Fat Guy

Thank you, dear Klatsch team, for that kind introduction. Hello people. It's time for another no-shopping challenge. Those of you who lived through it last time around know the backstory, but let me fill everybody in on how a month-long challenge changed the way I buy, cook and think about food, forever. I never intended to go a week without shopping for groceries, much less a month. It just happened, thanks to a blessed event. Like many, or perhaps most, people in Western industrialized nations, I shop for groceries at a supermarket once a week, every week. In my case, that supermarket is Fairway on Broadway between 74th and 75th Streets in New York City, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My family has been shopping there since I was a little kid, and ever since I moved back to New York City after graduating from college in Vermont in 1991, I have been going to Fairway every Sunday morning, with few interruptions in that routine. In the past three and a half years, my mother and a recent addition to the family – my son PJ – have become part of this equation. Shopping at Fairway on Sunday mornings with grandma is a highlight of his week, and my wife Ellen gets a couple of precious hours to herself. I’m a man of habit – even ritual – when it comes to food. I buy bread every week, whether we need it or not. I don’t even stop to think. When there’s extra bread, I put the slices in the freezer, certain that I’ll someday do something with them. A few months later, the freezer is overflowing with bread and I throw it all in the trash. It’s a loop I’ve been caught in for years: grocery shopping every week has been ingrained in me since I was young, just like other Americans. And since becoming a parent myself, our schedule has become even more rigid. So it was an unexpected disruption one Sunday earlier this year when we had to attend a friend’s daughter’s first communion in New Jersey – and I couldn’t do the grocery shopping. But we had plenty of leftovers, so I made dinner on Sunday (I’m the primary cook in the household) and planned to shop on Monday. Then it rained on Monday and I didn’t want to brave the weather – in New York City we don’t drive our groceries home; we carry them. I found some black-bean soup in the freezer. I heated it up, toasted some of the bread from the frozen stockpile and pulled together a salad: the previous week’s lettuce was still with us, and still in great shape. I put out little bowls of diced red onion, sour cream and salsa to garnish our soup, along with an array of hot sauces. My wife baked oatmeal cookies for dessert. It turned out to be a fantastic meal. I planned to shop Tuesday. But on Tuesday morning we had to make cookies for PJ’s entire Music Together class, then I had a full day of work, then we had date night and we didn’t think Fairway was date-night material. On Wednesday I had to sit through an all-morning seminar the contents of which could have been conveyed in about half an hour, then I had lunch with an editor, then I had to work late into the night to meet a deadline . . . Before I knew it, the end of the week was at hand, I hadn’t bought any new groceries – and, lo and behold, no harm had befallen my family. My refrigerator, freezer and pantry, I realized, had been overflowing with edible food. Why had I been saving all this stuff, I wondered, when I could have been eating it? I hadn’t shopped at all that week. Yet, we ate well – and for those of you who aren’t familiar with me let me say: you better believe that. I’m not some skinny vegetarian. I’m a big guy – my member name here isn’t “Fat Guy” for nothing. I write about food and restaurants for a (barely) living, and if you do that, you’ve got to eat often and well. As many of you know, I started out as a lawyer, but I was more interested in my business lunches than in my business, so a decade ago I left the law to devote my life to the world of food. I make no compromises when it comes to food; my girth is my proof. But that week, because I had to flex my creative muscles to assemble meals from what was on hand, I forced myself to be a more careful cook than ever before. We ate so well that week, it got me thinking. Surely I wasn’t alone in having a freezer and pantry full of food, much of which would get thrown out as it expired over the course of the coming months and years. We live in a small New York City apartment – people with houses, basement freezers and walk-in pantries must have far more stuff lying around. I knew I wasn’t the only person in America who returned from the supermarket and could barely fit the new food in the refrigerator because there was so much old stuff still there. Certainly I wasn’t alone in being able to skip a week of shopping and still eat well. Really well. So, a few months later, I asked the members of the eGullet Society to join me in a collective week without shopping, starting that day, with no warning and no opportunity to stockpile—just don’t shop, now, I challenged. (To keep it fair, a month earlier, I’d asked my colleague Dave to pick a date and spring it on me without warning; he