Fajitas de Pollo

So many days, it is so tempting to just pull up a delivery app, place an order, and breathe while we wait for dinner to arrive. After putting baby B to bed, sometimes we're just spent, and the idea of going into the kitchen to make something, even something easy, feels daunting. It's also usually late, like 9:30 or 10 pm, which isn't great for ordering delivery either, but sometimes exhaustion and convenience just win. We're trying to be better about it though by planning ahead more, trying to stay disciplined, finding easier and quicker things to make, and also picking up some ready-to-make/eat products at Costco and Trader Joe's to keep things simple.

One thing we picked up on a recent Costco visit was a package of fajitas de pollo by Del Real. They were $12.99*, which felt like a lot for a single packaged meal when shopping at Costco, but compared to the price of ordering something similar for delivery or the time cost of making it yourself, it really isn't so bad. Note though that it doesn't come with any of the usual restaurant fajita accompaniments, like tortillas or rice or beans or toppings, so tack on another dollar or so for those if you're pricing it out. Inside the box, there's a packet of chicken, one with vegetables, and a third with sauce (which they mark optional in the instructions, probably because it has a fair bit of spice thanks to serrano peppers and chipotle peppers in adobo). You can cook it on the stovetop (the recommended option) or in the microwave, and both take about the same amount of time, around 10 minutes.

* I wrote the majority of this post after we tried the fajitas the first time, and since then, we've made two other visits to Costco, buying three more boxes of fajitas. Part of the reason we picked up two on our last visit though was because they were only $7.97, which is good because less expensive, but bad because the 97 cents plus the star on the price tag meant they were being discontinued. The last visit wasn't at our usual Costco, so we are hoping, hoping, hoping that they are not being discontinued everywhere and only at that Costco.

We weren't sure how we would feel about this ready-to-cook fajita kit, but we were really happy with the results. Sometimes when you get pre-made food like this, it tastes highly processed, but this didn't. This tasted like you made it from scratch in your own kitchen, probably because there isn't a whole lot of excess stuff added in. It's one of those products that passes the "you can recognize and pronounce all the ingredients" test. The chicken is just strips of grilled chicken breast in a marinade that includes pineapple juice, chipotle adobado, orange juice, brown sugar, key lime juice, garlic, and spices, the vegetables (onions and green and red bell peppers) are just seasoned with salt, garlic, and some spices, and the sauce is just roasted tomatoes, serrano peppers, more chipotle adobado, green onions, onions, cilantro, and garlic. Would take some time to put together from scratch at home, but these pre-mixed packets completely worked to deliver the same result. It also didn't taste as buttery or greasy as restaurant fajitas sometimes can.

Comparing the finished product to the picture on the box, it looked pretty similar other than the fact that the box picture had grill marks on the chicken. Not such a big deal in terms of taste. We were pretty impressed by the quality of the product here and would definitely do this again (for as long as Costco's inventory will allow us to!). They don't expire immediately or within a week after purchase either (at least ours didn't), so it's an easy thing to toss into the fridge for a day when you really don't feel like cooking and don't want to spend a lot on yet another delivery order. Del Real also made a carnitas kit that I tried during the Cinco de Mayo sampling, but it wasn't nearly as good as this fajitas kit in my opinion. (Kind of hard to believe they came from the same company, to be honest.) Hoping we can make fajitas for a while!

Plenty of Potatoes

I've been going to Costco since I was a kid (although it was Price Club way back then), and it's one of my favorite stores. One thing I've heard sometimes though is people wondering what people with small households do with all the bulk items. It makes sense that if you live in a tiny closet of an apartment in the city that you might not want to buy 36 rolls of toilet paper or 9 boxes of tissues or 12 cans of corn at a time (although we do), but I think, space aside, people wonder more about perishable food. We recently bought a 20 pound sack of potatoes there for $9.99, and I thought it would be interesting to track how a family of 2 people could use up 20 pounds of potatoes before they all rotted.

