Wine 4 Drinking

I just saw a new product being advertised, the Tums Quik Pak, a 24-pack of plastic envelopes filled with antacid that, “delivers the strength of two regular TUMS tablets in a small amount of great-tasting powder.” Hey, I know a way you can get the same effective medication delivered as a great-tasting powder – chew two Tums tablets. How ridiculous is that? More packaging and waste for the same chalky product and it costs four times as much. It’s like you’re paying them extra money to not press it into a tablet.

This is the problem with American consumerism. It’s all about packaging and waste. With food shortages, rising oil prices and increased pollution, we should be focusing on conservation. No politicians talk about that because then we constituents might be inconvenienced. We might have to use public transportation. Or buy foods that aren’t metered out in prepackaged individual serving sizes. Or, as they do in other countries, pay for your shopping bags. But instead, we’ve created a culture of convenience and “freedom.” That I can choose between 18 different Coca-Cola beverages in 6 oz, 12 oz, 16 oz, 20 oz, 24 oz, 1 liter and 2 liter sizes does not make me feel liberated.

So in my life I’ve tried to reduce my consumption, which is why I’m always keen to try a new boxed wine. How does stuffing four bottles of wine in a plastic bag packed in a cardboard box help reduce consumption? It’s much lighter transporting the same amount of wine costs less, it takes up less space and it keeps wine fresher. And sure, a plastic bag uses fossil fuels, but so does recycling glass. So yesterday, I was in Cost Plus when I saw they were hocking two new boxed wines, Wine 4 Grilling (red) and Wine 4 Chilling (white).

Closer inspection showed that these wines were made exclusively for Cost Plus by the Trinchero Winery, a mass-market winery in Napa that also makes some of the boxed wines for Target. At $14.99/3-liter box, it was a bit cheaper than the Target wines. I bought them, figuring that if they were the same wines in a less pretty box, I could at least get the same buzz for a couple bucks cheaper. But I spoke to Mark Gallo of Trinchero, who explained that the wines were focused at a different price point and were formulated from different grape sources to fit that criterion.

The wines are definitely cut from the same swathe as the Target wines – fruit forward, soft tannins – but as a whole, I found them much more drinkable and interesting. The Wine 4 Chilling (I don’t name it, I just drink it) is a blend of Chardonnay, Moscato and Chenin Blanc. It has peachy, floral notes on the nose from the Moscato, very pleasant. The wine itself is a little flabby and fruity and there’s a touch of tight bitterness on the finish that’s not unpleasant, but not necessarily welcome. It’s pretty similar to the Target white blend, but with less of that Sweet Tart thing going on. It’s drinkable, but the colder it is, the better.

The Wine 4 Grilling is good for more than just backyard barbecue. Despite it having almost no nose (it could be my allergies), it’s surprisingly drinkable. It’s a blend of Zinfandel, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon and you can taste all three. The briar fruits that Zin brings are there up front followed by the softness of Merlot on the tongue and there is a healthy amount of Cab tannins on the back end. It’s not terribly complex and these days, I prefer my wines with a bit more acid, but it’s perfect for everyday drinking. At what comes out to be less than $4/bottle, it’s a real bargain.

Plus, as the packaging is made from 30% post consumer materials and both bag and box are recyclable, I like to think that by drinking it I’m doing my part to help the environment. As for conservation, I’ll do that with my gasoline and antacid packaging, but I won’t do that with my wine.

Death by Consumption

Today, Sunday, I just wrapped up a six-week job that sent me all around this crazy city. And it just so happened that I was able to turn a lot of it to my dining advantage. For instance, a trip to Mid-Wilshire might facilitate a lunch at Koreatown Plaza or my trek to Arcadia happened to coincide with me jonesing for Din Tai Fung.

So on Friday, my penultimate job visit led me to North Hollywood. The site happened to be a quarter mile from my favorite Thai place, Sri Siam (newly renovated). I dragged two co-workers there and gorged myself. We began with crispy rice salad, a mélange of crunchy deep-fried rice, crisp roasted peanuts, fiery red ground chiles and small cubes of Spam-like sausage that has been marinating in a vinegary pepper brine for three days. You eat scoops of it on leaves of lettuce with several hand-torn sprigs of mint and cilantro. It’s one of my favorite dishes of all time and I normally hate peanuts in my food. It’s such a perfect blend of flavors and textures – spicy, sour, crunchy, crispy, etc.