actually caught me during a week when I was already low on several key provisions.) We would feast on the bounty of our refrigerators, freezers and pantries. “Think about it from an economic standpoint,” I argued. “Times are tough right now. If you spend $100 a week on groceries, this experiment will put $100 back in your pocket quicker than you can say ‘stimulus.’” I’ll admit to being surprised when my suggestion was met with a chorus of excitement. We declared a “National Eat the Stuff in Our Freezers and Pantries Week.” (I know, it rolls right off the tongue.) A group of approximately 75 people from around the world took the no-shopping challenge that week. For seven days, it was a fun experiment and we ate surprisingly well – better than in a normal week, because we were really focused on our use of ingredients, and we had to pay a lot of attention to meal planning. Then, at the end of the week, a bigger challenge arose: my family hosted a dinner party. My wife’s cousin Stephanie and her new boyfriend Jason were coming over. We really wanted Jason to marry Stephanie, so I couldn’t serve them a bad meal of old food. I was worried, but my fears were unfounded. I made so many dishes in such quantity that nobody would have guessed it was a no-shopping week. A few weeks later, Stephanie and Jason got engaged. “National Eat the Stuff in Our Freezers and Pantries Week” was over. But though I had reduced the stockpile in the refrigerator, the pantry and freezer were a different story. They were still so full that every time I opened the freezer, something would fall out onto my foot. My cabinets were packed so tightly that I still had no idea what might be in them. So I decided to go another week, as did many of my co-conspirators in the one-week challenge. And then we went yet another week. In the end, we managed a month without grocery shopping, though some of us made exceptions to buy a half-gallon of milk for our kids. Not long after we started the challenge, a writer at the New York Times got wind of the project and wrote an online piece about all the crazy people online who were going a week without shopping for groceries. The Washington Post found out and decided to run a similar challenge for its readers. The phenomenon spread. As I was going into my fourth week of supermarket avoidance, a producer from Good Morning America called. A film crew with a mountain of lights and microphones filled every available bit of space in my apartment. (The segment got bumped for a hard-news event, so it may never air – we’ll see.) Oprah did a similar challenge for her viewers. Somewhere between the time I laid the no-shopping gauntlet down to the eGullet community and the media enthusiasm that ensued, it finally hit me: this challenge was more than just an amusing way to use all of the food I had bought during my weekly pilgrimage to Fairway and save some money. In staying away from the grocery store, I had changed. In a week I had become sensitive to waste in a way that a lifetime of lip-service to conservation had never achieved. Not that my awakening was a one-shot deal. My don’t-shop-now challenge had resonated with a cross-section of people around the world, but I didn't fully understand why until toward the fourth week, as the challenge evolved from something fun, into something edifying, into something personally, profoundly meaningful. Each individual who took the challenge experienced it in a slightly different way, but for many of us there was a common thread. We came to understand, through this shared experience, that the way people in the wealthy nations shop, eat and cook is the centerpiece of a wasteful lifestyle that's hard to break out of. While for most of history, humankind struggled full-time to find enough food to survive, in the mid-20th Century the tables turned. In the affluent nations, at least, we now have so much food, and it’s so cheap, that we throw billions of dollars worth of it in the garbage. While doing that, we’ve become a rather pudgy society. Yet many people in the 21st Century still shop, every week, like they’re stocking up for a hard 19th Century winter. Today’s food abundance has smothered self-restraint. After all, I didn’t just survive the challenge. I was buying less and saving money, but I was also eating better. And it wasn’t just my food life that changed. I reflected on and reevaluated all my patterns of spending and consumption as well as those of society at large. At the end of the month, the challenge was over, but it had changed me forever. It can happen for you too. I'm going to ask you to take the “Don’t Shop Now” challenge for seven days, starting right now. In taking this journey together we can make a difference. We can change our food buying, cooking and eating habits. And along the way you’re going to pick up more than a few new kitchen skills that have value in every room of the house and beyond. I firmly believe that many people, once they achieve the realization that they can do more with less, can do more than just eat better. They can buy less and dress better, play better, travel better, live better.

