From Warehouse to Your House
by Sally Sampson
Simon & Schuster, 2006
$15.00, paper
321 pages
On one side of the kitchen are the advocates of fresh, local, and artisinal. On the other, the warehouse shoppers, brandishing twelve-packs, freezer bags, and 36 frozen eclairs to a box.
When Sally Sampson first went warehouse shopping she, like most of us, bought too much and ended up throwing half of it out. Even if you're an untemptable shopper who never strays from the list, there's still a lot of food to deal with after a warehouse shopping trip. Sampson suggest making sure freezer bags are on the list, and provides a range of recipes that will help tame the mass quantities.
Sampson has found herself, as many shoppers do, buying too much and found herself calling on all her culinary creativity - salad dressings from gallons of olive oil, big batches of cookies to deal with those chocolate chips.
Her recipes have a no-nonsense approach and keep things simple. They range from all-American variety, with ten different burger recipes, to international flavors like bouillabaisse and Coconut Milk Curried Shrimp. Sampson will help you face down bags of frozen chicken wings and create vats of Beef Chili, but also helps you create delicate Brown Sugar Cookies and Salmon on a Bed of Leeks and Carrots.
Sampson's recipes will serve for a backyard crowd or a family dinner and cover everything you might find on the shelves for every meal, from meats and fish to vegetables and condiments, for breakfast, lunch, snacks, dinner, and desserts. A quick flip through the index and you'll see that she hits the mark on ingredients - mustard, oatmeal, ground beef, chocolate chips - and recipes - with numerous choices for chicken thighs, wings, and breasts, for blue cheese, cream cheese, and cheddar cheese and more.
But Sampson can also work on a small scale. I had a couple of sweet potatoes in the fridge, asked myself what Sally would do, and found lemon sweet potatoes. She writes in her headnote that she couldn't stop eating them - not the usual response to sweet potatoes, but she's right. This recipe achieves the perfect balance of sweet with a bit of sugar, tart with lemon juice, and salt to set it all off.
She also suggests buying lots of plastic bags for freezing your creations. Her technique is to open the package, make one batch for that day, and two to marinate in the freezer. Chicken wings work particularly well, and Sampson offers flavors like Orange Soy and a baked Buffalo style. Tabasco Trio Chicken wings are savory and just a bit hot, again Sampson achieves balance and appeal very simply.
Cookies particularly are done in huge amounts of eight to twelve dozen, which you'll find useful for bake sales and holidays, and can be easily trimmed down for a weeknight treat. Sampson's recipe for Brown Sugar Cookies will yield eight dozen, but it's easy to split in half, and she suggests, even easier, rolling the dough into a cylinder and slicing, as an alternative to rolling individual balls. They are tender, faintly butterscotch, and good.
With a classic and creative approach, Sampson makes warehouse food appealing, and allows you to enjoy being truly thrifty.
© 2007 Claudia Kousoulas
