Last Post Date Food Blogs (316)

Someone gave me yesterday Philippine Delicacy called PUTO came in two flavors cheese and Ube. TWO BOXES was sent me.

I shared one box to my housemates and one box I kept for myself
Today I will marathon eating the All Puto else it will stale!! Mapanis!

...at least at my house. Yours might have been quite different.

On my way home from photographing a baby (bald) eaglet,
I stopped by the grocery store.
There is a store chain here in New Jersey called Shoprite.
For the past year I have been capitalizing on a recent change there.
I noticed the change, when I got back to NJ from Florida last spring.

In the very back of the store they have a sit down eat area.
I suppose some workers in the area go there and eat lunch.
Perhaps it's gotten progressively more popular to do so.
It's a lot cheaper than going to a restaurant, and you don't have to
deal with a waiter nor waitress. So, no tipping needed and you can sit there
as long, or as short as you like, or take out the food too.

At the end of the lunch period, the store has a lot of leftovers.
So, they package about 2 meals (or more) into a plastic containers with a clear plastic lid
and move that to the front of the store, where they have several glass door
refrigeration units 2 to 4, depending upon which store location.

When they move it up there, the containers are at 30% off price.
Then later, they are reduced to 50 % off.
By the time ~ 4:30pm arrives many are at 70% off.
So, after I am done doing whatever I am doing that day,
I stop by Shoprite and get 4 containers once a week.

Thus, for the past year I have been literally feasting on gourmet meals for a song
and other than heating that dinner up in the microwave, I haven't cooked 1 dinner
in over a year.

When I get home I freeze 3 of the 4 packages and use the other for dinner that night & usually the next night. The second day I also move the second package from the freezer section to the refrigerated section and repeat that each 2 days. This then takes care of 8 dinners for the week. I got 4 packages earlier tonight.

At random I stuck 3 packages in the freezer and the one I tried tonight is (Indian) Butter Chicken. It was sooooooooooooo good, that I ate both meals AND I took
5 pieces of 100% whole wheat bread and sopped up every last drop of the sauce
and ate those too:

I guess I better pull out one of the other containers for tomorrow night......once I can move again.

I just looked up the recipe for you;

Now, THERE,THAT's how to talk to your GF. On closer analysis, it has it all. An invite out to tasty food. Compliments on her beauty, and the hint of passion after the meal. But I digress.
There's much talk about businesses failing with C-19. In the USA, restaurants are one of the top businesses, and they, as a group, seem to be in for the greatest percentage of business failures. So, as statistical outliers always attract the epididymis' eye of Vierk, let's rant away.
For starters, why would anyone want to be a restaurateur? Well, there are a few types. The saddest cases are those who are basically romantic (sometimes chefs) social foodies, who love to bask in the life of cavorting with customers, and banging the staff/customers. Recently I heard one such lady from NYC brag about "having in the artsy, leftie, moneyed wannabe bohemian types, foodie cruising in various regalia, among their ilk, less for the food, than for being fully in the scene". This particular lady was newly bankrupt, and now in nursing school. She said that few of these sort succeed, typically lacking a lick of business sense. They see themselves as artistes, and as such, only a tiny minority make it big. Sugar mommys/daddys sometimes are behind the exceptions.
The business types, though, can succeed, in various ways. Rarely on their own, most either form, or buy into, profitable franchise operations---yes the "eatery chains". Volume purchasing, advertising, and management approaches seem to do it. Profits can be very good, from margins often multiples of those in the "on their own" artiste operations.
I am wondering, with rents and staff forming so much of the costs of operating, why we aren't seeing more home based purveyors of take out food, or even of "live upstairs, guests seated downstairs" places, as I saw in Lisbon, and in much of the developing world. By analogy with Air B-n-B, perhaps in some form.
My own take on this topic is less eating out. After all, a little getting to know the food workers, and their work environment, can easily make anyone less sanguine about the restaurant scene. And it's more than sociopathic spitting on a dish, as of a poor worker somehow "getting back at the rich". On your way to the restaurant bathroom, psuedo mistakingly saunter into the kitchen, as I did in NYC, where I used to visit mostly for the food, and with raer exceptions, the lack of hygiene will shock you. Not to mention the conditions in the John. Graduate studies in entomology was frosting on the cake, as it were.
In fact, most of the tiny margin, artiste like establishments probably were close to failing BEFORE C-19. It's capitalism at work. The failures will force overpricing landlords to lower rents, and so on. And I'm becoming a much better cook at home.

No ! I didn't eat the robin.

This evening I wolfed down several turkey breast slices with honey-mustard, mashed potatoes with butter, 1/2 a sliced red bell pepper & shredded red leaf lettuce drizzled with Balsamic vinegar.

