lamb patty sandwich with avocado and radish greens
It was a week of reinventing leftover lamb (rehashed as sandwiches and pasta sauce), a week of takeout coffee, a week of political upheaval in Iran that will rewrite the way we get our news. In a vain attempt to reconcile these extremes, I overspent my budget by several dollars, a figure that would have risen considerably higher, were it not for the timely intervention of a post-wedding party in Harlem on Saturday, and a barbecue in Queens on Sunday. You might say that I lacked focus. If you were talking about my food photography, you’d be right.
10 June 2009: Another visit to Fairway: half a pound of FDNY blend coffee for $3.70. This is the same medium-dark, mostly-Dominican blend that appears at the Harlem Fairway as “Life Begins at 40 Blend,” named and blended for Harlem’s Engine Company 37/Ladder Company 40. It’s not the quality of Stumptown or Intelligentsia, but, for $6.49/lb., I can deal with that. I used to be much snottier about coffee. That was before high-end coffee prices went north of $10/bag, and the bag size dropped to 12 oz. from a full pound. Due to an internal naming dispute, the Red Hook store at first didn’t carry this blend, but now does so, rebranded for the local firehouse - except in Fairway’s company wide point-of-sale system, which means that the sticker on the bag and the receipt at the register call it one thing, and the barrel calls it another. Normally, I buy by the pound. Momentarily paranoid about missing my price point, I went for a half.
The first peaches of the year halfway-worthy of the name are out. I have an internal clock, sprung by stagefright, that tells me so, wound up by my memories of dancing for genius choreographer Abby Bender during her annual show in the first week of June, and of picking up some of these first fuzzed, sweet-smelling and slightly-wrinkled buck-a-pound peaches at Tops on the Waterfront before dress rehearsal. (If you go to Abby’s website, please note the following: 1. I’m not a dancer. Abby made a practice of working with non-dancers. I don’t know how she did it. That’s part of her genius. 2. That’s me, reaching for the raincoat, in the photo at the lower-left.) The annual show has since moved to mid-May, but the peaches stuck to the same date. I don’t usually by white peaches, which I regard as, on the whole, a bit mealy, tasteless, and, well, who the hell needs a peach to be white?, but they were clearly the best exemplars of peach-kind available and, being a bit ripe, were the lowest-priced at $0.99/lb.
Avocados remained at $1.50/each. One went into migas (fried tortillas and eggs) for Sunday brunch; the other will fall today at lunchtime.
Beets were a good buy at $1.99/lb, with healthy, sweet-stemmed tops intact. Those made it into a red sauce for farfalle, with the remnants of the Lamb Ball Experiment.
I sprang for 2/3 lb. of Parrano cheese, for $6.09. It’s sort of like a milder Gouda, with some of the graininess I value in Grana Padano. Here’s how my Official Fiftybucksaweek.com Mental Cheese-Price-Gauge works:
- $11/lb. and up: too fancy
- $6 - $10.99/lb.: not too fancy
- $1 - $5.99/lb.: not fancy enough
What can I say? You take the yuppie out of Murray’s, but you can’t take the Murray’s out of the yuppie. When my block of Reggiano runs out, I’ll be praying for the return of Argentine Reggianito.
Add in the twice-weekly dozen eggs, subtract out the tp, and my Fairway excursion came to $22.
Add $11 for the pizza and salad from Anselmo’s that I blogged about on Friday.
Add $4 for bread, $2 for tortillas, $2 for soda, and $6 for takeout coffee, $4 for MOAR eggs, and $5 for MOAR pulled pork sandwiches from the Ice House, and you’ll see that I came in over the $50 limit. Kai Ryssdal, cue up “Stormy Weather.”
Though it put me over the top, that pulled pork money was cash well-spent. At the Ice Hose, I ran into Amy Haimerl, the heart and soul of the Red Hook dog organization, who has done more than anyone to make me feel welcome in my new neighborhood. Amy and @listenmissy both being numbers gals, we had a fascination conversation about possible ways of representing the food budgets on this website in a way that doesn’t turn what’s essentially a narrative into a boring old spreadsheet; that conveys quantitative information in a more precise way, as to be satisfying to people who think in numbers more comfortably than my co-authors or I do; and that allows that data to be searched and represented in different ways, using the data visualization tools that have become one of the more interesting aspects of Web 2.0.
Speaking of which, it’s time to go back to following #iranelection on Twitter, but that’s another story.
leftover lamb patties crumbled into battuto for red sauce
