Fat Guy

We just went a couple of weeks without the need to make lunches. Two weeks ago PJ had his tonsils out and missed school for a week. Well, he missed school on Monday and Tuesday on account of the tonsil thing. Wednesday was a snow day. Thursday he went to school but Ellen brought him frozen yogurt at lunch time. Friday no lunch. The following week was February break. So, for this Monday and Tuesday: We're right in the middle of the season for learning which ongoing schools our son has been accepted to. The application process was grueling and involved many visits to schools -- open houses, tours, panel discussions, play visits, parent interviews -- and an incredible quantity of paperwork and stress. Tonight we had a more positive experience, which was that we attended an event for newly accepted prospective families at one of PJ's top three choices. So the Q&A period rolls around and I ask about lunch. Of the top three choices, two of them provide hot lunch in their cafeterias. This one tonight is the only one where kids bring their lunches. That's appealing to me: I'm going to miss making PJ's lunches if he goes to a school with a cafeteria. Not that we'd make a school decision on that basis, but still it's an area of great interest for me. I ask "What are the rules and regulations regarding lunch?" and the director of the school looks at me like I'm completely nuts. One of the teachers says, "What do you mean?" So I ask does it have to be kosher? (It's a Jewish school.) Dairy, meat, what? Are the lunches refrigerated? What's the allergy policy? Nobody could believe this was what I wanted to know about the school. Anyway, this school doesn't refrigerate the lunches and has a much less aggressive allergy policy than our current school. No meat, but that still leaves a lot of options. The school provides milk and water at lunchtime. The director starts talking about how he's amazed by what some of the kids bring in, like soup in a thermos. I think it's safe to say, if we go there, he ain't seen nothin' yet. I haven't been terribly proactive this year about getting interesting containers and whatever, because I thought I'd only be doing this for a year. But if he goes to this school it's going to be for nine years. That represents a lot of opportunity.

Not quite crunchy but my standard cocktail snack when I serve cocktails to guests is Pecorino Romano cheese. This cheese is so salty and powerful as to be almost inedible as a stand-alone cheese in any other context, but it pairs well with even the strongest cocktails. In a bar context, where you have the luxury of quantity, you can keep a large wedge behind the bar and pry pieces from it to serve: gives the peeps something to watch.

Then again I've seen a lot of Chinese folks with mad chopstick and finger skillz. They can take anything from whole fish to bone-in birds and go to town on them without the aid of a knife. So maybe the whole "they cut it all up because they don't have knives at the table" thing is part myth?

Dates for 2010 are 12-13 June. Just got this media release: HOST'S NOTE: Click here for the terms under which this is listed on the eG Forums.

Okay now here's one I thought for sure I'd get some money for. I have a copy of Heritage of Spanish Cooking, by Alica Rios, in barely-touched condition. It's an impressively proportioned coffee-table book that barely fits on my tallest shelf, 256 heavily photographed pages, 13.2 x 9.8 x 1 inches and weighing in at 4.2 pounds. The going rate is $2.44. And it's not just that one joker has it on there for $2.44. There are many copies available that cheap. At that price, it's basically a break-even deal (or worse) just to get it out of the house.

Just crossed the $500 (gross) mark today, and shipped our 36th book.

One thing I'd guess is that once food reaches a refrigerator temperature in the mid-to-high 30s it's not likely to be undergoing a ton of chemical activity. Things like pickling seem to proceed at those temperatures but otherwise the whole idea of refrigeration is to slow chemical reactions down. So I have to think the process of cooling and reheating is far more significant at a physical-chemical level than a night in the refrigerator at 37 degrees F. While the most convenient answer here is "Just cook it a day ahead," it would still be useful to me to know if it's possible to achieve the same results by starting the morning of a meal, braising 'til midday, cooling for a few hours, then reheating for service. My chili experiment, albeit not heavily controlled, indicates this may work.

