question about Parmalat milk or other milk in aseptic, shelf-stable packaging: Let's say you buy Parmalat milk and, when you buy it, you put it in the refrigerator. How does that affect the expiration date? Presumably it's going to be good for a longer time. Or am I off-base there?

Taking further inventory I am also not thrilled with my fresh-herb situation. I didn't buy any new fresh herbs last time I shopped. All I have is a very little bit of decaying thyme in the refrigerator, a small amount of basil that I froze a couple of weeks before because it was similarly decaying, and the usual dried herbs that most people have. I guess I'm going to be relying mostly on the dried herbs.

Defrost in the Foodsaver bag, though, right?

The Los Angeles Times just awarded four stars to the new Jose Andres restaurant out there: http://www.latimes.com/theguide/restaurant...2650,full.story

How would you recommend restoring the trout so as to make it flake-able? Just stick it in the fridge for a couple of days? Defrost in warm water in the sink? Leave on the countertop? Microwave?

Okay so earlier I said I have a small Whirlpool refrigerator-freezer. I actually have a Maytag. That's a good gauge of the reliability of the information you're getting from me. Anyway, here are the specs: So for the freezer it's 5.38 cubic feet, which for those of you who speak metric is 0.15 cubic meters.

I was actually wondering about the size of your freezer. Do you have the ability to extract the make and model of your unit and find out the actual cubic footage? I'm going to do the same with mine.

Man are you right about that. Look what I just found by going into the deeper strata of the freezer: Those aren't even old. Dave (the Cook) sent them to me in December. But the convection patterns in my freezer were such that they got behind the brisket and the chicken and disappeared. Perhaps we can all start thinking about what the heck I'm going to do with two frozen, smoked trout next week. I also wanted to illustrate my freezer. I think after you see it you will agree that, by American standards, it is exceptionally small. It's pretty much just the next level up in size from a half-height dorm-room refrigerator-freezer's internal freezer compartment. Maybe it's a relatively large freezer by Japanese standards, I don't know. But 100% of Americans I know who don't live in New York City have larger freezers, and most New Yorkers I know who are not students have similarly sized or larger ones. Yet, my freezer is so full of crap I'm getting concerned that at the end of next week it will still be overflowing. We may need to add a potluck to the calendar.

The observer effect definitely kicked in today. I'm not supposed to start this process until Sunday but I just did a big lettuce-washing project and couldn't keep from letting next week's plan influence this week's action. I washed a head of lettuce and have one more head of lettuce left. So that's going to be it for lettuce between now and next Sunday. Normally, when I wash lettuce I'm pretty wasteful. I just throw away the outer leaves and any leaves with visible defects. Today I was much more careful. I used a knife and removed bad spots and brown edges from the outer leaves but I salvaged the rest. Anyplace else I saw a problem I was very selective about targeting only the affected area. As a result, I probably increased by lettuce yield by 20% or more. Sorry about that. I also got a dinner invitation for Tuesday night and have been thinking about how to integrate meals like that into my plan. What I decided is that I'm going to make the governing principles of my week 1- no grocery shopping, and 2- no spending money on food. Because I dabble in food journalism, however, I have various free food opportunities (the eat-free-in-NYC blogger should be so lucky as to be me) and I'm not going to reject all of those when they come my way. I'll reject some, though, because otherwise I'd just be eating out every night. And I'm not going to do any work on a couple of newspaper stories I'm writing that will require a lot of dining out. I'll work on those the following week.

We had our first snafu tonight and the challenge hasn't even started. I'm actually glad this happened, because it was good for nature to take its course, but it still freaked me out: Tonight was date night, rescheduled from earlier when we were out of town (our normal night is Monday). My mother came over to babysit and we went out. When we returned home, we debriefed my mother on all the mundane things parents need to know about bedtimes, etc. In the debriefing, it came to light that my mother and son had EATEN ALL THE MUNSTER CHEESE. I don't even know how that's possible. There was enough in there that I thought I could make several sandwiches next week, not to mention grilled cheese sandwiches. But they really went to town on it. I still have cheddar, thank goodness, but the cheese reserves have now been depleted dramatically. We also got a dinner invitation for next week -- one that involves the consumption of an astounding amount of food. So that lessens the challenge a bit. But I'm trying to let things happen as in a normal week. So, we're going.