Text 11219, 65 rader
Skriven 2011-05-23 20:05:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Misc food notes
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I recently procured a duck for just $2.68 per pound. It was quite
young, just 3.5 pounds, so the flavor wasn't fully developed. It was
also labelled utility grade and was missing all the giblets and one
drumstick which also explains the low price.

I roasted it plain with a pan of dressing on the side that got
enriched with some of the roasting pan juices and a little duck fat.
Roslind enjoyed the skinned breast halves while I munched on the crispy
wings, a whole leg and an amputated thigh. Later I crisped up the
breast skin for gribenes and made carcass soup. I combined several
leftovers with the carcass: pork chop bones, a chicken carcass and
several chicken thigh bones and got quite a bit of mixed soup meat
and some really tasty stock. And of course lots of rendered fat for
frying things in. Since then we've had lentil duck soup, duck
pepperpot and duck fried rice, all very tasty.

I also scored a whole bunch of Mexican mangoes for just 66 cents a
piece which also made us happy campers.

I noticed steeper prices in the stores lately and started doing some
research on food inflation. Here's a bit of what I found:

Rice and flour: the retail price is up 50% since I stocked up last
year. (I will soon be running out of my old, cheap stocks too.)

Seafood is way up too and the Buckley's have raised their prices on
fresh lake fish as well: it's now $10/kg, which is still a bargain
compared to frozen supermarket seafood of lesser quality.

However California sourced fruit and veg are actually down, thanks
to the swing in our two currencies.

Turning now to the commodity market I learned that the overall
Commodity Food and Beverage Price Index rose 32% in the past 12
months. The Canadian Consumer Price Index is only up 3.3% but the
statisticians cheat by only counting the weekly bills and not the
shopping cart contents. People are switching from beef to pork and
chicken, from lobster and crab to squid, from fresh vegetables to
frozen etc.

Coffee is up 77% this year but still just 6% over the 1997 spike
(when there was frost in Brazil.)
 
With the situation having improved in the Ivory Coast, cocoa has
eased a bit over the last three months but is still double the last
low and 50% above the last price spike. Still it didn't go through
the roof as some alarmists predicted just four months ago.

I suspect there will be more bad news in this area in the months
(and years) to come.





Cheers

YK Jim


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