Julia Child once wrote of a braised dish that, if you refrigerate it overnight and reheat to serve, "It will only be the better for a sojourn with its flavor elements." I think this is an understatement, because it makes it sound like a cooling interval is optional. In my experience, it is optional only in the sense that you have the option to make your dish better or worse with no more or less labor. Braised dishes, and dishes that are like braised dishes (chili, some soups), are quite a bit better on the second day. So much so that it is inconceivable to me that, given the choice, anyone would eat a braised or braised-like dish on the same day it was cooked except in a situation of dire necessity. But I've been thinking: what is it about the overnight rest that so improves a dish. Is it truly, as Julia says, "a sojourn with its flavor elements"? Is it thickening due to gelatin from the meat? Thickening from the tomato elements? Molecular breakdown/tenderizing due to repeated heating and cooling? And most importantly, how long does it really take to realize the benefits of the overnight rest? Overnight? An afternoon? An hour? Today I've experimented with chili and I've concluded that the benefits can accrue in three hours, which is the time it takes my size pot of chili to cool to room temperature prior to reheating. I'm wondering if it can be done in less time, though. Thoughts? Experiences?

It's also interesting to me how food books hold their value so well relative to most other kinds of books. There are some exceptions, like textbooks and technical books (those do fantastically well), but for the most part food books are the best thing to be selling on Amazon. If I go through a shelf of food books to see what's selling for a decent price, I can be sure that there will be several I can list for more than $5. If I go through a shelf of history-and-biography-type books, even if they're pristine hardcovers, I often find not a single book worth more than 99 cents in the Amazon marketplace.

A pick-up-only Craigslist post may be the endgame, after I've sold off everything that's worth selling. We'll see. As for donation bins and other drop-off options, until you've dealt with moving 2,000 books it's hard to grasp just how difficult it is to manage the volume and weight!

Donations are theoretically possible but not easily accomplished in New York City. The organizations I've checked with won't pick up, and with this quantity of books we're looking at hundreds of dollars to pay someone to transport them -- not to mention all the time spent packing them up in boxes. The library near me doesn't even accept donations anymore. Basically, nobody around here wants free books badly enough to come get them.

I've been reading every word of every issue for about 13 years, since the time when Ed Behr wrote the whole thing and it was basically a newsletter ("food letter" as they say) up through now when he runs it much more like a magazine with a stable of contributors reporting to an editor-in-chief. When I started reading it I was still practicing law and just getting started writing about food. Later there were mentions of me in the Art of Eating, and I felt like I'd arrived. In 1998, a few years before the eGullet era, Ed Behr sat for a long interview with me. Perhaps I'll reproduce it here.

I'm endlessly fascinated by which books are worth money and which aren't. I realize it's largely a supply-and-demand equation with the critical variable being the number of copies out there for sale, and that there's no way to tell by looking at a book how many copies are out there, but still I love to speculate and I'm usually wrong. For example, the most expensive cookbook I've sold has been a paperback. I almost didn't even bother to key in the ISBN number because paperbacks are overwhelmingly worthless. But The Victory Garden Cookbook had what seemed like amazingly high prices from competing sellers, so I listed my copy for $35 -- a dollar cheaper than the next cheapest seller. It sold almost immediately. I got $29 for The Talisman Italian Cookbook, $28 for Regional Foods of Southern Italy, $20 for Naples at Table, and $19 for Soffritto: Tradition and Innovation in Tuscan Cooking. Interesting that those are all Italian-food titles and among my top-grossing items. The cheapest book I've sold has been $5: Betty Crocker 30-Minute Meals for Diabetes. I had two copies and figured it was better to get $10 for them than to cast them aside. Once I've taken the time to key in the ISBN number of a title it's hard to say no to $5 for a title, even though by the time I deal with the packing, shipping and customer-service issues it no longer seems worth it. That's not to say $5 is the low end. For every $5+ book in my collection there turned out to be several not-worth-selling titles. For example, I thought for sure that Sauces, by Peterson, would be worth something. This is a big, beautiful book and I'm getting rid of my earlier edition. Turns out there are numerous copies for sale under $5. And with a huge book like that it's just not worth selling for less -- my guess is that the only people selling it are high-volume sellers who don't mind netting $1 per book. Time has not been kind to Lee Bailey's books. The man (who died in 2003) wrote many large-format, heavily-photographed books in the '80s and '90s. They're enjoyable books and I thought they'd be worth something because of their high production values -- they're borderline art books. Almost every one in my collection, however, can be had on Amazon for between 22 cents and $1.30. I can't even count how many cookbooks I have that are valued at 1 cent. Well, I guess I could count. It has to be at least 200. I don't even know what I'm going to do with them.

