Covid-19: Ideas and Strategies for Shopping and Cooking

this is the permanent FM at the grove… i think they’ll keep open… but i also caught our wednesday regular at miracle mile by the job w hich i expect to stop soon

there’s no better sausage around. i like them all!

Curious how this relates to Covid-19 cooking strategies.

Leftovers.

Tonight was leftover pork tenderloin, mashed potatoes, black-eyed peas, avocado, salad (with WF toppings which is likely shutdown now)

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Stupid. Where’s that?

Sorry to cross post guys, this just seemed relevant to this thread, too, and the more eyes that see it the more helpful it could potentially be:

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Topics covered: batch cooking, food apportioning, choice of protein suggested, choice of marinate suggested.

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I do that all the time.

San Diego, City and County both.

What many people don’t realize is that San Diego has the largest number of farms in the U.S. It’s a large county and we’ve got a lot of small to mid-size farms in acrage. San Diego is the largest producer of avocados and the 2nd largest producer of macademia nuts in the U.S. Between the City and the County, there are 65 weekly farmer’s markets. All markets are closed through at least March 31st. All farmers markets here are required to have a special events permit; those have been suspended.

Little Italy on Saturday, Hillcrest on Sunday and Ocean Beach on Wednesday are very large markets and there is no way social distancing could even begin to work. The Little Italy market is trying to work out a reconfiguration that would satisfy the department of environmental health, let’s just say I’m not holding my breath. Most of our farmer’s markets have a large contingent of cottage industry products (food and non-food) that are sold only via the market, so these folks are effectively out of business as well.

Some of the larger market vendors also offer CSA boxes and those are still being delivered per usual and they are actively seeking new members. We are, however, very lucky to have Secialty Produce a wholesale produce distributor that is open to the public. They have well established relationships with many of the local farms and regularly offer their products. In fact, they have a large walk-in that is solely dedicated to locally grown produce.

San Diego also has a small but active fishing community and a Saturday morning dockside fish market. It also is close, but a local fishmonger has alerted his customers that this Friday and Saturday a private boat is coming in with a load of Bigeye tuna. They’ll be selling tuna loins direct at $10/#. With all the restaurants closed, there is no market for their catch other than direct to the consumer.

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I see your point now. Then it’s not for you.

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Went to our local TraderJoe’s. They had staff at the doors limiting how many people could enter, but they hadn’t reached the limit so they waved us right in. They were out of a few things but nothing I wanted. Only 1-2 people in each checkout line.

Drove by Berkeley Bowl around 2:00 and there were only about a dozen people in line.

Here is a company that is willing to deliver next day in LA County area for a $200 minimum. They mainly served restaurants, but are now pivoting to residential to survive. My friend ordered from them and reported everything was good quality. I will likely order from them once our supplies run low, most likely early next week.

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I just went to a farmers market and it wasn’t a big challenge for them to reconfigure for social distancing.

A market with that’s usually crowded would probably need to limit the number of entrances and have people stationed there to limit how many people were in the market at once, just like grocery stores are doing.

That is what one of the local farmers market here is doing… Limiting the number of people inside the market and limiting the number of entrances… But it’s a smaller market…

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The markets I go to all have lots of extra space. They’re all in closed-off wide streets or big parking lots.

Thank you to the wonderful person on this forum (forgot who) who a month or two ago recommended this nonstick pan. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000658GT6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I have always been resistant to nonstick (all the paranoia about the health dangers of teflon), but the truth is making an omelette in anything other than nonstick (1) takes more time, patience and cooking skill than I have; and (2) requires extra calories because of needing lots of cooking oil or butter.

Now in the age of coronavirus where I am self-quarantined at home, but still working remotely 24/7, my nonstick pan has made it easy for me to put food on the table.

Take some frozen kale (which I finally procured since the stores seem to be out of frozen vegetables and when I am working 24/7, I do not have time to wash, chop and freeze my own kale) and stick it in the salad spinner and douse with some warm water. Drain. Throw it into the nonstick pan - no oil or butter needed.

Crack some eggs (although on my last foray to the grocery store on Wednesday, there were no eggs to be found, but I still have some from earlier trips to the store), liberal dose of black pepper, some turmeric (hey maybe it will help with my immunity) and dump into the pan and I can have a perfect omelette in 3 minutes.

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Hi @Dommy -

Do you know if it’s still on? I’ve been wanting to go since you hipped me to it but I can’t find your post with the info.

Does anyone have a good CSA box hookup? I ordered a couple from someplace over a year ago, can’t remember who because they stopped sending emails. The boxes were excellent, beyond expectations. But the last time they charged us twice and we couldn’t figure out if we got double food or just paid double. They never responded and didn’t set us up on automatic delivery as promised.

P.S. To stay on-topic. We could use some more vegetables but I shopped my head off last Wednesday, plus I’m already a chronic grocery store shopper, so we’re good. But I have a freezer the size of microwave. The quarantine pushed me to finally order a stand alone freezer to put on the service porch.

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The largest of the San Diego farmer’s market has been cleared to reopen tomorrow. Here are the rules of the road by which they have to abide. This was a farmer’s market in which you could almost literally pick up your feet and get swept along by the crowd it was so busy.