Buy Big, Shop Smart
Thursday, September 13th, 2007Warehouse shopping clubs, such as Costco, Sam’s, and BJ’s, can offer bargains, but only if you actually use the huge quantities of food you bring home. In the book Big Food by Elissa Altman, she suggest the following four food and money-saving rules.
• The two-dish rule: Takle the aisles with a plan to make at least two or three different recipes. Eyeing three pounds of fresh tuna. Consider roasting it Mediterranean-style with olives for dinner and then packing a tuna salad for lunch the next day.
• The multiple-use rule: Condiments such as kletchup, oil, and mayonnaise can be incorporated into many dishes. Skip items with limited uses, like bulk packages of cereal and chips, that will go stale before you can eat them all.
• The freese-half rule: Large cuts of beef, pork, chicken are all bargins, because stores don’t pay to package individual servings. Freeze half and cook the rest. Mik and butter freeze well too.
• The no-bulk-greens rule: Lettuce and spinach last about five days; stick with bell peppers, green beans, and broccoli, which are easy to freeze.
(Source:Big Food)
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Earthly Eating Recipe:
Ruby-Red Grapefruit Sorbet with Champagne:
Serves 6
1 tbsp. finely grated grapefruit zest
4 cups freshly squeezed red grapefurit juive (from about 5 to 6 red-fleshed grapfruit, such as Marsh Ruby)
1 cup sugar
1 split chilled champagne
Mint sprig for garnish
1. In a large bowl, combine the grapfruit zest juice. Remove any seeds, but leave the bits of pulp.
2. Place the sugar in a small saucepan and pour 1/2 cup of the juice zest mixture over the top. Heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves completely. (If there’s no graininess when you rub a drop between your fingers, the sugar has dissolved.) Add the resulting syrup back to the remaining juice, and chill the mixture in the refrigerator.
3. Freeze according to the instructions of your ice cream maker.
4. Scoop the sorbet into the champagne flutes, then pour the chilled champagne over the sorbet, allowing the liquid to fill the spaces between the scoops. Garnish with a mint.
Happy Eating!