After that, we had the Tom Yum Gai, a citrusy chicken soup I’m not normally crazy about, but their recipe is so rich and perfect, I’m sure to order it again (should I survive past today). For an entrée, I ordered the green curry catfish, but due to some language barrier, was delivered the green curry soft shelled crab instead. When I saw the world’s largest soft-shelled crab coated in golden batter and rich curry sauce, there was no way I was going to send it back. It was a little over-battered, but it was still delicious. It was the first time I’d had crab Thai style and I must give it a hearty thumbs up. After polishing off some sweet sticky rice with sliced mango for dessert, I had trouble breathing for the rest of the day.

But that did not stop me from my continuing weekend bingeing. Next stop was Saturday at noon where I feasted on a borrego (lamb) quesadilla and a chile rojo burrito at My Taco. I’ve written about that place previously, so I won’t go into too much detail. The chile rojo, though, is glorious. Small chunks of pork stewed in a spicy red sauce stuffed into a tortilla with luscious refried beans. I went with a friend and his sons, 2 and 4. The little ones obliterated two borrego quesadillas almost as quickly as I did. My order left me completely satisfied but it didn’t stop my friend from giving me an extra taco al pastor he had. Of course I had to eat it. I left with a feeling of overstuffedness I hadn’t felt since…the day before.

I managed to keep food out of my mouth for the next several hours, but after babysitting for my friends’ kid, I was driving home at 11PM when I felt a feeling in my gut akin to hunger, except that my stomach was still full from lunch. So what did I do? I called up Casa Bianca and ordered a medium pizza with (homemade) sausage, eggplant and fresh chopped garlic. As far as I’m concerned, this is the only pizza worth ordering there, as I’m not a fan of their cardboard-like crust. But the sausage is chunky and fennel-y and generally great as is the eggplant. Cut to 25 minutes later when I was staring at an empty pizza box and a half-drunk bottle of cabernet franc. Oh, the humanity.

Sunday morning, eight hours later, I was getting ready for the last site visit of this job – this time in Alhambra. Two friends visited me there and after the job I convinced them to join me for lunch at the restaurant that has one of my other favorite dishes, 101 Noodle Express. They have 20-ish different types of steamed dumplings - everthing from scallops and yellow leek to shrimp, pork and pumpkin - and various soup noodles done in the Shandong style (don’t ask me where that is – somewhere delicious in China). They’re fine; we had some very juicy lamb dumplings and some others with pork and chopped vegetables. They also have noodles with beef tendon, which one of my friends loves. But the only real reason to go is for the beef rolls. It’s like a thin, fried flour tortilla shell slathered with a thin layer of hoisin sauce (homemade), cilantro and thin slices of slow-cooked brisket, all rolled up into a tube of heavenly goodness, especially when topped with their zesty sesame oil/green relishy stuff.

You think all that consumption would be enough for one weekend, but I came home tonight and made myself a pizza with Italian black kale and oyster mushrooms, both of which I grew at home. Which brings my weekend calorie intake to somewhere in the mid-five digits.

I feel a little guilty. And more than a little stuffed. There was also a wine tasting, a donut and half a maple bar I neglected to include in my weekend calorie count. And the sake I’m drinking now. I feel like I've eaten what one would eat if they knew they only had one weekend left to live. Thank goodness this job is over.

On the Beef Soapbox...

First of all, my apologies for my blog silence. John, as the only reader of the blog, I am truly sorry. But I haven’t stopped eating or cooking or thinking about food. A couple weeks ago, I went to hear Michael Pollan speak. He has a new book out that’s a primer for sustainable eating called In Defense of Food, a companion to his acclaimed The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book’s mantra is, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Basically, he means that we should eat things that we recognize as food (sorry, Gogurt) in moderation. He’s not completely anti-meat, but he suggests that industrial farming has created a glut of artificially cheap meat at the expense of the environment, fossil fuel consumption and our own personal health. Sure. I’m two-thirds with you there, Mikey. But I can’t help but eat a lot. It’s not my fault food is so damned tasty.

My big criticism with his manifesto is that he says we’re not paying enough money for our food. That there are hidden costs that are paid through farm subsidies and in incalculable environmental damage (there is an dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that cannot sustain fish because of fertilizer runoff from Iowa cornfields via the Mississippi River). And of course, he’s right, but how do you justify telling a low income family of five that they have no business buying $1.29/pound hamburger from Wal-Mart?

