I brake for fish -- not bread

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Brussels sprouts are a frequent side dish to the fish, chicken, veal and pork in Jerry's Meals To Go. They are a low $7.99.

As I drove past Balthazar Bakery in Englewood the other day -- without lifting my foot off the accelerator -- I reviewed how drastically my diet has changed, and the benefits I've received.


When Balthazar opened a retail store in its production bakery just before Thanksgiving in 2002, I lived around the corner.


I'd walk over to pick up a wonderfully crusty baguette or a dozen dinner rolls and, once in a blue moon, an extraordinary fruit tart.


Even after I moved to Hackensack, Balthazar remained my main source for bread, and I'd stop in every couple of weeks to stock my freezer with dinner rolls and cut-up baguette for sandwiches.


I supplemented that with pocket bread, za'atar bread and spinach pies from the Syrian bakeries in Paterson -- I always had them in my freezer or refrigerator. 


But I gave up bread more than a year ago to lose weight, so on Monday, I kept on driving until I reached Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood, where I bought a $7.99 Meal To Go -- a multi-course, restaurant-quality dinner.


And because this month marks the 2nd anniversary since I stopped eating meat and poultry, I bought a Jerry's meal with blackened fillet of sole, rather than one with pork, chicken or veal.


The side dishes were a half-dozen grilled shrimp in the shell, Brussels sprouts, vegetable frittata and a small block of macaroni and cheese. All I needed to complete my dinner was a home-made salad and a glass of wine.


The next night, I prepared green-shell mussels from New Zealand I had purchased at H Mart -- they are blanched on the half shell and frozen. I sprinkled on some grated cheese and dried herbs and baked them in the oven for about 20 minutes.


Tonight, we're having fresh wild-caught haddock fillets from Iceland that I picked up today at Costco Wholesale ($7.99 a pound).


I went to Costco after meeting friends for lunch at the Grant Street Cafe in Dumont. I had a Greek salad and black coffee, and they had sandwiches or an omelet with lots of bread and french fries.


At Costco, I also purchased 4 pounds of frozen, cleaned U-15 farmed shrimp from Vietnam (13 to 15 shrimp to the pound) for $36.99 or about $9.25 a pound with a $5 instant Costco coupon.


By giving up bread and meat, and going to the gym five days a week, I've lost a lot of weight. I weigh 190 pounds, compared to a high of 228, and my cholesterol is around 140 -- much lower than before, when I ate meat and took a cholesterol-lowering pill.. 


Balthazar Bakery, 214 S. Dean St., Englewood; 201-503-9717.


Jerry's Gourmet & More, 410 S. Dean St., Englewood; 201-871-7108.


Costco Wholesale, 80 S. River St., Hackensack; 201- 487-5471.

Lobster ravioli, crab cakes and other delights at Costco Wholesale

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You don't have to go to a seafood restaurant to dine on premium lobster ravioli, crab cakes, lobster bisque and other briny delights. All are available at Costco Wholesale, along with fresh, wild-caught fish and farmed prawns, and frozen sockeye salmon and mahi-mahi.


The wide selection at the Hackensack, N.J., warehouse store has helped me stick with a non-meat diet for the past eight months.


The lobster ravioli with parmesan and ricotta cheese from Pasta Prima are outstanding ($11.99). They actually taste of lobster, which is the first ingredient listed. 

When thawed, they take only five minutes to prepare and need only a drizzle of olive oil, cracked black pepper and grated cheese. You get two portions, each enough for three people.

The Maryland-style crab cakes from Phillips Seafood Restaurants list crab as the first ingredient and contain no breadcrumbs. You get six crab cakes for $13.69 at Costco, and $11.99 at BJ's Wholesale Club.

Blount Lobster Bisque ($10.89) and Legal Sea Foods Sweet Corn and Crab Chowder ($9.79) are two of the great seafood soups available.