There are many, many schools of thought on this and the people using a given service will all tell you it's the best one -- otherwise they wouldn't be using it. I spoke to a lot of folks, though, and especially ones selling cookbook-heavy collections. The consensus seemed to be that for someone in my position -- small, temporary, amateur bookseller -- you do the best on Amazon in terms of the number of eyeballs on your listings. Everything else flows from that. I will say that so far I've been selling about 1/4 of the books I've listed within just a few days of listing them. Today I set my personal record with a $65 sale.

I have a preference for the latter weekend, but haven't expressed it due to the always-unpredictable nature of my schedule.

I will make every effort to be there.

Depending on how prominent you want the herb component to be, one possible move is to go with tarragon. I personally love tarragon with asparagus, and tarragon won't get lost against the flavor of cheddar. My wine choice would be sparkling.

Yes, I have a storefront and everything. So does every seller almost automatically. I haven't provided that information here, though, because I don't intend to use this topic for commercial purposes.

I need to learn more about Abebooks. I know Amazon bought them a year or so ago, but that it still operates as its own company. I know Abebooks uses software called HomeBase that is favored by real professional booksellers. But so far, for an amateur seller and particularly in the cookbook arena, what I've been gathering is that Amazon is the way to go. While it's possible to cross-list I think you wind up paying monthly subscription fees to multiple operations, which I think is only worth it if you're in a long-term, high-volume business.

P.S. My tentative plan is to use Amazon fulfillment for any books that have a decent selling price that haven't been sold by the time we move. That, or store them in big piles in my mother's living room and turn her dining room into an Amazon fulfillment center.

Right, with Amazon fulfillment you ship all your inventory to Amazon's warehouse. You pay a monthly storage charge and a per-order fulfillment charge on top of all the commissions and fees so it's quite difficult to make much money that way. But someone from Amazon takes care of picking, packing and shipping, and your books get favorable search-results placement. I should add that everything I discussed above assumes a US seller selling to US buyers. If you want to ship from or to other countries, there's a whole additional layer of process to deal with. Also, if you want to sell collectibles (signed first editions and such), there's a whole approval process for that. I actually got denied. I wanted to sell a signed first edition of something as a collectible and Amazon told me to get lost because I don't have enough feedback etc.

