Choripan, a popular Argentinian grill restaurant, reopens in Hackensack

Choripan Rodizio reopened about a month ago at 10 Sussex St. in Hackensack, a little over a block from the original location on the ground floor of a Main Street building destroyed in a fire on April 26, 2015.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Choripan Rodizio in Hackensack appealed to both meat eaters and salad lovers before the grill restaurant was destroyed in a fire nearly 16 months ago.

Now, the popular Argentinian steak house is back in business at 10 Sussex St., near the Bergen County Courthouse.

A woman who was unlocking the front door about 20 minutes before today's 11:30 a.m. lunch service explained the restaurant reopened about a month ago, but the owners haven't been able to update their website.

One of the restaurant windows calls Choripan an Argentinian steakhouse, which also offers empanadas and pasta, the last reflecting heavy Italian immigration to the South American country. 

Open 7 days

I picked up a copy of the lunch menu, which is served from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Five salads are listed, four of them for $6.95 each; and All You Can Eat Rodizio with two side dishes runs $20. 

Choripan, a grilled Argentinian-style sausage sandwich, is $10.

The Choripan Burger is served with french fries and includes bacon, egg and American cheese, also $10.

Details

Choripan Rodizio, 10 Sussex St., Hackensack; 201-880-7941. BYO, open 7 days from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. A parking lot is behind the restaurant.

See: 

You can easily skip the meat

A welcome sign of renewal

At Costco, one can yields several meal ideas

Organic Diced Tomatoes, left, are one of the new Kirkland Signature items at Costco.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Costco Wholesale has been offering cans of organic diced tomatoes from Del Monte and other companies for years, and I've been using them in several fish, pasta, rice and egg dishes.

Now, Costco has introduced its own Kirkland Signature-brand Organic Diced Tomatoes, Organic Stewed Tomatoes, Organic Tomato Paste and Organic Tomato Sauce.

Penne in marinara sauce with added diced tomatoes, left. The pasta made a rib-sticking breakfast when eaten with Korean-style stewed tofu and pollock from H Mart.

 

Comparing the nutrition labels of the Organic Diced Tomatoes from Del Monte and Kirkland Signature, the only difference for a half-cup serving size is calories. 

Del Monte lists 20 calories and the Costco store brand lists 15, none from fat.

Both are made from organic California tomatoes and both are certified organic by Oregon Tilth.

An 8-can pack of Kirkland Signature Organic Diced Tomatoes was $5.99. 

Diced tomatoes are a versatile ingredient in quick, no-recipe, home-cooked meals.

Diced tomatoes with fish

Empty a 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes into a large, non-stick pan and add extra-virgin olive oil, fresh lemon or lime juice, powdered garlic and other seasonings; cover and warm over medium heat.

When the mixture starts to boil, uncover and place fresh, wild-caught fillets in the pan, season with Costco's Kirkland Signature Organic No-Salt Seasoning and cover.

My Costco in Hackensack usually has wild-caught haddock from Iceland, as well as wild-caught flounder and cod fillets ($7.99 and $8.99 a pound).

This also would work with frozen, wild-caught salmon or cod fillets from Costco.

Depending on the thickness of the fillets and whether the fish is fresh or frozen, cook for 15 to 30 minutes, place a fillet in a plate and cover with diced tomatoes. 

You can do the same with those large Black Tiger shrimp available at Costco, but they would be ready in 5 minutes or less -- when they curl up and turn white.

I prepare organic brown rice in an electric cooker, and often mix a can of diced tomatoes with the rice to add moisture, texture and color to the finished dish.

A can of drained diced tomatoes adds texture to bottled marinara or other pasta sauce, which I supplement with extra-virgin olive oil, red-pepper flakes, garlic powder and Italian seasonings, and a can of anchovies in oil.

To cut the sodium content of the dish, I drain the anchovies in a colander and rinse them under water before adding them to the sauce.

The anchovies cook away, but give the sauce a robust flavor it wouldn't normally have.