Four pounds of prawns from Vietnam were $37.99 (U-15 or 15 to the pound). 

They have been cleaned, so all you have to do is shell them, marinate them in the juice of two or three lemons, along with dried or powdered garlic, red-pepper flakes and other seasoning, then sautee them in olive oil until they turn pink and curl up.

Between the bread

Besides giving up meat, I am trying to cut down on pizza and bread -- one of my favorite foods -- to lose weight, and it seems to be working. I lost weight in Italy and I've lost more weight since I returned Sept. 20.

So, it isn't unusual for me to have salad with reduced-fat cheese and smoked wild salmon or enjoy leftover ravioli or fried fish for breakfast.


This morning, I ate leftover haddock from Costco that my wife fried for dinner last night, along with cabbage and salted cod, and boiled green banana -- all doused with Valentina hot sauce. 

Yesterday, I had leftover lobster ravioli and spinach and cheese ravioli, both from Costco.


Leftover spaghetti with sardines made a good side dish for the fried haddock we had for dinner the following night.

UPDATE: So many fish in the seven seas

-- VICTOR E. SASSON

The perfect loaf of bread?

Image by Shopping Diva via Flickr

My wife called today and said, "I'm in Englewood. Do you need anything?" She meant food.


Let's see. Should I ask her to pick up a few of Jerry's restaurant-quality dinners to go? How about cabbage kimchi from Gaboh Inc. or Korean dumplings from the place across the street from the firehouse? Or did I feel like having a few Colombian empanadas and hot sauce from the little bakery off Palisade Avenue?


Instead, I asked her to stop at Balthazar Bakery for its signature baguette -- still $2 nearly eight years after the place opened on South Dean Street.


Here is the short ingredients list: unbleached wheat flour, water, rye flour, sea salt, yeast and barley malt. That's it. The weight is 8 ounces and the taste is incomparable.

Balthazar Bakery,  214 S. Dean St., 
Englewood; 201-503-9717. Closed Sunday.

(Photo: Original Balthazar Bakery in Manhattan)

Delivering food the old-fashioned way

I shop for food in probably half a dozen stores, so you'd think I would be drawn to one of those supermarket delivery services. But some of the stores I patronize regularly (Costco, Trader Joe's, Fattal's Bakery) don't deliver and I haven't warmed up to the ones that do.

I do speak regularly to the home delivery staff at the ShopRite in Hackensack, because they know exactly where everything is and whether it's in stock, saving me valuable time.

Ah, if I had the delivery services that were available to my mother, Grace Sasson, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Brooklyn, life would be sweet. My mother self-published a cookbook of Sephardic Jewish recipes and made a lot of the food we ate -- including string cheese and baklava, which she learned from my father, the son of a pastry maker in Syria. We kept kosher and rarely ate out.

We had one refrigerator and two big freezers stuffed with food. One of her big time-savers was preparing a dish such as stuffed grape leaves or black-eyed peas with tender beef, placing them in a pot and putting the pot in the freezer. She only had to pull out a pot and place it directly on the stove or into the oven.

Just about everything she bought was delivered -- produce, fish, meat and Syrian bread from individual stores on nearby Kings Highway or Avenue U, and groceries from the C-Town supermarket near McDonald Avenue. She could call or stop by the store and leave her order. There was even a live-poultry market only a couple of blocks away.

One time, my father saw the fruit guy kiss my mother on the cheek, and went ballistic.

We spent the summers in Bradley Beach, on the Jersey shore, and my father would commute by train to his dry-goods store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (As a kid, I'd place a coin on a track and retrieve it -- flattened -- after the steam locomotive had left. ) After we picked him up, we would drive across the tracks to the farmer's market and buy 50-pound bags of potatoes and other items.
 
Luckily, we didn't have to go without fresh Syrian bread. A man took the train down from the city most days and hawked the pocket bread from a baby carriage he pushed down the center of the street in the sleepy, sun-spalshed community.