He acknowledges that the sustainable food movement is elitist but then he also cites women’s suffrage and environmentalism as movements that were started by the rich and privileged. The food thing is a little different because you can be environmentally aware and support women’s rights without spending extra money. The fact is grass fed ground beef can cost $8.75/pound (plus shipping). No matter what techniques they employ, it’s never going to come close to Wal-Mart prices. In fairness, it’s not so much that he’s saying that we should spend more on food, but as the hidden costs of industrial farming are realized, rising food prices are inevitable. Brace yourselves.

Speaking of beef, last night, I cooked a couple pounds of beef filet into a beef stroganoff which turned out really well. The beef was from Harris Ranch, the largest beef processor in California. It’s no Niman Ranch – it’s a basic feedlot – but at least they don’t feed the cows animal products. And it’s tasty stuff. Hm. What’s my point? I guess that it’s hard to adhere to Pollan’s lifestyle without spending a lot of money. The same beef I purchased at Harmony Farms meat market for thirty bucks would have cost a hundred from a grassfed beef supplier. It’s not like I eat that way every day. Or every week, for that matter. (On a side note, Harmony Farms also sells alligator, kangaroo, pheasant, caribou, bison, wild duck, etc. It's a trip.)

Trader Joe’s occasionally has some frozen grassfed steaks for $11/pound or so. They’re actually very good except that they’re carted in from Australia, so factor that into the carbon footprint equation. I just can’t win. A quick note on grassfed beef: because they generally have less fat of a different quality, they tend to cook more quickly and aren't usually as tender as cornfed beef. So keep that in mind when you're cooking them and consider using a Jaccard tenderizer. I do.

I will try to be better. But whether my next steak is from a grassfed bovine from Polyface Farms or if it’s defrosted from Trader Joe’s, I’m going to try Mark Bittman’s method of getting a meaty crust. It basically involved drying it out for a day or so in the fridge to concentrate some of the flavors – a poor man’s dry aging, as it were. But John, as my only reader and the one who introduced me to this method, you already know this. I’m basically wasting valuable digital space. So on that note…

