Take a peek inside your pantry. How many half-eaten packages of pasta are there? Can you remember why exactly you bought that family-size box of barley groats and the gallon can of chicken stock? Are you afraid to open it because then, of course, you’ll use maybe half a cup, and the can is too big to fit into the fridge or the freezer? Now think about your family: How do they eat? What do they eat? If your family is comprised only of you and one other person, think about your partner’s likes and dislikes, and take a gander at the overwhelming multitudes of stuff gazing back at you from the depths of the fridge, partially eaten by the two of you, and now probably growing enough mold to produce penicillin for the Eastern seaboard. If you have a few kids running around—maybe heading out to Little League practice or Girl Scouts or music lessons before racing home to do homework, shove some food down their craws, watch some television, and get to sleep—how do you feed them? If you’re working 9 to 5, time is probably of the essence: Your family wants to eat, and odds are they don’t have the patience to sit around while, exhausted and bleary-eyed, you throw off your coat and make blanquette de veau from scratch. As if you had the energy to. So, by necessity, both they and you turn to that sort of glorified fast food that, as if by magic, somehow manages to leap off your local supermarket shelves and into your shopping cart because it requires perhaps nothing more than the addition of chopped meat, is “easy to serve,” and fills everyone up quickly. This is not food; it’s fuel. Now think about your shopping habits. How often do you run to the market: Once a week? Twice a week? Twice a month? Of what you buy and bring home, how much do you actually wind up eating? How much goes bad before you even have a chance to cook it? How much do you throw out, both in terms of food and money? If you were able to buy big quantities of ingredients and use it all—absolutely all of it—to create delicious, simple, healthy, home-style meals that your family craved and actually even requested…and you managed to do it all at a great savings, would you do it? Chances are the answer is a resounding yes.[pagebreak]
Bulk Food
When the discount shopping club experience emerged, it forever changed the way most of us think about buying food: Just visit a Costco, BJ’s, or Sam’s Club on any given weekend, and watch the crowds gathering around the immense meat cases and the huge sides of Atlantic salmon. Are they thinking about what to do with an entire side of beef once they get it home, or are they simply considering the staggeringly low price per pound? This is not a comment on wastefulness: It’s simply a fact of human nature. We like big stuff. We think we’re getting more for less, and with a large fridge and perhaps an extra freezer, we are: The savings to be had buying food this way are staggering. That is, if we use all we buy. And if, like me, you shop at these discount clubs, you’ve been there. Oh, the savings! Oh, the fabulous discounts! Oh, the gray, freezer-burned, foot-long, 8-pound half fillet that falls out of the icebox and onto the floor, bereft and forgotten, 10 months after you brought it home! You struggle to remember when you bought it, and why. Was it for a party? Or was it the simple hope that you’d be able to feed yourself and your family well at a discount? You calculate the cost of the relatively minuscule portion that you actually ate versus what you’re throwing out, and are horrified to discover that it was about what you’d pay for six thick sirloins in a regular supermarket. The minute that fillet disappeared into the bowels of your freezer, your so-called savings disappeared with it. Gigantic buckets of dried shiitake mushrooms that seemed like such a good idea at the time; enough boneless and skinless chicken breasts to feed the lower 48; an entire Atlantic salmon fillet from an entire Atlantic salmon; a 72-ounce can of chicken broth that, once opened, will go bad in 5 days; a doorstop-size round of Cheddar that will begin to rot the minute you slice into it; 12 pounds of potatoes, some sprouting eyes; 4 pounds of Florida oranges; 24 lemons; a 32-ounce can of brand-name tuna fish that you couldn’t possibly use up at once (so you just leave it in your pantry, where it will sit, unopened, for years); an Army surplus-size jar of mixed bean salad in a murky, unrecognizable vinaigrette; a box of pasta big enough to keep a mob of marathoners running for a month. These items are what buying in bulk is all about: The bigger the food, the bigger the discount, the bigger the savings. But if you’re like most people who shop at these discount establishments, unless you’re throwing a shoestring wedding for 300, you’ll rarely use more than an immediate, smaller portion of anything for yourself and your family—and then have to figure out how to store the rest of it. The savings disappear, and the discount becomes more meaningless with every passing day that the immense can of tuna doesn’t get opened or the remaining 64 ounces of chicken stock get poured down the drain. How, then, can you rely on bulk food to feed your family well—the kind of wonderful, home-cooked dishes that real people eat—without eating the same thing three nights in a row or losing a veritable henhouse of chicken to freezer burn?[pagebreak]
A New Way to Cook
The home kitchen is meant to be exactly that—homey and nourishing to both body and soul. And in response to the fancy food and fancy meals that now abound and leave us wowed but unsatisfied and often downright hungry, most of us really do long for a return to simple, basic cooking. Whether it’s a peasant-style rustic soup that your grandmother made in Italy, France, Germany, or Beijing, or the meat loaf your aunt from New Jersey threw together, simple home cooking is best and, assuming it’s not swimming in lard, often healthiest as well. Heaven knows, it’s the most delicious way to cook, necessitating only the most basic of skills, the most basic of ingredients, and the most straightforward of desires that we all possess, no matter who we are or where we live: to eat well. Big Food is about planning and saving and shopping and storing the way our more prudent forebears most likely did. But it’s also about a return to a kind of cooking that assumes nothing about your kitchen skills beyond three facts: You can follow straightforward directions; you want to save money; and you want to feed your family luscious, home-style meals that are meant to be eaten, not photographed. Big Food will also guide you through certain very basic techniques that will forever change the way you cook anything you bring home: It will guide you through the process of turning slow-cooked meals into easy-to-serve, fast leftovers. It will show you how to store food that has been cooked or is still uncooked, and give you optimal storage-life expectancies in both the refrigerator and the freezer. It will show you how to be more creative and prudent in the kitchen, using large quantities. But even if you never set foot inside a discount club, and instead enjoy the luxury of shopping at the kind of high-end markets we all love but few of us have access to, it will still be a “must-have” addition to your kitchen library because it will show you how to think differently about the way you plan your shopping trips, the way you cook for your family and use everything you buy, and the way you eat.
