Have you seen the price of groceries?

Michael LaDuke back with another edition of the Red Lobster Chef’s Blog. I have gotten a lot of questions lately about how to shop for seafood and keep home meals affordable, especially with the rising costs of groceries. Since I do all of the shopping for my family, (actually, my wife Kathleen owns the mall piece of our shopping, I am relegated to the grocery store!), I do have a couple of tips:

1. Plan ahead and only buy what you need. Often when you look at raw product in the store, it does not look like a lot until you get it home. When buying seafood, have a good idea of the amount or weight of product you use. It will keep you from having too many left-overs.

2. Simplicity wins, and it is less expensive. As I have said often in the blog, great dishes can be accomplished by concentrating on flavor and simplicity. Buy fresh fish and grill or broil it with just a squeeze of fresh lemon, or lemon and orange. The more you complicate a dish, the more time, effort, and money it will take for it to be great.

3. Focus on the side dishes. If you keep on hand the dishes you and/or your family like to eat with seafood, it will be easier to shop on a weekly basis. Long grain brown rice and flavorful instant couscous are great accompaniments for seafood. Try not to add expensive items to your side dish. For example, if you cook pasta, but it requires sun dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and extra virgin olive oil, is that really the right combination for a simple, affordable fresh fish dish? Let the seafood be the star.

4. Plan your experimentations. If you are going to experiment with seafood, make sure you use information from a reputable source (like the Red Lobster Chef’s Blog!) so you know the end product will come out right. I recently answered a question from a reader who had purchased crab legs that ended up tough, chewy and flavorless. Her fish market had given her the wrong directions on how to prepare the crab.

Thanks for stopping by the blog, I hope you enjoyed the recent video on ideas for cooking crab. Later this week, will join you from Hilton Head SC, where I will be on vacation enjoying time with my family and eating great local seafood. Thanks for reading and come see what’s fresh today at Red Lobster.

Try our Oven Roasted Tilapia and Vegetable with Lemon Herb Butter recipe.

Michael LaDuke