Boxed In

O.K., I'm going to be the first to admit that I'm a guy who goes on jags. I get obsessed with something and milk it until I hate myself. For instance, this summer, I turned my tiny kitchen into a sauna making pizza several times a week. And gained several pounds. And increased my carbon footprint from overusing my stove. All because I fell in love with Pizzeria Mozza and became obsessed with making the perfect pizza. I failed miserably but it was a delicious fiasco. And just recently I came up with some new ideas that I'm sure will create a new spasm of pizzamania. Stay tuned. My current obsession is boxed wines; not great right now because I have a cold, but kinda great because I'm poor. In concept it's fantastic - two to four bottles of wine for a reasonable price stored in a vessel, i.e., plastic bag with a spigot, that doesn't allow external oxygen which degrades wine. You can store it for weeks on end, it stacks, you're not wasting glass, it's kinda cool looking. But in practice, I'm - to put it kindly - underwhelmed. I should start off by saying that I have a fairly good palate for wine. I have been lucky enough to have access to some fantastic wines and while I don't drink first growth Bordeaux every weekend, I taste a few hundred different wines a year, a couple of which one might consider hoity toity. So I know my Barolos from my Barberas d'Alba. But I'm also not a snob. Good wine is good wine. Which brings me to the box. My first real encounter with boxed wines was in Montreal, where their wine consumption per capita is probably much higher than ours. I remember being surprised at how tasty it was (it was a Frenchy wine). Boxed wine is popular overseas: in Australia (boozers) and Scandinavia, where the alcohol taxes are so high, bulk alcohol sells well. So with the increasing consumption of wine in the U.S., it's only natural that the boxes beyond Franzia should follow. Stateside, it comes in the likes of Black Box, Carmenet, Delicato and Target (via Trinchero). There are others - Hardy's in Australia and some California options, but I haven't gotten to them yet. Here are my impressions of the few I did taste: Target Pinot Noir California 2006 - Short finish, not quite tart, not quite soft. Just kinda there. Very little pinot character, very generic. Gets a C-. Target Pinot Grigio California 2006 - Candied and uninteresting, which was a surprise since a bunch of online reviews gave it high marks. It's like someone took a fair-to-middling Italian pinot grigio and dropped in a Brach's butterscotch. I drank it but I failed to see its charms. Target Cabernet Sauvignon/Shiraz California 2006 - Not bad in my congested state. Soft tannins, but not a pushover wine. A short, pleasant finish, good acidity. Perfect for a grill picnic with a bunch of people you don't care to impress with your wine generosity. Actually, the most quaffible of the bunch. Carmenet Vintner's Collection Merlot California 2003 - I got this at BevMo and was shocked to see it on sale for $9.99. For 3-liters. That's approaching 2 Buck Chuck territory. And back when this label was owned by the Chalone Wine Group, it was pretty respectable, so I was thinking it was going to be a score. In fact, it was a dud. Faded and old in an unpleasant way - but not corked. That doesn't happen with wine in a bag. Imagine the wine equivalent of finding a Kit Kat two years after the Halloween you first received it. It looks like a Kit Kat, it has many of the qualities of a Kit Kat - waxy chocolate, some sort of cookie inside, brown - but it's not at all palatable. But here I am, drinking it. Since the wine is four years old and on sale, I'm guessing that Carmenet is getting out of the boxed wine business and I'm witnessing first hand why. Black Box Wines Chardonnay Monterey County 2006 - This is the first box wine that really tried to set itself apart from the jug wine crowd by saying that it was a "premium wine," whatever that means. It's a tad pricier than the others and it's attached to a wine region, not just a state or country. It's actually a drinkable chard with a pleasant, buttery and slightly piney nose. On the palate, it's oaky and inoffensive with almost no finish and therefore characterless. That's harsh. It's somewhat characterless, but drinkable. __________________________________________ And I suppose that's what you want in a wine that you buy 4 bottles to the bag: Drinkable. I just wish there were more that were. But it's such a niche in the American wine world, I kinda understand. In trying to reach the wine box crowd, they're going medium fastball, straight over the plate. Nothing too acidic, nothing too tannin-y. Therefore nothing too interesting. These wines are the equivalent of Ragu in the early-80s. Here was a watery concoction that resembled spaghetti sauce in some abstract sense, but was engineered to appeal to the entire population. But unlike the presidency, we eaters can choose from a plethora of choices. We can pick plain, zesty, chunky, meaty and all combinations therein. This is fabulously illustrated in a Malcolm Gladwell lecture on taste expert, Howard Moskowitz. Winemakers like DTour are already taking the cue and making boxed wines for a more discerning crowd that still drinks in volume (Holla!). When they make it out west, I'll be sure to let you know how they taste.

The Best Show on TV

I’m currently waiting for my fourth meal of Thanksgiving leftovers to heat up in the toaster oven (Monday’s turkey tetrazzini, leftovers of leftovers) and I’m sipping on a dreadful zinfandel, a tart and bitter 2005 Beaulieu Vineyard (but I’m still drinking it). It’s about as far away as you can get from what I saw this morning on After Hours with Daniel, the best show on television these days. Sadly, the show is available only on the cable HD network, Mojo, but you can get the first season on DVD at Netflix.

The concept is: celebrity chef, Daniel Boulud, visits the kitchen of a snazzy restaurant and cooks a late night meal with the chef there for a star-studded guest list. It’s not a cooking show nor is it a true reality show. It’s more like a gustatory fantasy that encompasses all the best parts of eating: the preparation, the presentation and the company. It’s also a chance to see the best chefs in America “let their hair down” and really cook the things that they love and then talk about it. The first season combed the restaurants of Manhattan (WD-50, Daniel, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Blue Ribbon Sushi, Maremma, Cru, BLT Prime, and Aquavit) and the second season delves into the blossoming LA scene.

In today’s episode, Daniel cooked with Nancy Silverton at Pizzeria Mozza and I just about died from empathic ecstasy. I should first mention that Pizzeria Mozza, a joint venture with Silverton, Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich, is one of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. The pizza can be doughy around the edges, but otherwise it’s a fantastic thin crust pizza with lovely burnt bits. I happen to love extra crust to chew on and their toppings are unique. Pizza with wild nettles and finnochiona, pizza with squash blossoms and burrata, a pizzete with chanterelles, scallions and guanciale, etc. They change from season to season. But it’s the vegetable antipasti that are truly stunning. Brussels sprouts, broccoli rabe, cauliflower – they’re prepared simply in a way that’s transcendent. So Silverton brought all these dishes out while Daniel roasted a home-cured ham and a pork shoulder made from milk-fed Quebecois pigs. And for 30 minutes, the world disappeared.

