France: Eat Your Way Through the Country

There is one adjustment you have to make as an American when you go to France. You have to eat like the French. They typically eat small portions and don't snack. But the food is divine — and rich. And despite the photo above, usually not so obviously rich.

On our first full day, we went to the local market, not the supermarket but the building full of stalls with luscious vegetables, beautiful cheeses, olives of may flavors and meat and fish of every stripe. We were stocking up for the pantry at our villa in a little village near the Rhône River.

Once weighed down with bags and bags of produce and other food, we stopped into a little brasserie for lunch, where Ruth had the Cappuccino
 pictured above.

Despite our haul of goat cheeses, fresh green olives in brine, cranberry beans, tomatoes, leeks, eggs, eggplant tapenade, we decided to eat at the local restaurant, Chaverdille, because it is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

It is the only restaurant in the little village, but the food was wonderful. Our theory is that it's difficult to find a bad restaurant in France, because they won't last.

The sauces are deep with flavors, and the preparation is almost always stopped at just the right line. And the wine is incredibly cheap. What's not to like?

Food Store Shopping Binge Receipt: $65 and More Veggies Than You Can Carry

Here's the receipt from a recent trip to the store where we buy our produce. The booty was almost too much to carry, but it will feed us for some time.

The store's produce is typically inexpensive (if they can do it, why can't the big supermarkets?). Some items are not cheap: apples $2.79/lb.; grape tomatoes $2/pint. But broccoli crown was $1; cilantro $.50; strawberries $1/1.5 pint; limes $1/7.

Bargain Wine of the Week: An All-Purpose Cheat Sheet

Eat Well, Eat Cheap gives you all sorts of great wines for less than $10. But then you walk into your local wine store, and you can't find one of our recommendations for wine values at a bargain price. We've tried to give you some universal pointers on brands that are consistent enough to be reliable, but what's a person to do when faced with aisles of anonymous labels?

Wine Enthusiast magazine, arguably the most trusted wine magazine, has come to the rescue. In its new issue (March 2011) it published a reliable wine bargain cheat sheet for the wine store, supermarket or wine discount store.

Wine Enthusiast divided its bargain list first by country. Then it listed the labels that have proved to be the most reliable in its "Best Buy" listings over the years. After each label, it lists the specific regions and varietals that are the pick of the label's bottles — by varietal but not by year.

So, for example, for Chile, it lists eight wineries that consistently produce great bargains. Santa Rita, Concha y Toro, Casa Lapostolle and Los Vascos are among the eight. Under Casa Lapostolle, it lists the winery's Rapel Valley wines, and specifically its Rapel Cabernet Sauvignon and its Carmenére. The winery imports many more wines than those two, but Wine Enthusiast says that those are the two that are consistently good and consistently bargains.

For American wines, it offers separate categories for California, Washington and Oregon.

The magazine offers this invaluable "Cheat Sheet" as a three-page pdf for download, so that you can take it to the store the next time you shop for wine. You might want to leave it in the car for those times when you pop into an unknown and untried store (or even for restaurant wine lists).

Good Cheap Cookware and Kitchen Supplies: Discount Retailers

We've written about how great discounters like TJ Maxx, Ross, and Marshalls are for marked-down oils, spices, and oddball gourmet items. After scouring our three local stores, we're convinced that these are also great places to buy cookware.

Our Marshalls outlet, for example, currently has a fairly wide selection of half-price Le Creuset. Some of these pots are marked as factory seconds, but we couldn't detect any imperfections. A nine-quart Dutch oven that costs $300 from the manufacturer can be had for $150 at Marshalls; a large oval French oven that retails for $400 was selling for $200. Marshalls also had half-price nonstick Calphalon (we couldn't resist the $60 large sauté pan, which came with a nice heavy cover).

There was also a good selection of baking dishes and pans, including Le Creuset casseroles, as well as knives and a wide assortment of kitchen implements that ranged from measuring spoons to mixing bowls.