I agree with all that: the main definition of dumpling should be dough, stuffed or unstuffed, cooked by wet heat. There are some special cases that probably need to be included too, such as Asian pan-fried dumplings, though those are usually steamed first or simultaneously. Once you call an empanada a dumpling, though, you broaden the term so much you render it kind of useless.

Sometime tomorrow we'll post a whole bunch of material to get the ball rolling. In short, the mission is "Don't shop now." The idea is not to go out and stockpile for a week. The idea is to skip shopping this week and work with whatever is in you refrigerator, freezer and pantry. Stay tuned...

So glad you'll be joining in. I'm hoping we'll pull in a lot of people starting on Sunday-Monday when we really start promoting the happening. Andie, as you'll recall, last time we did this we had several dozen people do a week. Then we had smaller groups continue on for a second and third week. Finally, we had a hard core that went an entire month or beyond. I imagine you're going to be in the latter group. I'm probably shooting for that too.

Fantastic! We'll set up a fresh new topic on Sunday and make some announcements to get the ball rolling. I have so much junk in my refrigerator, freezer and pantry at the moment that I may have to do this for a year. For those of you who didn't catch it, this is what we sent out in our NewsGullet email newsletter the other day: Stay tuned...

As far as I know the body can't process whole flax seeds, so they need to be ground one way or another. I buy them ground. You can also grind them in a small coffee grinder. I think you can mill flax seeds in a Vita Mix. But if you just put them in with your smoothie, I'm not sure how effectively they'll get ground. It will probably be uneven, no matter how powerful the unit is. I'd probably take a whole bunch and mill them in the Vita Mix, then store in a zipper bag or deli container in the fridge. Add a couple of tablespoons as needed. I hope this helps you live forever.

Just wanted to illustrate the standard smoothie-making procedure in our household. This is for two smoothies. Smoothies are, needless to say, a great way to utilize blemished and/or over-the-hill fruit. In this case, there was a nasty spot on an apple that we picked several weeks ago at a U-pick place. After removal of the spot, lots of usable product. My layering strategy is to start with 2 tablespoons of flax meal, then put in whatever is the most difficult thing to blend, in this case the apple. I top that with frozen fruit (in this case banana, blackberries and strawberries) to nearly fill the pitcher. This in the end tends to make enough for two nice-size smoothies. My Waring blender also needs some liquid. In this case I used a little water. The water level looks deceptively high because of all the volume displaced by the fruit. but it's really just a little bit. I also use juice sometimes. Pineapple juice gives a particularly rich flavor. What I try to avoid is using ice cubes. With a higher-power blended I'd use ice cubes, but with my standard blender the combination of frozen fruit and liquid yields a smoother smoothie.

For a little comparison of Heath and Skor, please see the topic I just started: Toffee Throwdown.