Good in omelets

   

You can also drain a can of diced tomatoes, place them in a plastic container and refrigerate them for use with egg dishes.

I make open-face egg-white omelets with buffalo-milk mozzarella or sliced, reduced-fat cheese, all available at Costco. 

Adding a tablespoon of diced tomatoes is a natural -- sort of a pizza without the fattening crust.

On Tuesday, I bought a 1-pound plastic bottle of Kirkland Signature Shredded Parmigiano Reggiano from Italy, where the cheese was aged for 24 months ($13.79).

This flavorful shredded cheese would be perfect in an open-face omelet, supplemented by grated Pecorino Romano and dice tomatoes.

If you use whole eggs to make a frittata -- such as the Organic Brown Eggs from Costco -- you can mix the grated and shredded Italian cheeses, diced tomatoes, sweet peppers and other ingredients with the eggs.

Pour the egg mixture into a heated non-stick pan with oil and cook over medium heat.

When the bottom is set, put the pan under the broiler for about 5 minutes or until the top is browned.  

Organic eggs with grated Pecorino Romano cheese.

Related article

• High wages don't mean low profits - and Costco proves it

'All you ever cook are fish and pasta'

Image via Wikipedia

What's for dinner? Potato chips or mackerel in red-wine sauce?

My 13-year-old son came home around dinner time and lugged his book bag into his room.

While he was at the YMCA gym, I was shopping for fish to prepare for dinner. But when I went into his room to call him to the table, he was finishing off a large bag of potato chips.

"You're eating chips? What about dinner? I cooked mackerel (one of his favorites)."

"I don't want any," he said between bites of the chips. "All you ever cook are fish and pasta."

Even if that were true, he was the one who suggested more than 13 months ago that we stop eating meat and poultry, and he was the one who went back to being a carnivore when a hamburger was put in front of him on a flight several months after all of us took the pledge.

My wife also has returned to eating meat and poultry, but I've been happy eating only seafood, even as I cut down drastically on bread and pizza starting about six months ago to lose weight. I've shed 25 pounds.

I've added cheese to my diet, including the full-fat kind I used to avoid, pairing it with fruit or adding it to salads.

My son isn't being deprived of meat and poultry. This week, my wife prepared his favorite soup with chicken feet, and even added beef and ribs to it. I bought him uncured, preservative-free bacon from Trader Joe's.

Image via Wikipedia

He raved about the macaroni with a sauce of olive oil, chicken broth, garlic and anchovies the first couple of times I made it, garnished with lots of fresh, wilted spinach and grated cheese, but now it's taken its place among the hated "pasta" dishes he avoids.

I bought organic ground beef at Costco in Hackensack for him, while stocking up on canned fish, vegetable stew, four-bean chili and other non-meat items for me, but once I took him to Smashburger, he refuses to eat a burger anyplace else.

I told my son that if he continued eating chips instead of the dinners I prepare, I won't return his PlayStation 3, which I hid because his school work suffered.

My wife didn't back me up. She said eating chips was no reason to deny him the video-game console. 

Image via Wikipedia

I've had to be inventive without meat, poultry, bread and pizza as part of the dining equation, both at home and eating out. 

My breakfasts often are salads with the same ingredients I once stuffed into sandwiches -- smoked fish, sardines, cheese, tomato and so forth. 

This morning, I fried four quail eggs -- sunny side up -- from the Korean supermarket, and ate them with leftover baby bok choy, Korean stewed tofu  and a cooked cabbage-and-sweet-pepper dish my wife made. 

I just prepared a canned fish salad -- tuna, pink salmon, sardines and anchovies -- with Dijon mustard, lemon juice, cumin and other Middle Eastern spices, and diced celery and onion, and wonder if my son will have a sandwich of it for breakfast tomorrow.

I love pasta and rice, but can't eat them to my heart's content while cutting down on carbohydrates.

Eating out, there are several meatless Korean dishes I like and others that can be prepared without meat, and they always come with vegetable, fish and tofu side dishes that are perfect for me.

