Pacing around with no food shopping to do

Despite all the little details you have to attend to before vacation, one thing you don't have to do much of is food shopping. You'll want half-gallons of milk and orange juice with sell-by dates of a week or so after you return and not much else in the way of fresh stuff.

My wife stopped at ShopRite this week for Applegate Farms cold cuts (no antibiotics, hormones or other additives), some salad greens and some fruit, and at Balthazar Bakery for the baguettes we'll use to make sliced ham, chicken and turkey sandwiches for the first day of our road trip. I'll go to Costco tomorrow for bottled water to keep in the car and smoked wild salmon I'll stow away for our return.

What I really miss when we go away are the familiar foods, familiar takeout and familiar restaurants. When we returned from Barnegat Light the other day, I enjoyed a light dinner of the wild Copper River salmon I had cooked several days before, straight from the frig, with some tuna-sardine salad (extra-virgin olive oil, chopped red onion, cumin), kimchi, olives and pita. With the first bite, I knew I was home.

More on Shish! at Whole Foods Market

Here is Jason Perlow's beautifully illustrated post about Shish!, one of the food stands at Whole Foods Market in Paramus, that appears on his Off The Broiler blog. I joined him the day he eat there:

http://offthebroiler.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/nj-dining-shish-at-whole-foods-paramus/

Why I never eat fast food

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my mother put a great, homemade, kosher meal on the table every night, including a plate of cut and washed lettuce, cucumbers and celery. In 1958, she self-published a cookbook. We rarely ate out and takeout was limited to bagels or an occasional coal-oven cheese pizza from Coney Island, part of our weekly meatless meal. We also ate fresh fish that I picked up at a local market every Friday.

I ate forbidden bacon for the first time at a Key Club convention in upstate New York and non-kosher steak and hamburgers while I was a graduate student in journalism in Missouri in the late 1960s. As a general assignment reporter in Hackensack, I sometimes started my day with an Egg McMuffin. But I am proud to say I have never eaten a McDonald's or Burger King hamburger and the one time I tried a burger at a new Wendy's in Paterson in the early 1980s, I got sick the next day.

Now, the local daily newspaper has published a promotional column and two stories about the opening of a fast-food Sonic Drive-In in Hasbrouck Heights that proved so popular on the first day that employees had to wave off cars. For the record, far more people flocked to Whole Foods and Fairway to buy high-quality food when they opened new markets this year in North Jersey.

There is a growing body of evidence that some ground meat used for fast-food hamburgers contains cow feces -- in other words, customers are literally eating shit. None of the food served in fast-food restaurants could even remotely compare to the Sephardic dishes I grew up eating, dishes I continue to long for.

If I want a burger, I buy organic or grass-fed ground beef and make it myself, adding spices that are used in Middle Eastern kebabs. And I continue to dream of my mother's small meat-and-egg omelets that I used to pop into fresh pita halves. In the summer, this sandwich needed only a thick slice of Jersey beefsteak tomato to make a satisfying meal. (This post was revised.)

Blessing of the fishing fleet at Barnegat Light

The Fishery (2015).

On Sunday, we attended the blessing of the commercial and recreational fishing fleets at Barnegat Light, famed for its lighthouse and its fresh seafood, including bluefin tuna exported to Japan and monkfish sold in South Korea. 

You can also find fish and scallops from this old port on the ice at Whole Foods Market in Paramus.

The image of the shore town's lighthouse is found everywhere, from the paving stones in a resi

dent's driveway to the striking blue stained-glass windows of St. Peter's at the Light Episcopal Church, which had an Evensong service by the Valley Forge Choir of Men and Boys. 

Unfortunately, a thunderstorm blew in during the blessing of the fleet at the yacht basin, sending everyone scattering to their cars and cancelling the procession of boats through the inlet.

We did takeout from Viking Fresh Off the Hook, including the delicious sea scallops the port is known for, and ate our food at Minerva's, the B&B where we spent the night. 

On the way home Monday, we stopped at The Fishery on Route 35 in South Amboy for a lunch of lobster bisque, clam chowder, steamed Jersey clams and colossal wild shrimp (six to a pound).

-- VICTOR E. SASSON

Cashing in on your love for food

Two credit cards from American Express give you cash back when you shop at supermarkets and eat in restaurants. Neither has an annual fee. I have collected thousands of dollars in cash rebates. I once used a Continental Airlines mileage credit card, but found booking the seats difficult or impossible.

The Blue Cash card from American Express gives you 5% back for purchases at supermarkets, gasoline stations and pharmacies once you've spent $6,500 on the card. For purchases at Costco, you get 1.5% back. All other purchases give you 1.5% back, not the usual 1%.

The True Earnings card, which is also a Costco card, gives you 3% back on restaurant meals, 2% on hotels and rental cars, and 1% everywhere else, including Costco. If you are an executive member at Costco ($100 annual fee), you'll get another 2% back from the warehouse store. Yesterday, I received $167.66 from Costco. Bon apetit!

(The original post described the second card incorrectly as the True Value card.)

Eat at home after you see this movie

"Food Inc.," a new documentary in limited release, sounds like a real stomach-turner, a "horrifying dissection of the U.S. food industry, where corporate-owned, massed-produced and chemically enhanced edibles can be unhealthy at best and deadly at worst," according to The Associated Press review.

Here's only one of the sickening images mentioned in the review: Chickens "so puffed up with antibiotics, they collapse under the weight of their breasts and die before they can be slaughtered." Food industry behemoths like Tyson and Perdue, which feed their chickens antibiotics, wouldn't speak for the film.

The film review appears today in the entertainment section of the local daily newspaper, a half-dozen pages or so from coverage of restaurant openings and closings, reviews and health inspections. I wonder how many readers will notice that those reports rarely discuss the origin and quality of the food, including the use of antibiotics, growth hormones and other additives in meat and poultry.