If you need cookware, first check out your local discount stores; you may be able to find just what you need for a lower price than you would pay at a department store or kitchen store.

Rave Review: "Artisan" Lettuce

OK, first off—we don't much care for the term "artisan," which is to this century what "gourmet" was to the 1970s and likewise is indiscriminately applied to everything from mass-produced bread to gummy Costco cheeses. Nonetheless, the sudden appearance of "artisan" lettuce, as it is obnoxiously labeled, in our local stores and, yes, Costco, has dramatically improved our salads.

Our longtime problem with pre-mixed salads is the high spoilage rate: the mixture of lettuce varieties always means that some leaves decay before others, forcing us to either pick out the slimy deadbeats from the remaining crisp leaves or toss the whole package, an act we find unacceptably wasteful. Still, because these packages are often economical despite the spoilage, we've continued to buy them.

But a few months ago, packages of "artisan"—sorry for the quotes, but this term really grates—lettuces began to appear in our local supermarkets: tight-packed whole heads of red and green varieties. Not only did these cost less than the typical mesclun mix, they had a much longer shelf life.

Last night we apprehensively opened a two-week old box with one remaining head, which had been neglected on the back of a refrigerator shelf. Astonishingly, the lettuce was crisp and entirely usable.

A one-pound box of lettuces runs less than $4 at Costco.

Candles on Ice

Our friend JP, who has written here before, snapped a shot of these Dias at the Indo-Caribbean Diwali parade in Brooklyn a couple of weekends ago. They look a bit like clams on the half shell on ice. They're actually candles that the celebrants light and walk around with at the celebration.

Shopping Bargains: Spices

We’re working up a longer post on the deals you can find at Indian food markets, but the recipe for Too-Tired-to-Cook Curry reminded us of the huge savings on spices these stores offer.

Check out the photo: a 1.5-ounce jar of coriander powder was $5.99 at our local supermarket, compared with $1.49 for a seven-ounce bag at the Indian store.

The savings on cumin powder are even more dramatic. These days, many recipes call for cumin—not just for Indian food but for a wide range of dishes, including Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, Cuban, and Tex-Mex. Perhaps because of its sudden popularity, cumin tends to be obscenely marked up at supermarkets, where a 1.5-ounce jar runs between $4 and $7. At Indian markets, however, you can get a 14-ounce bag of cumin powder for about $4.

Although online grocery sites also offer some good deals on spices, it’s worth googling “Indian grocery” and your city’s name to see what’s available locally. 

Shopping Bargains: The Warehouse Club

Derided by many for their laughable, ludicrous quantities—remember Homer Simpson and the Mrs. Butterworth bottle?—warehouse clubs like Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s offer equally large savings . . . for those who can control themselves.

Though it is ever-escalating, our annual membership fee at Costco — now $50 — is a bargain as long as we avoid expensive and caloric temptations. So we avert our eyes from the tantalizing bags of Terra Chips and Atomic Fireballs and stick to the basics: coffee, olive oil, mustard, baking yeast, sugar, nuts, basmati rice, juice, fresh fruit and vegetables, dried fruit, canned tomatoes, cheese, and whatever other quality staples can be gleaned. Even with this fairly short list, our membership pays for itself several times over, as we also buy vitamins, detergent, and other household basics at Costco.

We generally do a warehouse run once or twice a month. Here’s what we got on our trip this week:

4.5 lb. raisins                           $6.89
2 lb. pecans                               8.89
3 lb. almonds                             9.49
1 lb. organic salad mix              4.79
2 lb. grape tomatoes                  4.99
15-lb. bag grapefruit                  9.99
1.5 lb. Parmigiano Reggiano   15.83
1 lb. goat cheese                        4.49
2 lb. queso fresco                       5.49
2  loaves whole grain bread       4.49
2 lb. coffee                               10.39

For less than $90, we got a big pile of groceries that in some cases will hold us for months. We’ll use the raisins and nuts for homemade granola and freeze part of the goat cheese and queso fresco. One of the bread loaves will go into the freezer. The costliest single item, the parmesan cheese, will last at least a couple of months.