Everywhere else, I choose fish or shrimp for my entree, such as the fried whole tilapia I shared the other night with my wife at a Colombian restaurant.

Searching for fiber in my food

Image via Wikipedia

The newspaper has a story on how "roughage" and "more fiber" in our diet can extend our lives, but it's short on information about what foods have them.

The daily recommendation is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. However, the Associated Press story, which equates "roughage" and "fiber," only mentions one food source: grains.

The National Cancer Institute study is called the largest of its kind. "It finds the overall benefit to be strongest for diets high in fiber from grains." 

Rather than rely on the Associated Press, it's probably best to read a summary of the study on the Web site of the Archives of Internal Medicine at the following link: 

Dietary fiber and mortality 

I took a look at some of the food in my cupboard and refrigerator to see which has dietary fiber.

My breakfast this morning included two foods with dietary fiber: Bob's Red Mill 100% Whole Grain Hot Cereal (10-Grain), which I prepared with dried blueberries and honey; and sun-dried tomatoes, which I paired with buffalo-milk mozzarella cheese.

Lundberg Organic Short-Grain Brown Rice also is 100% whole grain, but other brown rice has fiber, too. You can get more fiber from fully cooked, canned kidney beans or Madras-style lentils.

A half-cup of ShopRite's Organic Dark-Red Kidney Beans contains 6 grams of dietary fiber; 5 ounces of Tasty Bite Madras Lentils contain 5 grams of fiber, and one-quarter cup of organic brown rice has 3 grams of fiber.

Although I am cutting down on bread to lose weight and giving up that fiber, I make up for it by eating pasta and almonds, both of which contain dietary fiber, as do fruits and vegetables.

You can find a fact sheet on dietary fiber, including a listing of foods, at the following link:

Dietary fiber

How I lost weight in Italy

Image by gruntzooki via Flickr

Today, for the first time since I returned from Italy on Monday, I weighed myself and was surprised to see I had shed four to five pounds on my trip Sept. 8-20. 

I was surprised, but also pleased that I had followed the advice of my trainer at the gym to cut down on bread, pizza and other carbohydrates. 

In the past, I've always gained weight. In Greece, I blamed the retsina wine and incredibly fatty yogurt. In New Orleans, I blamed just about everything in one of the great food cities of the world.


I ate well in Italy -- fresh fish and seafood, seasonal vegetables, a salad with almost every meal, pasta, lasagna, risotto, sparkling mineral water and wine -- but I didn't do that three times a day.

In fact, I tried to eat only two meals a day and relied on granola and soy bars, nuts and espresso to tide me over. I never had dessert. If I ate a big lunch, I'd skip dinner. Or I'd have a big breakfast and a big dinner.

Sometimes, I would tell my server I didn't want bread, and ate the bread sticks I found on every table or settled for one or two slices of the seven or eight in the basket. Bread sticks are "grissini" in Italian -- as in Grissini, the expensive Italian restaurant in Englewood Cliffs.


I ate pizza only once, on my last full day in Italy. The vegetarian pie was an oval, about half the size of a small pizza here in New Jersey, and had more vegetables than cheese on top of the soft, chewy dough, which was scorched by the coal oven. 

Pizza is brought to the table unsliced -- you use your knife and fork to make pieces as big or as small as you like, and in whatever shape you like.


I not only ate well, but I was full when I left the table, even of I had only two courses from a fixed-price tourist menu.


I also walked a great deal. From my first stop in Milan, I took a train north to the city of Monza and then a free shuttle bus to the autodromo -- the track where the Formula One race was being staged. I did that three days in a row, and on two of those days, I had to walk more than a mile each way to the race course.


The walking never stopped. I drove to Venice on Monday, Sept. 13; parked in a garage and for four days, relied mostly on ferries and my own feet to get around.

(Photo: Fish display at a Milan restaurant.)

Eating alone

Image via Wikipedia

My wife and son are away, freeing me from having to prepare dinner for three this week.

So I've been eating this and that for breakfast and dinner, and keeping our meatless pledge.

