Top Sirloin roast was on sale this week at Safeway this week, for just $7/lb, and I ordered one with a couple of dishes in mind (Beef Stroganoff and Cambodian beef sticks). What I got was sirloin cap. This is, indeed, part of the top sirloin, a triangular cut with a thick layer of fat on top – which Safeway nicely trimmed (though I had to trim it away for my uses).
This cut is prized in Brazil as picanha and has become popular in the US in recent years, as other once cheap cuts that could be used for steaks have become too expensive fore regular use. I have no doubt that the same will happen to sirloin cap.
I will try making an actual roast next time it goes on sale, but for the time being I can say that the cut worked well for grilling as thin strips – it was tender but with a nice grain/pull -, but it failed as cubes for the stroganoff. I’m not surprised as sirloin in general tends to acquire a dusty texture when cooked wet. It might work if I’d cut it into thin slices here as well.
I don’t bake much, and I never make pie crust. I know it’s easy, but I avoid anything that forces me to use a rolling pin (this includes cut cookies). Therefore, in the rare occasions when I make a pie, I buy pre-made pie shells.
Unfortunately, most store bought pie shells aren’t very good. They can be too tough, not flaky enough or have an unpleasant bitter baking soda taste. In addition, they are expensive! Enter Amazon Grocery pie shells.
At about $2 for 2 shells, these shells were surprisingly affordable – though beware that Amazon practices “dynamic” pricing, with products sometimes changing prices multiple times a day and coming in-and-out of inventory. Still, that’s half the price of the supermarket-brand pie shells. They were also surprisingly good. The shells are pretty thin, and while not flaky, their thinness stops them from being hard. They also have a pretty good flavor, slightly salty but that works well with sweet fillings as it provides a balance to them. That said, I used the shells in a sugar cream pie, and I’m not sure how well they will handle a pie with a significantly heavier filling, such as apple pie.
These shells come refrigerated and rolled up, with parchment paper separating them. Some of the dough stack to the paper, though it was easy enough to fix fix them.
I’ll definitely buy them again next time I bake a pie.
Update: Let’s talk about dynamic pricing. Just two days after I wrote this post, Amazon has doubled the price of the shells from $2 to $4!
I love ravioli. It’s been my favorite pasta since I was a kid. Indeed, it was the only pasta I liked as a kid. This love comes from the fact that my grandparents used to make homemade ravioli, and they celebrated my first birthday with a raviolada, I love seeing the photos of my with a face full of sauce.
Short of having my grandmother make ravioli, I only had ravioli growing up when my father would buy the fresh pasta at a nearby pasta factory. But it was expensive. My parents were thrifty, so it was a special occurrence.
In the US (and in Argentina nowadays), you could get frozen ravioli for a reasonable price, so they were one of the first dishes I started “making” after I got married. I still always keep a bag of frozen ravioli in the fridge just in case.
With time, supermarkets started selling higher quality refrigerated ravioli, and recently Rana has moved into selling these “gourmet”-style ravioli, with unusual/special fillings. They were on sale this week ($5 for the 8 oz package, down from $8 regular price), so I grabbed a couple of bags.
I hadn’t had the pulled pork ravioli before and I was sort of puzzled by them – I still am. The pulled pork filling is very tasty, it has a strong, but balanced, BBQ pork flavor and stands well to the pasta. The flavor of fillings in ravioli often gets lost, but that is not the case here. Still, it was not clear to me why I was eating pulled pork inside a ravioli. The flavor/texture combination wasn’t really obvious and I’m still not sure that it worked. Again, it was tasty but it was weird.
I usually eat commercial ravioli with store-bought pasta sauce, but I didn’t think the flavor combinations would work here, so I tried these ravioli with butter – that worked well enough. I think brown butter and sage would work as well, though I was too lazy to make it last night. I did try it with some grated pecorino cheese, but the cheese does nothing here but confuse flavors – it’s definitely best left out. You do need butter or sauce as otherwise the ravioli get too sticky/gummy.
The other issue I have with these ravioli is the package size. The 8 oz package is supposed to offer two servings of one cup each. But unless you are serving them as an appetizer or along other dishes, or simply are not very hungry, a cup of ravioli is too little. Two cups, however, is too much unless you are actually very hungry. Now, the package might be perfect if you are making dinner for yourself and a young child, but that’s no longer my case. I wish they would increase the size to 12 oz, or perhaps decrease it to 6 oz. That said, $5 for a gourmet tasting meal is definitely not a bad price.