A one-pound box of salad mix can be tricky to manage, as it’s sometimes hard for the two of us to eat that much lettuce before it goes bad. Although this low price justifies a certain amount of spoilage, we really hate to waste, so we’ll make a few salad-based meals to keep on top of things. (One reason these mixes spoil quickly is that they’re crammed too tightly into the containers; if you shake up the plastic box every time you take some salad out, the leaves will last longer.)

Costco offers some of our favorite seasonal items, such as the $8 one-pound boxes of chanterelle mushrooms that appear in the fall. Other products, like organic sugar, come and go, so if you see something you like and can stockpile it, you probably should load up.

If you have the patience to winnow the quality buys from the towering aisles of junk, and have the room at home to store your purchases, the warehouse club is one of the best deals out there. 

Recommendation: Elissa Altman has written a book on buying, storing, and preparing bulk foods, titled, appropriately, Big Food. Check it out!

Shopping Bargains: T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, Ross

Believe it or not, you can find real food bargains at these discount retailers, which usually have “gourmet” aisles tucked somewhere in the back of their stores between the cheetah-print bras and the clearance Buddha heads.

These stores are a lot like flea markets—if you go looking for a specific item, you’re likely to be disappointed, but if you have the patience to browse, you can find some genuine steals.

Our T.J. Maxx is a good source of marked-down oils, vinegars, dried herbs, mustards, olives, and preserves. It’s the only place we buy walnut oil: a 17-ounce can of the excellent Tourangelle brand is $6.99. There’s always a lot of tea and chocolate, too. And, in case we’re worried that the food on the shelves is as stale as last year’s fishnets, a banner over the aisle proactively assures us that everything they sell is fresh. This is true; we’ve never had a problem with T.J. Maxx’s food (and that's more than we can say about Williams Sonoma's).

Shopping Bargains: Ethnic Markets

Ethnic grocery stores are underutilized gems that make it much easier for us to eat well and cheap. Our local Asian, Indian, and Hispanic markets provide us with many (and sometimes most) of our dinner ingredients. They’re a great source of not only exotic items but also inexpensive everyday staples such as rice, noodles, and produce. Because this is a big subject, and so helpful to budget cooking, today we’ll just talk about the deals at our local Asian grocery.

Asian markets scare some people, who are put off by the unreadable cans of weird pastes and vegetables, the even-odder-looking fresh veggies, and the bags of dried fungi. But, in our experience, the produce in these stores cannot be beat for price or quality.

Scallions: The last time we checked, our supermarket charged $1.69 a bunch; they’re 50 cents a bunch at the Asian store, and much plumper, to boot.

Herbs: Everybody hates the overpriced, geriatric, dried-out (or sometimes slimy and black) packaged herbs at the supermarket. At the Asian store, basil, cilantro, and mint are fresh as can be and $1 a bunch.

Shallots: Our supermarket charges $2.99 for a bag of two measly shallots. At the Asian market, a one-pound bag is only $1.50. Shallots have a subtle flavor—part onion, part garlic—that’s great in everything. (Our friend Cynthia, who has a severe garlic allergy, can eat them without a problem.)

Tofu: It’s $3 a container at even our cheapest local supermarket; at the Asian store, a one-pound block of soft, firm, or extra-firm tofu can be had for $1.35. If, like us, you eat a lot of tofu, this savings adds up in a hurry.

Asian markets are also excellent sources of dried mushrooms; noodles; sesame seeds; tea; and stir-fry staples like hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, chili paste, and bamboo shoots. Feeling adventuruous? Sometimes if you throw a dart, you discover a yummy surprise. That’s how we found yuba, or dried tofu, which is much, much better than it sounds . . . but then, it would have to be, wouldn’t it?