We were discussing the question of best mass-produced treats, and the venerable Heath bar got a few mentions. This led to me going out to try to find a Heath bar at a newsstand or bodega, but I found that Heath had surprisingly limited availability. Chris Amirault then inquired about Skor bars, which until then I had never tasted. More widely available -- though still not a Tier 1 candy like Snickers or M&Ms where you can get one pretty much anywhere candy is sold in the US -- would the Skor bar be the answer to my dreams? I bought one and, to me, it tasted great and seemed to be an earnest Heath-bar facsimile. I then decided I should get one of each and do a taste test. This proved challenging. I finally found a Heath bar at a Duane-Reade pharmacy (probably the dominant chain here in New York City), but once I found it I couldn't find a Skor bar anywhere. By the time I found a Skor bar, I'd eaten the Heath bar. This went on for days. Finally, I managed to get both at the same time. I'll cut to the chase: Skor is better. I went into this experiment thinking Heath would be better, but in the end the superiority of Skor was inescapable. I'm not the first person to conduct a Heath-Skor challenge, or even the first person to post online about it. A blogger who goes by "Flax" did a particularly nice job comparing the two bars (and by the way also ruled for Skor). But I thought I could add a little. Here's the essential information from the "Flax" effort: From other Googling, I found indications that Heath and Skor are now made in the very same factory. Also I remember Heath used to come as two small bars in a package, but it has now been converted to a single-bar format. I'm wondering if they're even made with the same machinery. They look quite similar, though the ripple pattern is not identical. "Flax" is correct about the difference in appearance. Inside, Heath is lighter in color and the bits of almond are visible. As for ingredients (which can be found listed under the fold of the wrapper -- it took me a minute to discover that), here they are: "Flax" is also correct that the main difference in taste is Skor's buttery richness: "Flax" concludes, as I did, that Skor is the tastier candy bar: But I'm not one to rely fully on single-observer tests. So I also set up a blind tasting. My friend Sean and my wife Ellen were served samples A and B and asked to comment. The decision was instant and unanimous: they liked Skor better. Not only is Skor better than Heath, it's also simply a great candy bar. As luck would have it, I was able to acquire some of the professional high-end pastry-chef version of Skor/Heath from my friend Nicole, who is in my opinion one of the best pastry chefs going. This is what you get when you make a chocolate-toffee confection with high-quality chocolate and all the other top-shelf ingredients: Needless to say, the chocolate in this version tasted superior. The chocolate used in Heath and Skor is mediocre Hershey's chocolate. Luckily this doesn't matter all that much because it's such a small component of the candy. But I will say that, even though the pastry-chef version was based on superior ingredients that could be easily tasted and preferred, there were things to be learned from Skor's food scientists. The Skor bar was saltier and more buttery, and I think having compared them side-by-side my pastry-chef friend will increase the salt and butter components next time she makes this item. So, to Skor, I say bravo not only for being better than Heath but also for having a thing or two to teach even a top pastry chef.

I went a little overboard with quantity today, but here we have cheddar cheese, hummus, cucumbers, pita chips, grapes, cantaloupe.

Yesterday, Monday, I found myself at a loss for what to make. I had one hard-cooked egg left from the batch I made last week, which had almost completely unmolded itself. I had a quarter of an avocado. I thought about egg salad with avocado but it seemed too messy and mushy. I've also found that PJ may or may not eat egg salad, depending on the day and his mood. So I decided to make two small sandwiches: one egg salad, and the other hummus with avocado. Then I started rounding out the lunch. There were two oatmeal cookies left from Ellen's cookie-production episode last week, so I packed one of those. We still had some Halloween pretzels. A few grapes. Some cantaloupe. Eventually there was lunch. Just for visual variety: when all is said and done, here's what lunch looks like. As I mentioned before, a brown paper bag with the child's name written on it is a school requirement. Today's lunch should be easy. This is the day he spends the afternoon with my mother, so he always snacks a lot there. The lunch I pack will be fairly light.

I wish. But we had a long drive ahead. I had water.

I omitted onions because I wanted subtle flavors, but I seasoned as normal. I probably wound up eating a lot of salt. The overall effect, however, was not one of extreme saltiness. Also, I've found, based on limited experience, that the fancier caviars have less salty flavors.

The other day I was the beneficiary of a 50g tin of Petrossian's Royal Siberian caviar, left over from an extravagant gift sampler. Petrossian is a very fine purveyor of caviar and a 50g tin of Royal Siberian goes for $201 retail. For those of you who don't speak metric, a 50g tin is about 1 3/4 ounces. Because the tin had been opened but the caviar hadn't been served, I didn't feel comfortable leaving it in the refrigerator for long. And I was planning to be out both days this weekend. So I felt I had to use it for Saturday breakfast or discard it, and I wasn't about to discard $201 worth of Petrossian caviar. I called a couple of friends -- the people I rely on for last-minute things like this -- but one had to play tennis and the other couldn't handle waking up for 8:30 breakfast. So, I scrambled some eggs in a saucepan using the Jean-Georges medium-high-heat method, made some simple home-fried potatoes, and dumped the whole tin of caviar on top of the eggs. Topped with a dollop of creme fraiche, also left over from the Petrossian gift basket. It was good. Sorry you couldn't be there.