For dessert it was a chocolate brownie.

I hope your dinner was good too.

I just took recycling outside. 'My' robin, nesting ontop the front porch light,
flew from the nest to a short nearby tree, as usual, when I opened the front door.
But oddly, she didn't chirp this time.

Perhaps the lack of sun today had something to do with that.
Or maybe our front porch 'dance' is becoming 'old hat' to her.
Perhaps I should sing as I exit to spice things up.

While at the store thought I'd purchase a six pack of the pop just to see how it tasted so I bought some tonight to give it a try.It didn't taste to awfully bad.

This round I did a switch.
I wanted to try something sweet... but I didn't have any cream cheese.
Fresh mango, yogurt, honey, mozzarella cheese, pizza dough.
It was okay, but after I realized I forgot butter !



The side split getting it into the pan so some mango juice oozed out.

If my retirement plan works out, I would visit China a few months each year. Wondering what I would do for an income, joking I said "I could open up a pizza shop."

Florida has many Italian restaurants and you don't have to travel far to find a good one. A small place about 5 miles away has thin crust 18 inch pizza for $11 on Monday and Tuesday. Takeout only.
But I'm resisting going back there until the stay home order is lifted. In the mean time, we tried some frozen pizza and all failed miserably. My wife said we could make our own and from scratch started working on dough. We already had sauce but only provolone cheese. Good enough for a start.

This is the first round with hand made crust.


I'm honest. better than frozen, but it failed.


So, I bought some refrigerated pizza dough at Walmart and was annoyed at how hard it was to work. The texture wasn't right. I quickly had an attitude change and my wife had to take over.
Maybe my company name will be Moody Pizza.



Pizza shouldn't look like afterbirth. I'm disappointed.

We all seen the perfect baked turkey. Breast side up golden, looks so delicious.

Truth is, that turkey will not be as good to eat as it could have been. In restaurants, when you order turkey, you get it by the slice and the breast meat is always so moist and juicy. When they bake the turkey in restaurants, they simply bake it breast side down. The juices from the dark meat run down over and through the white meat making it moist and juicy. that is the secret to moist breast meat.

The turkey won't present the same out of the oven, it will look blah. Its not served a turkey at a time though, its served by the slice and when sliced up, the look of the turkey won't matter. The enhancement in flavor more than makes up for the lesser appearance.

Ps: Also applies to chicken and other birds.

Two unrelated circumstances came together recently to form what is currently the practice to call a perfect storm. It is hard to predict what a storm might leave in its wake; it depends on too many variable factors to be done with much accuracy. The nature of the storm; its strength and direction, and what lays in its path are a few that come readily to mind. My storm, when it came, could easily have been mistaken for a light breeze, and I certainly could not have predicted what it would leave behind.

Sardines are what it left behind. That -I think- illustrates very well my point about the unpredictability of the consequences of storms; as does this blog: Who could have predicted that something entitled “A Perfect Storm” would turn out to be about sardines?

The first circumstance to manifest was my diminishing interest in putting any effort into preparing meals. The second was the uncertainty of being able to rely on the availability of any particular item in the supermarket, because of the panic buying the virus crisis has prompted in many of us. It occurred to me that a possible solution to both these problems may well come in the form of cans. Had I been more discriminating in my choice of cans when I set about stocking up on them it is more than likely that sardines would not have been included, but my guard was down and they were.

I opened the sardines one lunch time when I found I had nothing else that didn’t need heating up. There were three of them lying there in the can, and they were not as tightly packed as their reputation had led me to expect. Nor did I expect how tasty they would be, and a world of possibilities opened up.

I was suddenly thinking of sardines in white wine sauce and sardines au vin: imagining sardines a la creme and sardines on a bed of couscous with roasted Mediterranean vegetables, and even sardines and mash, or sardines in the hole.

After a while, immediately after my disappointment at the infeasibility of sardine Kiev, I remembered why I had bought the sardines in the first place, so I just eat them straight from the can.

Dairy farmers are crying over spilled milk... Restaurants, schools and businesses are shuttered. Now there's a huge surplus of milk and cheese products. One dairy that produces 30,000 gallons of milk dairy is forced to dump nearly half of that because the food-service industry no longer has a demand.
Something must be done... but what?
These are products that normally would be consumed by people going out. The people haven't disappeared... they're hunkered gown on a stay-home order. Same people.

Maybe it's my 'cheesy-request' but if people started buying more milk from grocers and the demand went up, dairy farmers could kick-in and supply to a different source. Even if they were to lower their cost to the it wouldn't the total loss they are having now.

Some stores have a shortage of dairy products... supply and demand. Find another source,


That's my opinion. Yours may differ...