To paraphrase celebrity guest, Phil Rosenthal, “A good meal is like a little vacation.” It’s so true. Each of my visits to Pizzeria Mozza has been a (semi-pricey, but not obscenely so) hourlong getaway from the mundanities of daily life. A perfect pizza al funghi with a little quartino of Soave will do more for the soul than any spa treatment or weekend getaway. But top it off with pork product from Daniel Boulud and you’re talking Fantasy Island-level vacation.

And this is what makes After Hours so good. You get to see the work of good chefs augmented by the presence of one of the world’s greatest chefs making the food that they love to eat. Daniel will make something like roasted pineapple stuffed with hand made pineapple ice cream and then declare apologetically that it's a dish too simple to serve at any of his restaurants. And it’s also interesting to see the difference between West Coast and East Coast chefs (represent!). The Manhattan chefs kind of do their things: Marcus Samuelsson makes his Swedish meatballs and Wylie Dufresne does his weird molecular gastronomy stuff. But in L.A., lesser known chefs like Ben Ford and Michael Cimarusti pull out all the stops to try to impress and challenge Chef Daniel.

The irony is that in the first episode, Daniel says that he is excited to come to L.A. to learn how to “cook simple.” He makes rustic foods like stuffed tripe or head cheese, while the upstarts serve Australian lobster sashimi and mojito spheres. Veterans like Nancy Silverton and Joachim Splichal tend to cook more confidently, while young guns like Sang Yoon and Quinn Hatfield seem like they have something to prove, which is great. Either way, the food looks fantastic and exciting. It’s a great time to be an L.A. diner.

Beyond the Burrito

Los Angeles is a culinary goldmine, especially when it comes to (cheap) ethnic cuisine. Vietnamese, Thai, Salvadoran, Armenian, etc. So it comes as a surprise that it is not known for their burritos. On the burrito front, Northern California comes out way ahead. I have fond memories 25 years ago of the burritos at Super Taqueria in San Jose or El Toro in San Francisco but the only remembrance I have of burritos here is the giant "Pregnant Burrito" at El Nopal in Palms. And not because it was good, but because it was the size of a Tonka truck. This doesn't mean that I haven't had good burritos in L.A. The carnitas burrito at Senor Fish is delicious, as is their scallop one. The vegetarian burrito at Chabelitas is scrumptious. Which brings me to my point: it's not that burritos in L.A. are inferior, but the rest of the Mexican cuisine here is so spectacular, no one cares about a tortilla sock stuffed with beans and meat. And for me to call a burrito Mexican is debatable. The multi-layered version we gringos know, with the beans, meat, cheese and salsa, is far more a California product than it is a Mexican creation. Its goal seems to be to overwhelm with quantity rather than quality. Taco Bell announces, "We've got a seven layer burrito!" Del Taco responds, "Oh, yeah? We've got an eight layer burrito!" But why get a burrito when you can get chuletas en pasilla at La Cabanita? Or the quesadilla con borrego at My Taco? Or the tacos al pastor at La Estrella? There's so much depth in Mexican cuisine, why would I settle for a pedestrian burrito? Case in point: Last week I was in a minimall with a friend when I saw a tiny hole-in-the-wall spot selling these huge sandwiches. Even though I had already had lunch, I wanted to try one and my friend, who's Mexican American, said, "Oh, these things are everywhere." But I had never seen them before. They're called cemitas poblanas and my friend was wrong. They're not everywhere. Essentially, it's a hard-ish sesame seed roll that's been heated up on a grill and stuffed with meat, avocado slices, panella cheese (a fresh Mexican cheese), sometimes onions and cilantro and finished with a slathering of either zingy jalapeño or a smoky chipotle salsa. So here's their story (according to the Internet and Jonathan Gold): it's basically a street food from the city of Puebla in the state of Puebla which is almost smack in the middle of Mexico. I guess there was an influx of Europeans in the 19th century, which may account for the use of bread, but according to lore, the term "cemitas" refers to the Lebanese, or Semites, who immigrated there. Traditionally, the sandwich meat used is milanesa, thin, pounded steak that's been dusted and deep fried. Stateside, cemitas are more popular in the Mexican neighborhoods of Chicago and Brooklyn, but there are a few places here that make them. The closest place to my house is El Ruby Cafe on San Fernando Road in Glendale. It's been around for awhile and they serve only one variant of the cemitas poblanas, with the milanesa. It was tasty and the salsa was just the right amount of hot, but the meat was stringy and tough and the bread (the most important part) was on the chewy side. A few minutes further south in East L.A. is Cemitas Poblanas Elvirita, which has a solid following. It's a box-shaped restaurant that looks like a small converted bingo hall. The rolls there is crisper than El Ruby's, but a bit on the thin side. The milanesa was more tender and flavorful. I also tried a cemita with barbacoa - long cooked meat, usually lamb - and it was a little oily and stringy. I'd read a fair amount about this place and was somewhat disappointed. I did enjoy a Mexican Coke there - much better than the American version which uses high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. I like it because it's less sweet, plus there's something about drinking Coke from a bottle. My favorite cemitas place was the first one I visited, Don Adrian, in Van Nuys. Though it was the smallest of the three, it had the largest menu. Pork, beef, ham, milanesa, head cheese, fried chicken, tongue, pickled tripe - they had it all. I opted for the barbacoa and it was just stunning. Piles of tender, juicy lamb on a fresh bun that was hard on the outside and soft like a memory foam pillow on the inside. The onion/cilantro relish they use on it cuts through the richness of the meat. Not bad for $5.50. The biggest and best of the sandwiches I tried, hands down. My two week romance with cemitas poblanas is still in its infancy. There is still much to explore - the taco truck that sells them outside the Smart and Final at Pico and Cotner, the place on Sherman Way and the other variants I have yet to try at Don Adrian. Who needs burritos?