Our 20 pound bag of potatoes came with 23 potatoes. Here's what happened to them:

- Loaded baked potato salad, same recipe as the picnic challenge, for Labor Day weekend BBQ: 7 potatoes (this was actually what prompted the purchase in the first place)

- Sugar browned potatoes for the Nordic challenge: 2 potatoes

- Soup, made in the same style as the caldo verde from the Portuguese challenge, with kale and kiolbassa (half for dinner and half to be eaten at some later date): 5 potatoes

- Kiolbassa vegetable saute: 2 potatoes

- Soy chorizo tacos (like these): 1 potato

- Buttermilk mashed potatoes (frozen to be eaten at some later date): 2 potatoes

- Garbage: 4 potatoes (3 were wet or moldy when we took them out of the bag on day 1, and 1 got too soft before we could use it on our last day of cooking them)

For us, the key was really finding some uses for the potatoes that could then be frozen and eaten later. If we hadn't had to throw out those 4 potatoes, we probably would have made a lot more mashed potatoes and put that in the freezer, or maybe a second day of soy chorizo tacos. Even if you divided out the price for only usable potatoes, it comes out to about $0.53 per potato, which is slightly cheaper (currently) than buying that many potatoes by the piece at Trader Joe's. We would normally just pick up a potato or two at a time, but since we needed them for the baked potato salad, this just made sense.

That said, even taking out all the potatoes we froze and brought to the BBQ, it still felt like all we had eaten for a couple of weeks was potato. This is only the second time we've bought the giant bag, and while it's doable with a lot of meal planning and prepping for the future, it's definitely not easy to go through that many potatoes before they go bad if you're a small household and not solely meat and potatoes eaters. So interesting keeping track of this though!

Asian Cashew Chopped Salad

Recently we noticed a new chopped salad kit at Costco, the Asian cashew chopped salad from Taylor Farms ($4.49 here in NYC). As we mentioned way back when when we had a good salad kit from Wegmans, we're not huge fans of a lot of the kits in grocery stores, finding the ingredient choices not very exciting or too reliant on fruit, or not having enough ingredients to justify the kit price. This salad kit seemed to avoid those pitfalls, and was a decent price for the amount of salad in the bag.

The salad's main ingredients were savoy cabbage, green cabbage, carrots, celery, cilantro, cashews, sesame seeds, almonds, wonton strips, and an Asian sesame dressing. The kit came with 2 packets of the dressing, and separated out the nuts, seeds, and wonton strips from the vegetables to keep them from getting soggy. We've been pretty happy with the quality of the vegetables we found, unlike some of the giant bags of kale or spinach we've gotten lately. There were some cilantro leaves that were a bit too wilted, but for the most part, the cilantro was fine, and all the other vegetables seemed to be in good shape.

The salad was also pretty good as far as taste goes. The sesame dressing added flavor without being too salty or overbearing. It was pretty light, which we liked. We used both dressing packets because otherwise there wasn't enough dressing to coat the whole salad. Everything worked well together in this kit, and it was a very fresh and clean (and convenient!) dinner. Hopefully Costco will keep this salad in stock.

India from the Microwave

Yesterday's weather was the type of gloomy winter weather - cold, unending rain - that makes one not want to leave the house. Instead of ordering delivery, we decided to make dinner out of the growing stack of Indian convenience meals in our pantry. Unfortunately, since we've been pretty bad about keeping track of the pantry, most of what we had was past its best by date, but we hoped that they would still be tasty (or, at the very least, edible).

The one thing we made that hadn't yet passed its best by date (although the date was coming up at the end of this month) was this box of Punjab eggplant that we got from Trader Joe's. On the box it was described as "braised eggplant cooked in a distinctively flavored sauce." The phrase "distinctively flavored" doesn't really clue you in to what this would taste like, but the back of the box says that Punjab eggplant is a traditional recipe that should have a barbecue or smoky flavor from grilling the eggplant over open flames before combining it with spices. We've had stuff like this from Indian restaurants before, which was part of the reason I picked it.

The other reason I chose it was because I could recognize all the ingredients - eggplant, tomatoes, onions, sunflower oil, pumpkin, garlic, salt, coriander, chilies, cumin, ginger, turmeric, and cloves. All natural, all things I could buy if I wanted to make this from scratch. It was a great feeling being able to read a box and know everything in it. It was also super easy to make - empty the contents into a microwave safe bowl, cover it (I didn't do that and it went all over the microwave; don't follow my example), and microwave on high for 2 minutes.

We really liked this eggplant dish. It didn't really taste very smoky, at least not like smoky grilled eggplant we've had in the past, but it had a nice flavor overall. You could definitely tell that it was made of "whole foods" as there were bits of eggplant and onion and tomato that were easily recognizable. It's not spicy, if that's a concern to anyone, but the spices used were very balanced. We would get this again.

