Shortening In Bread

Most of the time when I make my own bread, I don't add any shortening - it's just flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe some sugar or dairy whey to"feed" the yeast. That's not to say I don't understand why bakers put it in there - adding fats to the dough prevents the gluten from developing fully, so it gives the bread a more cake-like crumb and softer crust. It's very common for soft "sandwich" breads.

Commercial breads and those produced by supermarket bakeries often use shortening in their dough because that soft bread with a tender crust is really popular (just look at how many loaves of squishy white bread fly off supermarket shelves) and that's another reason why I always read the labels before I decide to buy something:

Finding "shortening" on the label doesn't bother me. I don't use it personally, but it's pretty much unavoidable unless you personally make every scrap of food you eat and that is impractical. But I will not buy anything using "partially hydrogenated" fats. Partial hydrogenation produces trans fat, period.

Grocery Shrink Ray Hits ALDI Sugar

ALDI stocks bags of sugar by the pallet, placing the pallet on the floor underneath a sign advertising the price.  For years, there has been a second sign placed beside the price sign. It read something like, "Please remember when comparing prices, we sell full 5-pound bags of sugar while our competitors sell 4-pound bags."

It's jelly-and-jam-making season again, and we use a lot of sugar putting up dozens of jars of fruit preserves. ALDI has usually had the lowest price for sugar, so I went there first over the weekend to pick up a couple of bags, and found this:

There was a pallet of four-pound bags of sugar under the price sign, and the note about always selling 5-pound bags was gone.  Four pounds of sugar for the price of five pounds. Well, that's one staple that gets crossed off the ALDI shopping list.

(I ended up going to Price/Rite, where five pound bags of sugar were fifty cents less than what ALDI was getting for four. I really should start buying 25-pound bags of sugar at Costco when we start making preserves.)

Stop & Shop Takes Self-Service Scanning To A New Level

Photo by Stop & Shop

In April 2009, I wrote a blog post about ScanIt!, a hand-held scanner you can use in Stop & Shop to tally up your groceries as you shop, and then breeze through the checkout line in seconds because your shopping is already tallied, bagged, and ready to pay for.  I use it all the time because it saves me tons of time in the store, and even if I have a huge cartload of items I can still check through the express lane since I only have one single remaining thing to scan - my shopper's card - before I have to pay.

Now, Stop & Shop has brought that innovation to my smartphone. Available now for Android and iPhone, ScanIt! Mobile puts your shopping right at your fingertips.

I was on my way in to Stop & Shop and saw the big posters promoting the new app, so I scanned the QR code, downloaded the app for my Android phone, and started it up. Set up was fast and easy:

1. Use your phone's camera to scan the bar code on your shopper's card.
2. Choose the Stop & Shop location you usually shop at
3. Start shopping!

Now, instead of having to carry a scanner around in the store, I can just start up the app when I walk into Stop & Shop. The app automatically connects me with the store's wifi network and hooks up the ScanIt! database, and I'm ready to scan items for checkout. The app also delivers special offers and any electronic coupons you may have loaded to your shopping card. At checkout time, I just scanned the "I'm Done!" barcode at the register, paid, and left. Easy. It's pretty great.

In my testing, I did find a couple of bugs.

• The software has some trouble with colored barcodes. Some of Stop & Shop's frozen veggies, for example, have green barcodes on the packaging and it took a couple of tries to get the barcode reader in the app to recognize them.
• ScanIt! Mobile automatically turns on your phone's wifi connection when you start it (so it can connect in the store.)  But you need to remember to shut your wifi off when you leave the store, because the app leaves the wifi active when you exit from it.

Other than those little quibbles, I thought it was pretty sweet. One less gadget to carry around the store, and the functionality was pretty good. Thumbs up.

Now if Stop & Shop could just get a Twitter account, I'd be perfectly happy with them.

Shopping For A Hurricane

Whenever a weather event threatens, people hit the stores looking for supplies. We see it all winter up here in New England - the Chicken Littles on TV warn of three inches of snow on the way and the supermarkets practically get ransacked with people buying every bit of bottled water and especially the Big Three Storm Commodities: bread, milk, and eggs.

We've had plenty of warning with Hurricane Irene clawing her way up the coast (it should be here as a tropical storm sometime on Sunday) and by now most emergency goods were sold out at hardware stores (batteries, lamp oil, duct tape for taping windows and plywood for more secure covering.) I don't think there's an unsold generator in the state of Connecticut right now.  But there was considerably less urgency at the local supermarkets today.  Most of my inquiries to area friends were met with answers like "Seems to be no busier than the usual Saturday," or "Running low on bottled water, but there's plenty of most other stuff."

