SmartShopIt Blog

Shop Smarter in 2010

As each new year approaches, we are inspired to sit down and determine what was good about the previous year and what we could have done better.  For me, that always involves trying to figure out how to improve on my grocery shopping skills.  And there is definitely lots of room for improvement as recent events have shown me.

Sometimes as we get over zealous in our search for great bargains, we get ‘hooked’ into buying the wrong things.  This is hard to avoid, especially with all the good marketing and merchandising the retailers and manufacturers do so well.  Such was the case for me the other day.

Now I don’t have any problems buying products that have been on the shelf a little longer as they tend to be discounted to move quickly.  Sometimes I actually think it’s easier for a cook to just buy the best right off the farm or fresh out of the ocean product and combine them a little extra virgin olive oil and 100 year old balsamic and call it a finished dish.  But all that chef really did was shop well, which by the way, any good cook also needs to know how to do.

What made our moms and grandmothers such great cooks was not just their ability to shop well but to also take inexpensive, sometimes not so fresh products and make them into mouth-watering dishes.  As I cook for my family and with economic times as hard as they are, I strive to learn from good ole grandma in this area.   But I don’t fare as well sometimes.

To get to the meat (shrimp and crab meat to be specific) of the story, I went to my favorite market for seafood.  Like any good shopper, I have my favorite stores for certain types of products.  Where I live we have great Asian markets (99 Ranch Market on the west coast and H-Mart stores on the east coast) that bring us products we don’t normally find in the American mega-marts.  In addition, they are usually less expensive on items that appeal to the Asian palate.  For example, I can find bananas at 99 Ranch Market right now for $.49 per pound where our local Safeway is selling them at $.99.  Huge bulk carrots are $.49 where Safeway is $.79 for skinnier roots.

In addition, the Asian market seafood departments are killer for having fresh and inexpensive seafood.  Hunting for some good shrimp ($3.99/lb for 50/60 count white shrimp versus Safeway at $5.99/lb)  and crabs ($3.99/lb  for live Dungeness vs. Safeway at $5.99/lb for pre-cooked) I headed to my local 99 Ranch Market.  At the Asian markets, they lay out the seafood over ice and in tubs for the patrons to pick the ones they want, giving them the ability to choose the best (provided you know how).  To my surprise, they had shrimp and crab laying out for only $1.99 per pound.  Granted, they were a bit older and the crabs were those that had died and couldn’t be sold as live crabs any longer.  But I figured they were still fresh and still looked pretty good.  Without inspecting them closely for freshness, a lack of better judgment overcame me influenced by the low price, and I took a chance and bought them.

I got home and wanted to make a Shrimp & Basil Malfaldini dish and a Steamed Crab dish.  But as soon as I tasted the products after the initial cooking, I knew I was in trouble.  Both meats were a bit on the mushy side and had lost the intense seafood flavor that fresh products bring to the dish.  The shrimp dish was ok as the meat was somewhat hidden by my basil sauce and the great Malfaldini my daughter had bought in a NY Italian market by her Queens apartment.  But there was no way the crab could be served just steamed with a dipping sauce.    To try to save the crab I coated them with some olive oil, salt, fresh ground pepper, ground cumin, ground coriander, garlic powder and smoked paprika and then roasted for 15 minutes to turn it into a Mediterranean Roasted Crab dish.  The seasoning was excellent but no matter what I did I couldn’t salvage the dish.  The quality of the meat was too poor.

So the money I saved was thrown down the drain in a poor product.  Lesson learned.  Seafood needs to always look and smell very fresh.  Avoid seafood that has a fishy smell (should have little smell or smell like the ocean on a clear day), lost its bright luster (especially noticeable in a fish’s eyes) and/or has a slimy film building up on it.  You can’t settle for less.  Sometimes we want to save money so much we buy inferior products.  And only experience can teach us these things.  So I take this lesson into 2010 to improve the dishes I can put on the family’s dinner table this new year.

Here’s hoping you also take many of these kinds of small lessons and make 2010 an even better year and a great start to a new decade.  Wishing you and your family a Happy New Year!

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Filed under: Seafood