Our last meal together was Sunday night, when I served lobster ravioli with pesto sauce and king crab-and-corn chowder -- all from Costco in Hackensack -- along with toasted Balthazar Bakery bread and a salad of organic greens. (Photo: Basil leaves.)

We went to Lotus Cafe in Hackensack for dinner Saturday night -- tofu and spinach soup, large shrimp in chili sauce, lo mien with vegetables and snow pea tips with fresh garlic.

On my own Monday, I had a sardine sandwich for breakfast and fish and pasta for dinner -- spinach egg noodles with pesto and steamed Pacific flounder (from frozen).

This morning, I grazed for breakfast on leftover dips from Aleppo Restaurant in Paterson, smoked salmon fillet, sardines, cheese, a toasted bagel, sliced tomato with za'atar thyme mixture and kimchi, all washed down with black tea.

Dinner came from H Mart in Englewood, where I found a spicy fish-and-tofu soup ($4.99) and rolls of rice, vegetables, imitation crab and seaweed ($3.49). I ate the soup with steamed yellow rice I prepared.

Does dried pasta ever 'expire'?

Image via Wikipedia

I returned today to Gourmet Marketplace in Little Ferry, where I found products from Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood on my first visit Dec. 15. 


I wanted to get a few bottles of a great-tasting balsamic vinegar of Modena called Ponti, 99 cents for a 16.9 ounces (look for the word "primus" on the label).


Imported Lensi-brand Italian pasta was on sale for only 50 cents a pound, but when I got home, I saw "Jan. 17, 2010" on one of the packages and wondered if that was an expiration date. 


Does dried pasta "expire"? Do you remember the TV commercial that said dried pasta outlasts most marriages?


I bought a 16-ounce package of spaghetti and another of fettuccine. I also saw ziti, but you have to buy four, 1-pound packages for $2.


Gourmet Marketplace is in the former Valley Fair 
on Bergen Turnpike, near the Little Ferry Circle,
now called Value Fair. Credit-card minimum.

Fighting over leftovers

We're not fighting each other for the leftovers. We're fighting because my wife and son often spurn leftovers in favor of a new taste sensation every day. That not only causes conflict, it means I have to sweep the refrigerator and make a meal of them now and then.

My wife and 12-year-old were away this past weekend, so my dinner Saturday night were items from our home-cooked meals in the previous week or so: one fried flounder fillet, one shoulder lamb chop, one chicken sausage and a baked red potato. The only fresh item was a salad of organic spring mix.

Thankfully, my wife assembled her breakfast this morning from leftovers and anticipated my suggestion she finish a couple of spoonfuls of ackee and saltfish. Usually, I open the fridge, then look over and push around the containers, just waiting for my son to return from school and say he's hungry. Then I spring my question: "How about a chicken tacos or should I heat up that chicken leg quarter?"

For about a year now, we've been trying to prepare smaller quantities in an attempt to avoid the leftover issue altogether. We used to make a pound of spaghetti or other pasta each time to accompany meatballs or sausage or to combine with tomato sauce and sardines. Now, we make only a half pound and use only half of a 32-ounce bottle of sauce, but can't even finish that.

This morning, I wanted to defrost chicken for tonight, so I asked my wife if she and our son would be eating the Niman Ranch pork ribs left over from dinner last night, which I served with yellow rice, black beans and salad. She said I should take out only enough chicken for me, because she wants to cut her cholesterol.

We love these fully prepared, naturally raised ribs and I recall  that when I was buying them at Trader Joe's, I picked the biggest package there. I could have bought a smaller package, just enough for us to finish at one meal, but didn't -- maybe because I like to have a lot of comforting food around and fear running out.

 My father had an encyclopedic memory for leftovers and if he didn't see something from previous nights on the table, he would grill my mother, who prepared a home-cooked meal just about every day. Of course, he didn't consider that she served them for lunch to her three sons or visitors. He wanted to know what happened to all the leftovers.


For commentary on food coverage in The Record, see:
http://eyeontherecord.blogspot.com/