So late this afternoon I went off to the local Big Y to see what would be left on the shelf.  I was almost surprised to find the shelves so well-stocked, but kind of amused at what was actually sold out.

There was no skim milk at all, but plenty of 2% and whole milk.  Lots of bread was on the shelves, and plenty of eggs, cheese, coffee creamer, and so on.  Not too surprising that dairy stuff wasn't a quick seller, actually - in the wake of Hurricane Gloria 25 years ago, power was out for four days and unrefrigerated dairy products spoil quickly.  So I checked out other aisles.

Soups are popular emergency rations.  Nearly all the Campbell's chicken varieties were gone except for a few cans of Noodle-Os.  There were tons of cream soups, though, and a full bin of Cream of Asparagus.  Lynnafred thought that was hilarious: "Look at this - no one wants Cream of Stinky Pee Soup, and I don't blame them a bit."

Large bottles of bottled water were sold out, but there were plenty of smaller bottles by the case ready to go.  

Oddest sell out in the whole place, though?  Marshmallow Fluff.  

Sacks of Breakfast Kibble

We've all heard that a big chunk of the price of name-brand breakfast cereal is the packaging and marketing that supports it. The stores in my area were late to the party when it came to bare-bones cereal packaging, though.  So it amused the hell out of me when I found Stop & Shop's store brand kid-cereal knockoffs being sold by the sack - at roughly one-third to one-quarter of the equivalent amount's price as sold by General Mills or Kellogg's.

Shop Rite San Marzano Tomatoes

Behold another reason why I love having a Shop-Rite in my town.  They have their own store brand San Marzano tomatoes.

Memorial Day Weekend Cupcakes

Spotted at Stop & Shop.  And yes, the frosting on the cupcakes are camouflage color.

Barf's, LOL

ANY Recipe?

"I added garlic to my recipe for Lemon Meringue Pie, and my life has never been the same!"

Enfield Target's New Fresh Grocery

The Target anchor store in the Enfield Square shopping mall recently underwent a big addition/facelift. They added a new "Fresh Grocery" section.

There are a lot of supermarkets and small grocers in and around Enfield. Competition is fierce. I really don't know why Target would think it's a good idea to open yet another place to buy the same old handful of national brands, when Big Y, Stop & Shop, ShopRite, ALDI, Price Chopper, and Geissler's are already beating each over the head every week. It certainly isn't because Target can do groceries better than the local supermarkets. If anything, Target is showing off their comparative weakness when stacked up against real grocers.

Take produce, for example. I like supermarkets and small green grocers where I have my choice of a wide variety of fresh fruits and veggies, all out on display so I can check them out. Everything in Target is portioned and packaged; there's no real opportunity to take a good look at what's available.

There are a lot of ridiculous pre-packaged items as well.  Individually-wrapped apple slices?  Seriously?

My biggest pet peeve is the meat, though. Nasty-looking fatless cuts pumped up with saltwater and nitrates and sealed up in some sort of sick-looking "pillow pack" advertised as "leakproof."  Holy shit, are people so scared of their food they worry about a little leakage from a package of beef?

There are a few Target-branded "Archer Farms" items that I will probably go in for occasionally - the same items that Target has carried for years without the big Fresh Grocery addition.  I'm not going to bother with the rest of it.  I'm not interested in lowest-common-denominator meats, overpackaged vegetables, or five thousand variations on American cheese.

Grocery Store Apps for Android

As smart phones become more common, supermarket chains are beginning to realize the marketing potential of mobile apps.  And it really is just beginning - at the time I'm writing this, I could only find three supermarket chains offering apps on the Android marketplace: Kroger, ShopRite, and Stop & Shop.  

I downloaded all three apps to give them a try and explore their functions - and see if they really did make grocery shopping easier and/or more interesting.  Some of them are more elaborate than others, but here's a quick review of these supermarket-specific apps:

Shop-Rite - The first time you run the app, you are asked to establish an account and sign in.  From there, you choose which stores you want the app to relate with for sales and specials.  There is no connection with your ShopRite savings card, so you are not able to set electronic coupons to your account for use at the checkout.

For the most part, the app is simply a ShopRite-specific shopping list; you can page through all of the specials in the current flyer for your store, and click on items to add them to your shopping list.  Once the list has been built, bring it up in the store and "check off" items from your list as you add them to the cart.