A few months ago, for various reasons not least of which is an impending move, we needed to cut our book collection in half. We put about 2,000 books -- the ones we're keeping -- in storage, which left us with about 2,000 books to unload. Our collection is not 100% food-related but food books are a substantial chunk and happen to be the ones with the most value as used books for sale. So we started looking at ways to sell them. The most convenient thing would have been to sell the whole collection to a used bookseller like the Strand, but we couldn't get anybody to take the collection at a decent price. We heard things like "I'll give you a dollar a book for nonfiction" and "Nice collection but I just don't have room for it." (The realization of how little most used books are worth can be jarring.) Selling the books from a table on the street felt too hardcore for us, and from a pure-finance perspective charitable deductions are only helpful for people with income, so we researched the online mechanisms. Although there are many outlets for used books online, all roads led to Amazon. I had been hoping to do it on eBay so as to be able to participate in the tie-in charitable-donations program with the eGullet Society, and I'm researching how something like that might be possible with Amazon, but the logistics of selling on Amazon just seemed so much better. The mechanisms for listing books on Amazon and managing inventory and orders are superior, and on Amazon you capture the eyes of people who go to Amazon looking for a given book and, when they search, the used options pop up. In short, if you have the opportunity to pick up some extra hours as an assistant manager at McDonald's you can probably make more money per hour than you can make selling books on Amazon. At the same time you do better on Amazon than you can do selling books to a used bookstore for 50 cents each. The first step in the process is setting up a merchant account, which is mostly a matter of filling out lots of online forms -- if you were able to join the eGullet Society you can handle the Amazon merchant registration process. Then you have to list your books. The only reliable way to list a book is to key in its ISBN number, which is kind of a pain. You can search by title but then you're never sure which edition you're dealing with (some books have a dozen or more editions with subtle differences that are hard to identify except by ISBN number). Once you've pulled up the book's information from its ISBN number, you have to assess and describe its condition. There are guidelines for this, and if you stretch the truth then people may return the books, so you have to take the time to do this right. Then you have to figure out a price. You look at what everybody else is charging for the same title in various conditions, and you set a competitive price in the hopes that people will choose yours. This is a process that seems to be without rhyme or reason, but over time you start to see the patterns. It all turns out, not surprisingly, to be a question of supply and demand. Books that have zillions of copies in print being sold used on Amazon tend to list for a low as 1 cent. (It's still possible for aggressive sellers to make a profit this way, because there's also a $3.99 shipping credit -- so if it's a light book and you can ship it for cheap you can still make a few cents.) Meanwhile, books with fewer outstanding copies tend to sell for more. Therefore, ironically and counterintuitively, the books that sold poorly when new often do better than the bestsellers simply because of the smaller number of copies available on the used market. It's fascinating to see what comes up when you price a book. Sometimes we have a big, beautiful hardcover cookbook full of photographs that looks like it will be worth a lot for sure, and it turns out there are 300 different sellers offering it on Amazon for 50 cents. Other times I key in the ISBN number on some small, crummy-seeming book and it turns out people are getting $10 or more for it. So far I've listed about 100 books. It's slow going and I don't list every book we have. I type in the ISBN number and look at how the market has priced the book. I don't sell a book unless we can potentially make a few dollars on the sale, so the ones that are selling for 1 cent or 99 cents go back on the shelf -- those we'll probably donate or something. For every book I've listed I've probably keyed in the ISBN numbers of 4 or 5 books I haven't listed. So it's slow going. We've sold 26 books in our first week of business. The first few times I got an email from Amazon alerting me of a purchase, it was a real thrill. Now it's like, "Oh no, I have to ship five more damn books." Order fulfillment is fairly arduous. It's not as hard as a real job but it's a pain. Especially for books that you've listed in Like New or Very Good condition, you really have to make sure you ship them in such a way that they won't get damaged. The corners and edges, most importantly, need to be well-protected. I did a lot of reading on the Amazon seller forums and around the web to figure out the best way to pack and ship books. The easiest ways are 1- to use fancy padded book mailers, or 2- to use the Amazon fulfillment service. But in both of these cases you incur substantial costs. If you buy book mailers that cost $3 each, and your profit on a book was $4, that's a big sacrifice. Amazon fulfillment can also be quite costly when you add up all the fees. I settled on something called the "book burrito" as the best combination of good packaging and low cost. A book burrito is a corrugated cardboard sleeve folded/wrapped around a book that extends past the ends of the book to protect the corners. You can make them out of pieces of recycled cardboard boxes. Here's an example: What I've been doing is first wrapping the book in brown paper, then making a burrito, then attaching the packing slip to the burrito, then putting all that in a clear plastic mailer. We may acquire some "b-flute" cardboard on rolls if we keep this up, because making burritos out of recycled boxes is time-consuming. It's no big deal to do it once. But if you get a day when you have to ship seven books it's more difficult. When you get the notification to send a book to a buyer, you go into your Amazon seller control panel and the system generates a packing slip for you. You have to print that and include it with the shipment. Once you have a book all packed up, you need to weigh it and put postage on it. The research shows that customers much prefer merchants who ship with tracking, so we've been paying the extra 19 cents for tracking. We do it all with Stamps.com, which is a very good solution for this sort of thing: it allows you to print the postage on your computer printer, which in turn means you can drop the packages in a mailbox instead of needing to make a trip to the post office. It's a small-scale equivalent of an office mailroom's postage metering system. Once you've shipped the book you go back into your control panel to confirm the shipment. You tell it what means of shipping you used (e.g., USPS Media Mail) and you enter the tracking number. Then Amazon's system generates a confirmation email to the purchaser. There is also some follow-up service that you need to be prepared for. So far out of 26 books we've had one complaint, and it was a valid one (my mistake on the listing, which is why I now only do it by ISBN number), so we basically wound up giving that book away for free. Even with invalid complaints, sometimes it's not worth fighting them I hear. We'll see how much of a challenge customer service becomes. You have to handle that part of it well, though, in order to get good buyer feedback. So how much money can you make from this? Let's break it down with an $8 book as an example. That's how much we sold our excellent-condition copy of Jessica Seinfeld's "Deceptively Delicious" for. Buyer's Price: $8.00. Amazon Commission: $-3.54. Yikes, that's a lot of money. Amazon gets 15% plus 99 cents plus $1.35 per book. You can get out of the 99 cent charge if you become a pro seller, which costs $40 a month and is therefore worth it if you're going to sell more than 40 books a month. After I sold my first few books I upgraded to pro seller. So the commission on this book would have been $2.55 for a pro seller, but you have to factor in the share of that $40-a-month charge attributable to one book. Shipping Credit: $3.99. The buyer pays $3.99 for shipping and handling, regardless of the size and weight of the book. This is passed through to the seller. Most cookbooks weigh in at 2, 3 or 4 pounds once you include the packing material. If you use USPS Media Mail with tracking it costs $2.96 to mail a 2-pound book, $3.35 to mail a 3-pound book, and $3.74 to mail a 4-pound book -- a 3-pound book for example being defined as a book that weighs between 2.1 and 3 pounds; if you go up to 3.1 pounds you're talking about a 4-pound book. Then you have to consider the cost of your packing materials, which is why it pays to use recycled cardboard and such. Although, you have to be careful with recycled stuff because you don't want your shipments to look like they come from a terrorist or kidnapper. That's not likely to be good for customer feedback. Also, if you're using a service like Stamps.com there are some monthly fees as well as the cost of labels. All that has to be factored in. Earnings Before Shipping: $8.45. That's the after-commission amount plus the shipping credit. Shipping Cost: $3.35. That's the postage cost. I'm actually not sure what the materials and other costs come to. A few cents for tape, the bag, the label -- I haven't done the spreadsheet that thoroughly but you can be sure that the real cost to me is more than just the $3.35 postage. Let's call all those costs 50 cents. Total Earnings: $4.60. If all my other computations are correct, that's what we take away on this $8 book sale. This assumes no value to the 20 minutes it took to deal with the listing, packing, shipping, confirmation, etc. But if you assume my time has no value -- which it probably doesn't -- then we made $4.60 on the transaction. It's also not like they just magically send you the $4.60. There's a whole process to get the money into your bank account, and they won't give you all your money -- there's a reserve amount they hold on to to cover customer disputes and such. We've sold books for as little as $4 and as much as $34 (the professional cooking and foodservice-management titles tend to get the most) -- mostly at the lower end of that range. Needless to say, you have to sell a lot of books before selling used books on Amazon becomes a financially useful venture. But if you have a big collection like mine and a lot of spare time (as most freelance writers do these days) then it's probably worth it. Either way, I'd rather have $4.60 than "Deceptively Delicious."

