Good supermarket buys

Today through Saturday, ShopRite supermarkets are knocking down the price of free-range Australian beef tenderloin to $3.99 a pound with the Price Club Card. It's sold under the Nature's Reserve label.

The whole tenderloin is shrink-wrapped, but there is usually a lot of blood and you'll have to trim some fat. But you'll get a dozen or more small steaks and, sliced thin, some Korean-style barbecue meat. The meat, raised without antibiotics or hormones, is chewy and has a nice beefy taste.

Live lobsters are $4.99 a pound at ShopRite with the club card.

My wife picked up a seedless watermelon this week at Costco in Hackensack for $4.99. The next day, Tuesday, I shopped at H Mart in Little Ferry, where they were going for $3.99 each.

So many fish in the sea

This week, I've been eating a lot of wild-caught fish and enjoying it immensely. I'm thinking I could be very happy on a diet of seafood and hardly touch poultry or meat.

I started off the week with the smoked wild salmon I get from Costco as the main ingredient in my breakfast sandwich, with pesto, sliced tomatoes in za'atar, Parmigiano-Reggiano shavings and fresh arugula.

When that ran out, I tweaked my canned fish salad. Last time, I combined red salmon, sardines and yellowfin tuna. This time, it's albacore tuna, Moroccan sardines from Fattal's (one tin of boneless and skinless and another in spicy oil), smoked herring from Trader Joe's and Japanese-style mackerel. This salad got lots of chopped red onion, some olive oil and teaspoons of powdered cumin, and it's great stuffed into pita halves with organic salad greens and fresh arugula and basil.

Dinner on Tuesday night were those New Zealand Greenshell Mussels with sun-dried tomatoes and pesto (see post, "Here's a natural for dinner"). Last night, I had a fillet of fresh wild halibut from Costco ($10.99 a pound), seasoned with fresh oregano and parsley, cumin and Aleppo pepper. I bought the halibut because there was no wild salmon to be had that day.

Tonight, I'll have leftover mussels and halibut and two freshly baked whiting I picked up today at H Mart in Little Ferry ($2.99 a pound). I'll also have a chunk or two of Korean-style Alaskan pollack ($5.99), stewed in a sweet and spicy sauce with carrots and hot and sweet peppers that I found in the long refrigerated case of side dishes, or panchan.

Podcast on the North Jersey food scene

After sampling the Middle Eastern fare at Whole Foods' Paramus store on Friday, I discussed additive-free food, food shopping, favorite Korean and Middle Eastern restaurants and other topics with Jason Perlow, the food lover behind the Off The Broiler blog. Click on the following link, or if that doesn't work paste and cut it into your browser:

http://www.theuw.net/~perlow/podcast/Off_The_Broiler-%2351%20Victor%20Sasson.mp3

The market that often beats all others on price

For dinner tonight, we baked six small whiting and steamed two dozen Little Neck clams in sake and garlic. I bought them at H Mart in Little Ferry, the Korean supermarket formerly known as Han Ah Reum.

I also picked up five pounds of organic carrots ($4.99) and a box of 20 champagne mangoes from Mexico ($11.99). The whiting were $2.99 a pound and the clams $3.99 a dozen. I saw herbicide-free Campari tomatoes for $1.99 a pound, compared to $2.50 at Fairway in Paramus and $2.75 at Costco in Hackensack.

I shopped at the H-Mart in Englewood, when I lived there, and occasionally visited the Ridgefield store. Year in, year out, the prices for fresh fish and produce are often the lowest around and the quality, compared to ShopRite, for example, is far superior. The whiting I picked up this evening had the sweetest flesh and compared favorable to the larger whiting I bought at Fairway last week for $3.99 a pound (or was it $4.99?).