Completed shopping trips can be cleared with one button, and the shopping list function is ready to go for the next trip.  Old lists can't be archived directly within the app, but there is an "Email Shopping List" feature you can use to send the list to your email account for saving.  Saving old lists isn't very important to me, and I do use the list function when I'm shopping.

Other features include a store finder, and direct links to ShopRite's Facebook page and Twitter feed.

Stop & Shop - Running this app for the first time prompts you to either start a new account or, if you already have an account at stopandshop.com, to sign in. This app does link in with your Stop & Shop savings card, and the app gives you several useful ways to interact with your account.

After the splash screen, the menu will open up, with a "status screen" listing various aspects of your account: Year-to-date savings are shown, as well as how many reward points you've accumulated in whatever programs are currently running.  There are also links to detailed pages about your default Stop & Shop location and the current weekly flyer.

Bringing up the weekly flyer will show a detailed and categorized listing of everything on sale that week.  Like ShopRite, there is no way to link electronic coupons with your savings card.  Unlike ShopRite, however, there is no shopping list capability in this app (though you can select sale items for a more detailed look.) Too bad, because I found the shopping list to be very handy for ShopRite.

Other useful links from the "My Stop & Shop" page include a direct link to Peapod Mobile (Peapod is active in my area, though I've never used them) and a link to a page filled with customer service numbers for Stop & Shop.  All of the phone numbers are actually hotlinks and clicking on them will immediately dial them using the cell phone.  Wow.  I almost forgot that this thing in my hand can be used as a TELEPHONE too.  Far out.

Besides the lack of a shopping list function, though, the other most annoying thing about the Stop & Shop app is that it forces you to navigate entirely through the app screen - you can touch any of the links on screen, or use the "BACK" and "MENU" keys that appear at the top of each screen, but the "back" button on my phone is disabled.  True, it's a minor thing, but because almost every other app I have works with my phone's built-in touchkeys, having to change behaviors to use Stop & Shop's app is kind counter-intuitive.

Kroger - I live far outside of Kroger's market, but I took a look at their Android app anyway.  It has much of the same functions as Stop & Shop and ShopRite, but it also allows you to load "electronic coupons" onto your savings card. I would certainly take advantage of this if I were able.

In a few days, I'll take a look at some "orgainizational" apps for supermarket shopping - programs that range from simple shopping list compilers to coupon and "pantry inventory" programs.

Mama Cozzi's Pizza Kitchen Pizza at ALDI

In the mood for pizza, but not really in the mood to wait around for takeout, I swung by ALDI and bought a couple of their Mama Cozzi brand ready-to-bake 'zas for supper the other night. I picked up two 16-inchers: one pepperoni and one "four meat" for a total of about $15.

Just like with many other ALDI items, Mama Cozzi's pizza is pretty good, especially when judged fairly for what it is.  There's no way it would ever compare with the awesomeness of a Frank Pepe New Haven pizza, for example.  It's not as good as most neighborhood pizzas (notice I said "most." There are lots of really bad neighborhood pizza joints out there.)  But in comparison to the fast-food crap they sell at Domino's, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, or Papa Johns you'll be pleasantly surprised by both the lower price and far superior quality of the Mama Cozzi product over those ketchup-on-cardboard creations.

The "four meat" pizza, advertised as including pepperoni, sausage, bacon, and "seasoned beef," was better than I thought it was going to be from the looks.  The crust was thinnish and baked crispy on the bottom with some breadiness above (a nice balance,) generously spread with sauce, and had plenty of meat in every bite.  The pepperoni and bacon tended to get a little lost against the sausage and beef, but the overall flavor was better than average.

The pepperoni was my favorite of the two, though.  Covered with both slices and diced bits of pepperoni, the pizza was spicy and delicious. The pepperoni used was zesty and of high quality and I was favorably impressed.

These pizzas are never going to win awards, and I doubt anyone would choose one of them over a family-owned non-national-chain-produced pizza.  But I would certainly go with Mama Cozzi over Pizza Hut, any day.

Cut It Yourself.

Price Chopper was in no mood to sell partial cantaloupes today.

Best Store Name Ever.

The perfect name for a place that exists solely to sell Snacks.  Every city should have one. This one's on Park Street in Hartford CT.

Hell Of A Deal Ya Got There, Big Y

There's a supermarket chain in my area called "Big Y." They operate 60 stores in Massachusetts and Connecticut.  One of the incentives they use to keep customers coming back is a "coin reward" program, in which shoppers who also have a Big Y loyalty card are given silver and gold coins which can then be exchanged for discounts.  Silver coins are usually redeemable for discounts; gold coins are often redeemable for freebies.  Loyal Big Y shoppers - and there are a lot of them - eagerly seek out goid coins.