To commemorate the end of the diet I had a fantastic meal at Le Bernardin on Friday night. We started out with an egg and moved on to several iodine-rich seafood courses. I'm off the diet and the sucking-candy regimen ends tomorrow, so I may not have much more to report. Then again I may have to do this for a week each year forever, so we'll see.

It came in three pills but yes, I imagine I don't have an iodine deficiency at the moment. Nonetheless, I will be eating foods containing iodine. Big time. I spent the afternoon agonizing over the pizza v. Chinese food decision. I also came very close to falling off the wagon. On two occasions I had to walk out to the post office and on my route is a pretty good pizza place. The internal dialog on all four occasions (two round trips, passing the pizzeria four times total) was along the lines of, "It's 3:45pm. There couldn't possibly be any harm in having pizza now instead of waiting until 6pm. But no, I've come so far I can't hurl myself off the wagon with only a couple of hours left. I'll have a Lemon Head instead." And wouldn't you know it, in the final minutes of the diet a dark-horse candidate emerged: bacon. Dinner is going to be grilled cheese with bacon, in about 10 minutes.

I remain on the low-iodine diet until 6pm today -- 2.5 hours from now local time. There is no official recommendation to increase iodine. My natural tendencies, however, will more than compensate for a week of reduced iodine. I'll probably have my levels back up by midnight. I have had a jar of citric acid on my spice rack for about 15 years but never knew what to do with it. I still don't know what to do with it, but now I know more about it.