Champagne Bottle Hits the Ship's Bow

I just went to a wine tasting in Venice, CA on behalf of a wine store my friends own where I feasted about delicious things and drank the wines of Languedoc. Languedoc, one of the most productive wine regions in the world; a region in southern France that produces more wine than the entire state of California. Suck it, Napa. But the wines were merely drinkable. Only three showed distinction, but what they were is not important for today's post. Today is about grocery shopping. I do most of my shopping at Trader Joe's and every so often, Costco, because I'm cheap. And every time I go - it's almost guaranteed - I will find either frozen food on an unrefrigerated shelf or refrigerated food stuffed into the freezer section. They're left by shoppers who either decide they don't need what they chose or they find, say, a more desirous frozen version of what they picked up in the fresh section, so they take it and leave the fresh version in the freezer. To me, this is no different than shoplifting. If you leave a bag of fresh spinach to crystallize in the freezer because you found the cheaper and less salmonella-filled frozen version, this renders the fresh spinach unsellable. It will be wilty and unappetizing. You have just stolen from Trader Joe's. Just because you couldn't walk three aisles over to put it back. You are a selfish dick. So the predicament then is: if I, as an innocent shopper, come across a (as in the case yesterday) a tub of spinach dip that some schmuck dumped in the freezer, do I take it out and put it on the nearby cracker shelf? If I do and no one puts back to be refrigerated, it will go bad. Or do I leave it where it is to freeze? Where it will also go bad, but in a less infectious way. Or do I truck it back to the fresh food section to put it back? Because I have the letters "S" "A" "P" tattooed on my forehead. Obviously, I do the latter. I'm a sap. I admit it. I'm the type of guy who will get dumped and then lend $100 to the girl who just dumped me even though I never got past second base with her. That's a true story. But I rescue this tub of spinach dip not because I want to save Trader Joe's a buck. It's the principle. Don't waste food. Preserve the world's resources. Do you know how many starving kids there are in China? I couldn't give a rat's ass about the economics of it. I'm the dick who, ten years ago, knowingly bought wine from Trader Joe's that was mispriced. It was priced at $12.49 when it retailed for $50. I bought three bottles, went home, re-checked the price on the Internet, then went back and bought the rest of the case. That's a 75% savings. My comeuppance came when every bottle of the wine I opened tasted unremarkable, if not mediocre. The moral of the story is, if you don't want the frozen peas, don't just dump them on the canned peas shelf. Because I will find you! I will make you feel shame! I will make you never forsake a frozen vegetable again in your life. Or let you freeze a fresh one. Walk the 100 feet to put it back, you lazy food waster.