The second dish we tried was gongura dal ("tempting sorrel leaves lentils") made by Kohinoor that we had bought on a whim from a South Asian grocery store last May. I neglected to check the best by date while we were in the store (I was mostly consumed by a search for asafoetida), and didn't realize until a couple of weeks or months ago that the best by date was back in July. Usually when you buy these types of sealed convenience packages, they give you more than 2 months to make them, so I was really surprised. But that date was less than 6 months ago, so I figured that, while it might not be as fresh as it would have been earlier, it shouldn't be too bad. I was mostly interested in this one because I don't think I've ever had sorrel leaves before and I love trying new flavors. A has had Caribbean sorrel leaves drinks before, so he's much more familiar with the flavor than I am.

The Kohinoor brand advertised itself as providing "healthy authentic Indian delicacies" because they used olive oil instead of ghee or butter. I was excited for that, but when I opened the package, it seemed a little watery to me. I couldn't imagine that using olive oil would be the cause of that, but hoped that maybe it would thicken up when microwaving. After all, the ingredient list - water, pigeon pea, spinach paste, olive oil, salt, chopped green chili, chopped onion, chopped garlic, mustard seed, cumin seed, red chili powder, turmeric, sambhar powder, tamarind paste, whole red chili, lemon powder, cumin powder, gongura leaves, and maize starch - seemed like it should have some sort of body and texture and not just be colored water, as it appeared to be when I poured it into the bowl.

Nope. It was almost completely liquid when it went in, and it wasn't any better once it was microwaved for 2 minutes. The box said this was supposed to be "yellow lentils flavored with tamarind and Indian spices" but we saw no lentils. Even if this was 6 months past its best by date, the lentils shouldn't have disintegrated into water in 6 months. I have a hard time believing this would have been any better 6 months ago. We decided to try it anyway even though we were suspicious about the texture and the consistency, and it didn't taste good to either of us so we poured it down the sink. It was so liquidy that it went straight down the drain with nothing left behind. And it's not like gongura dal is supposed to be that watery. I looked up pics and recipes after dinner, and it was nothing like this yellow oily water. Oh well. That was a waste of $2.

The last package (which we ended up making 2 of, thanks to the sorrel leaves disaster) was Tasty Bite channa masala. We buy this on and off at Costco but it always ends up in the back of the pantry and we forget to make it, although we do enjoy it. The best by date on these was back in December 2013, and while we know they taste better when fresher, they were still pretty tasty and way better than that gongura dal water.

The channa masala was chickpeas that had been slow-simmered with onions, tomatoes, and traditional Indian spices. Similar to the Trader Joe's one, the ingredient list here reads like a list of whole foods - onions, water, chickpeas, tomatoes, sunflower oil, coriander, salt, spices, chilies, bay leaf, and turmeric. The chickpeas had a nice texture, even a year after we should have eaten them, and the spices were good. Also, one of the best parts of the Tasty Bite pouches is that you can stick them in the microwave without even having to get a microwave safe bowl. You cook it right in the pouch for 90 seconds and they're done. 

Overall, dinner was pretty good, at least our dinner of chickpeas and eggplant. It's nice having these packages in the pantry for days when we need a quick and nutritious meal that has lots of flavor and that also feels like you're eating "real food." We don't have too many left, so we'll probably need to stock up soon, but first I'm going to check to make sure we haven't missed any more in the back of the closet!

Pacific Flounder

I don't dislike the Trident seafood brand. They make delicious salmon burgers that have a permanent spot in our freezer. But I dislike (greatly) these Pacific flounder fillets we got at Costco. They were a really affordable price, but that was probably the only thing we liked about them.

They're paper thin, not meaty like they appear in the package photo. They have random bones, even though they claim they're boneless. They fall apart easily when cooked instead of staying together as a single fillet. They also smell and taste fishy, even though they weren't expired. And since they aren't vacuum sealed as individual fillets (and they are so small that it would be such a waste of packaging to do so), it made the entire freezer smell like fish every time we opened the bag (even after we put them in freezer bags inside the bag).

We love flounder. But we couldn't wait to finish this bag of fillets (which is finally done). Not going to buy these again. Do you have a favorite frozen fish from Costco?