The ravioli themselves are pretty large – the kind you need to cut in two in order to fit into your mind. Obviously you can do this with a fork, but I personally prefer smaller ravioli.
I might buy these again to feed to my husband, who just loves pulled pork. But really, I wish Rana would just sell their pulled pork to eat in a sandwich, that feels more natural.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently in a cooking strike. Meanwhile, my youngest daughter has been doing a lot of cooking for herself. This means that commercial pasta sauce has reappeared in our kitchen.
In the last few years, a number of premium pasta sauces have made their appearance at the supermarket, led by Rao’s, named after the famous pasta restaurant in NYC. What characterizes premium sauces are that they are made with actual whole tomatoes and olive oil. Regular pasta sauces, on the other hand, are made with tomato puree and soybean or canola oil (Ragú, Prego) or a combination of tomato puree and diced tomatoes (Barilla, Bertolli and Classico).
Mezetta is the premium bland that most often goes on sale at Safeway, so I’ve now tried several of its flavors. I reviewed the roasted garlic one before. The ingredients for the basic sauce include “Italian Plum Tomatoes from Italy’s San Marzano Region, California Plum Tomatoes, Imported Olive Oil, Fresh Onions, Sea Salt, Fresh Garlic, Fresh Basil, Black Pepper, Spices,” plus whatever flavoring the particular sauce has. This one had cheese. It tasted exactly like would expect: tomato sauce with cheese. It’s actually pretty good as a dipping sauce. it has a very fresh, bright flavor and the cheese adds even more umami. I like it less on top of pasta. Served on ravioli, it was too acidic to compliment rather than overwhelm the filling. Even on just plain spaghetti, the acidity of the flavor is a bit too much. It needs something more substantial and absorbent, such as bread, to truly shine.
This, btw, has been my general complaint with the premium sauces – they are just not as good on pasta as the more cooked down, old-style and cheaper red sauces. Premium pastas tend to win taste tests when they are tasted on their own – and I can totally understand that – but it’s different to eat a whole bowl of pasta than taste a spoonful of pasta sauce.
Frozen ravioli have long been a savior for busy moms – and just regular people. They are easy (though a bit bulky) to keep in the freezer, quick enough to make, and, combined with store-bought sauce, a super easy weeknight meal. I’m going through yet another cooking strike, so frozen ravioli have reappeared in our lives.
I’ve been buying Celentano frozen ravioli quite a bit lately because they are often on sale at Safeway ($4-5 for 20-24 oz, from a $8 purported regular price), and at that price they are cheaper than Safeway’s own brand. Safeway only carries the cheese, spinach & cheese and beef ravioli, so they are they only ones we tried.
They are pretty good, not dramatically different in taste than other brands. My daughters don’t like the spinach & cheese flavor, but they are happy enough with the cheese ones. These come in both regular and “mini” version, the latter are easier to eat. The regular sized ravioli are too large to eat with one bite, so you need to cut them in two, though you can accomplish this with a fork if you cook them past al dente (which I do). Like other raviolis, if you do this they tend to open in the boiling water and the filling comes out.
The beef ravioli have a subtle flavor, as is often the case in ravioli, but not really different than Safeway’s own brand. There is enough flavor to eat them with butter and cheese instead of sauce.
In all, if you are watching your pennies, there is no particular reason to not buy this brand versus other regular frozen ravioli brands – obviously they are not as good at Genova ravioli, my favorite brand, but they are about 1/3 the price.
My husband got me a box of these heart-shaped stuffed madelines ($10) for Valentine’s Day and it was such a lovely gesture. The box came with six red, raspberry jam filled madelines and three nutella-filled ones. I love madelines and was very intrigued. Alas, the idea was better than the reality.
What makes madelines wonderful is their subtle flavor, the slight caramelization of its surface, and their spongy texture. Here, the flavors of the fillings were so strong that you couldn’t taste the madelines themselves. The filling made them very thick, and perhaps for that reason, very dry. It robbed the madelines of their “madelineness” and just made them into a generic jam or nutella filled thick and dry pastry. I just wasn’t a fan.