Thursday's lunch was an oatmeal cookie from a batch Ellen made, sliced avocado dressed with lemon juice, a hard-cooked egg molded to look like something, the last of the Halloween pretzels, and mixed fruit. No lunch Friday.

I don't know about the No. 1. The old sign just said "Dumpling House." 118 Eldridge.

Sha, how many courses are you trying to do?

Winter squashes are cheap, and pumpkins are often free in early November. I know one place near us that's simply giving them away. They're not particularly good for eating, but the seeds toast up nicely.

I would suggest you start aggressively monitoring as many store circulars as possible starting now, then. The non-perishables are easy to accumulate ahead of time, and you probably have 3 circular cycles to watch for a great deal on a meat-and-bones item -- which you can freeze. Are any of the ideas here resonating with you? What sort of ideas do you have? Let's start working on some math now that we know everything is to be divided by 10-12. I think the dollar goal is achievable, although I guess it depends on how many courses you're doing. But I bet you could do soup, an egg dish, a meat-and-starch dish and a humble dessert for a dollar a person.

Yes it would help to know the parameters. Just looking over the circular from a supermarket near me, there are a lot of interesting options. But ultimately it's going to come down to what's being promoted near you. I see something here called "pork loin combination," bone in, for 99 cents a pound. That could form the basis of a soup *and* some kind of Southwestern pork-and-beans dish served with rice -- at least that's what I'd do with it. I imagine you can get turkey even cheaper this time of year. They're also selling 18 eggs for $1.49. A coddled egg over grits, or something of that nature, could be a whole course for just cents per person. There's a whole section of the circular with 10-for-$10 offers, including Bumble Bee tuna and canned tomatoes in 28-ounce cans -- and the 10-for-$10 special is mix-or-match. There's so much that can be made from just flour and water. Or if you get cheap eggs you can do a fresh pasta.

If you really apply yourself and seize every opportunity, I think you can do it for a dollar for the whole meal. I agree with the comments above that it's all going to be about taking advantage of sales and loss leaders. The stuff like rice, beans and potatoes will be no problem. It's just a question of getting a super-cheap piece of protein. Maybe a butcher will give you scraps for free so you can make a soup. Lots of supermarkets have a rewrap rack where they sell the old produce that's about to go off. Etc.

Yesterday was an egg molded to look like a bear, cheddar cheese, pita chips, cucumbers, apple sauce and Halloween pretzels. I heard from Monday that he hadn't been able to open the Halloween pretzels without teacher assistance so I cut a little way into the package to make it easy starting. For whatever reason, this lunch achieved 100% consumption. I've had a bunch of personal stuff going on this week, and this morning I couldn't believe I had to pack lunch. Luckily last night was Tuesday, sushi night, so I had an avocado roll ready to go. There were additional molded eggs, so I packed a kitty egg. Some crackers. The Halloween pretzels, but this time I took them out of the bag. Apple sauce again. A banana. Somehow a lunch came together. I can't believe I have to do this tomorrow too.

These are the still photos illustrating the process. At the end is the finished dish as we had it at dinner. When it was served, I was so excited that I started eating before photographing. So the dish as I photographed it is missing a bite.

We finally had the chance to dine at Pera on Monday night. It was great. More on that later. (Note: we were guests of the restaurant, not paying customers.) The thing I wanted to report on right away is that I got to watch chef Sezai Celikbas prepare lamb Adana in the afternoon. His butchering skills are off the charts. We were downstairs in the prep kitchen, so the lighting was not great, but I did manage to capture a little video. I've edited it down to three minutes. What you can see is Sezai first removing the silverskin, sinew and undesirable fat from some meat, then dicing the cleaned meat and a suitable ratio of clean fat, then hand-chopping all of it, seasoning and molding onto skewers. More later.

I had no idea the widely available Skor was a Heath analog. I'll have to get one -- maybe I can even get both -- and report back.