So it's no surprise that Big Y uses the program to drive sales.  Take, for example, the promotion at right which appeared in this week's Big Y sale flyer: For every $300 a customer spends through the end of February, the customer receives a gold coin.

And what can you get in exchange for that gold coin?

For each gold coin, you can get ONE of the following:

• A Free 48-ounce carton of Big Y brand ice cream
• A loaf of bread
• One pound of Big Y brand bacon

Now that, my friends is one damn generous promotion.  Spend $300, get a three-dollar pound of bacon.  Or a loaf of bread!  Holy shit, if you spend six hundred bucks you can make bacon sandwiches for free! 

OMG IT'S SNOWING, GET TO T3H SUPERMARKET

There's a winter storm on the way.  The National Weather Service says we should see maybe a foot of snow before it's all over.  Not too shabby.  Twelve inches of snow makes for a little inconvenience  in the way of shoveling and so on, but the temperature is cold enough that the snow should be powdery and easy to move.  However it works out, I'm not about to worry about it.

Plenty of people are worried about it, though, driven by hyperbolic "meteorologists" on local TV news stations that pump people into a panic to keep them glued to the newscasts (and the newscast's advertisements.)  I decided to check out the local Stop & Shop and see what was selling in advance of the storm.

O noes, better fill up that gas tank!  You never know when the town will get around to plowing the streets.  Don't want to get caught snowed in with an empty tank!  Every single pump had a five-car line.

Where's all the bread go?

Sorry We are out of Eggs

There was a run on ground beef.

Here's something I never figured would be rushed because of snow:  Cat food.

Oddly enough, there was plenty of milk - but the half-and-half and coffee creamer was decimated, and the bottled water aisle was hit heavily but not cleaned out.

It's been more than thirty years since a winter storm caused Connecticut to shut down, and that was in the days before so many people owned front-wheel drive and 4WD SUVs.  Yet, whenever a snowstorm starts sniffing around New England, we get panic buying like this.  *sigh*

Aldi Opens in Enfield

It's a very good day to be a grocery shopper in North Central Connecticut:  ALDI has opened their latest supermarket in Enfield, right in the heart of a busy commercial district that already hosts a Big Y, Stop & Shop, and ShopRite within line-of-sight of each other.  You can bet that the competition - which also includes other supermarkets like Geissler's, Armata's, Price Chopper, Save-A-Lot, and Price/Rite stores in bordering towns, is going to keep prices in check.

I really like ALDI - we've been shopping at the one in nearby Vernon for well over a year now.  It's great to have one right here in town. 

Greedy Bastards at Price Chopper

So, I'm at Price Chopper the other day, doing some grocery shopping, and I pay at the register the same way I always do, with my debit card.  The cashier asked me if I wanted any "cash back," and I said "Sure, twenty dollars," figuring that it would save me a stop at the ATM on the way home.

"Okay," she says, "There's going to be a one-dollar fee."

"Wait...what?"

"If you want cash back, it's a one-dollar fee."

"Never mind, then.  No cash back," I replied.

Seriously, Price Chopper, WTF?  No other supermarket in this area - not a single one - charges a fee to get cash back from a debit card transaction.  And there isn't any reason to do so, either.  When you get cash back on an ATM transaction, all you're doing is giving the store more money than required for your purchase and they are giving you the change.  There isn't any additional fee imposed on the store.  Are these assholes going to start charging a fee if you pay for $22 worth of groceries with at fifty-dollar bill?

Piss off, P-Chops.  I've got at least ten other supermarkets and groceries within a seven-minute drive of my house.  You've just managed to bump yourself several notches down on my preferred stores list.
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Feets Don't Fail Me Now

I was in Save-A-Lot a few days ago and found a section of the frozen meat case completely devoted to large frozen packages of chicken feet.  Only they weren't labeled "chicken feet," they were labeled Chicken Paws.  Paws.  What a great name for the filthiest part of the bird - it almost makes them sound cute and huggable.

Not cute and huggable enough for me to buy them that day, however, even though I've bought them in the past.

This is a Barred Rock pullet.
They're good layers, don't mind
the winter, and are relatively
friendly as chickens go. 