I’ve been eating ramen since college – and I still do from time to time – but I pretty much missed the ramen revolution of the last decade or so. I’ve seen the new ramen styles at the grocery store and read vague reference to them, but I never paid much attention. Filled with carbs and fats, ramen is not particularly healthy, and when I crave it, I want the old, familiar blocks of Top Ramen or Maruchan, with a lot of cheese added for an Argentinian touch.
Still, I saw a box of A-Sha Meteor Noodles with Danzai Sauce on sale in the Grocery Outlet flyer, and I figured I could dip my toes into the ramen craze by trying these. While the ramen was good, I don’t think I’ll hurry to put my whole foot inside it.
These noodles are air dried, rather than fried, so they don’t have much flavor on their own. They have to be boiled in water for 5 minutes, but rather than add a powder to the boiling water to create a broth, you drain them and mix them with the sauce that comes in the pouch. All the flavor comes the sauce. And I just can’t really describe the flavor. It’s savory, maybe somewhat meaty in the way that mushrooms are, but not really tasting of mushrooms, and fully of MSG-produced umami. It’s tasty enough, but not memorable and I can’t imagine myself craving it. If anything, it made me miss regular ramen.
My husband liked it more and had it a couple of times. I don’t think we’d buy it again after we finish this box.
I think we paid $6 for the box of 12 at Grocery Outlet, but its official retail value is $20.
Trader Joe’s frozen entrees vary in quality, but I don’t think any are as bad as its Chicken Adobo ($4.30). I’ve rarely had such a bad frozen meal.
It’s hard to know what to say about it beyond the fact that it doesn’t taste at all like chicken adobo. The chicken itself had no flavor, and I think it was probably cooked without seasonings by itself. The sauce was watery, and just not pleasant. The portion looked small, but it was so bad I couldn’t even finish it. In all, just a bad dish.
I had a $10 Doordash credit that I could only use to pick up stuff at 7-11, and we figured we’d use it to try their pizza. I had first heard about it a few years ago, when a cousin was visiting from abroad and found 7-11 pizza an affordable and easy way to feed a picky child. Still, with frozen pizzas available at the supermarket, and lots of pizzerias around, I never had an actual reason to buy it at 7-11 – until now.
I failed to take a photo of the pizza before we ate it – and the photo of the slice is after microwaving it a day after -, but it looked like a normal pizza. It wasn’t bad. My daughter felt it tasted like frozen pizza, but I liked it better than most commercial brands. It has a good amount of garlic in it, which helps flavor it. I wouldn’t necessarily seek it out – but I can see having it again, either to use that $10 credit again or if we wanted something while on the road. The slices, once they cool down a bit, are pretty firm and not too messy.
One of the cool things about 7-11 pizza is that you can buy it cold and have them heat it up for you. This means that you can use EBT (food stamps) to buy it, despite the fact that EBT doesn’t work for hot foods. Given how many people on food stamps don’t have access to a kitchen – or might want to give their kids the “treat” of a “real” pizza, I love this option. I’m not sure whether you save tax if your order it that way too. As I ordered it through Doordash, the pizza was hot and taxed.
The 14′ cheese pizza was $8, so about the same price or cheaper than a frozen/refrigerated pizza at the supermarket.
I’m obsessed. It’s been a handful of days since I first discovered Amazon Kitchen Roasted Tomato Salsa, mild, and I have already devoured three 16-oz tubs. I almost fear it’s a medical condition driving me to it – maybe I lack vitamin C, but I have little desired for cooked tomato sauces and I haven’t been craving citruses. Just this salsa.
It reminds me a lot to the salsa that used to be available at Chevy’s. It has a crushed tomato texture (though it’s made with diced tomatoes) and it just exudes freshness. It has the right amount of spice, the right amount of onions and it’s just delicious. Fortunately, i’s also not bad for me – though the tortilla chips I’ve been eating it with, do. The whole tub has 150 calories but 90% of your daily limit for sodium. Let’s be honest, though, I always exceed that.
Before trying this salsa, I tried Amazon Kitchen Pico de Gallo Salsa, and I was not too happy with it. I tend to prefer pico de gallo to salsa because it usually tastes fresher, but this was not the case here. Even though it was a fresh, refrigerated salsa it evoked the shelf-stable jarred stuff. That one, I wouldn’t get away.
The great thing about Amazon fresh salsas is the price. They are currently $2.70 for the 16oz tub. That’s almost half the price of Safeway’s version.
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