I never saw a chicken foot in a supermarket until I was in my late 20's and even then, it was in an Asian market.  It was several more years before I found them in mainstream supermarkets.  These days, chicken feet seem to be in a lot of the places I shop.  When I buy them, I prefer to buy them fresh and I always take a close look at the package to make sure they're not too dirty.  That's a direct result of having kept a backyard flock of chickens for several years.  Chickens don't really care where they walk, and it doesn't matter how clean you keep the henhouse, they're always finding a way to tread on their own poop.  Remember this if you decide to buy a package of chicken paws: inspect them and buy the cleanest ones you can find, and then scrub the hell out of them anyway (under cool running water, with a vegetable brush.)

And what sort of things do you make with chicken feet?  For starters, they make really exceptional chicken broth.  Feet are nothing but skin and tendons and some fat (and a few toenails hahaha) and they're loaded with delicious chickeny flavor.  I like to stir them around in the bottom of a hot kettle until they start to brown a bit and then add chopped onion, celery, carrot, some parsely, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf or two, and water to cover, and then simmer them all day while I go do something else.  When I come back from the something else, the pot is filled with superb chicken broth ready to be strained and seasoned.

But the best way to enjoy chicken feet are as appetizers. 

Chicken Feet with Black Bean Sauce

1 pound chicken feet

3 cups water

Oil for deep frying

3 scallions, chopped

1 tbsp ginger, slivered

2 or 3 star anise

3 or 4 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 tablespoons black bean paste

1 tablespoon dry white wine (I like to use sake)

2 teaspoons sugar

Black pepper to taste

3 tablespoons soy sauce

½ teaspoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon cornstarch, moistened with a bit of cold water

Rinse and scrub the feet well, then trim off the tips (cutting off the nails.)  While you're prepping the feet, bring the 3 cups of water to a boil in an uncovered pressure cooker.

Plunge the cleaned feet into the boiling water and blanch them for about a minute, then remove them from the water with a slotted spoon and drain them well.  (Keep the water in the pressure cooker.)  Deep fry the feet in the oil until they're golden brown and then drain them.  Reserve a tablespoon or two of the oil.

Put the scallions, ginger, and star anise into the pressure cooker with the water and the chicken feet.  Close the pressure cooker and cook them for 10 minutes with the top jiggling., then remove the  feet from the pot, reserving the broth. 

In the reserved bit of oil, saute the garlic and black bean paste, then add the feet and stir-fry them until cooked and browned.  Add the wine, sugar, pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil.  Pour in the stock, cover the feet and simmer another 5 minutes.  Stir in the cornstarch mixture to thicken the sauce, and serve the feet hot.

Yes, it's a time-consuming recipe, but worth every delicious minute.

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Left Behind At The Supermarket - A Photo Essay

Saturday afternoon was unusually busy at Stop and Shop here in town.  I'm guessing that Stop & Shop has picked up a lot of former Shaw's customers - especially shoppers who don't want to go to the local Big Y because that's the most expensive market in town.

Whatever the reason, Stop & Shop was jammed, and as we strolled through picking up a few things, we noticed an unusually large number of items abandoned here and there througout the store.  It's common for people to change their minds about purchasing stuff, and when they do they seem to just stick it on the shelf anywhere.  There were so many of them this time, though, that I started snapping pictures of them as we walked along.

Ham and baked beans have been BFFs forever. No wonder these beans
wanted to chill with the hams.

Sesame Noodles abandoned in the refrigerated section with the chicken pot pies.

A tub of Yoplait yogurt wonders why someone would abandon it with ham steaks and
prepared foods.

Naughty little Helluvagood Dip, wandering amongst the wieners.

Butter, cheese, and thin-sliced pork for stirfry.  I wonder if this was dropped
off by the same person who left the Sesame Noodles in the pot pies?

Near the shredded cheeses, there is a plastic tub where Stop & Shop sells an inexpensive regional
brand of pizza dough.  This is, apparently, a favorite place to leave things one no longer wishes
to purchase.  Someone dropped off a package of the more-expensive Stop & Shop brand dough.
And a tub of Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese.  And some sliced cheese.  And some Baby Bel
cheese rounds from near the deli.

Stop & Shop keeps a display of Lipton Recipe Secrets Onion Soup right next to the sour
cream, hoping shoppers will impulsively decide to make some dip.  It's also a convenient
place to drop off unwanted loaves of rye bread.

A kid's toy, nestled in with the bread.

Butternut squash peeks out from the bread section.

Marie Callender's Turkey Breast With Stuffing was left behind in the veggie section.
At least the moron was considerate enough to keep it in the freezer.