One thing everyone thinks women are preprogrammed to do: shop. I'm female, but the only shopping I was preprogrammed to do is shop for food. Clothes and shoe shopping bore me to the point where I'm ready to gnaw my arm off at the shoulder to escape, but food shopping fires me up.
Now, "shopping" is not the same as "buying." You can shop for many hours, days, even weeks without buying anything. This is because when you "shop" you check out prices and quality of various items at various sellers and then decide what to actually buy and where you're going to buy it.
TIP: Do a LOT of shopping before you buy anything. When you move to a new area, you have no clue which stores are notoriously higher priced, which are notoriously lower priced, and which are right in the middle. There are two approaches to shopping: (1) woman's intuition and (2) uber-organized. If you're the woman's intuition type, you'll walk around a store, get a feel for it's pricing, and trust everything to memory and gut-feeling. If you're the uber-organized type, you'll make a spreadsheet of all the things you want to cook this week, and you'll have columns to fill out for pricing of each item at the various stores you will visit. I have to admit I'm somewhere between the two extremes. Up North, at the Wall, with my husband, I know that the best deals on meat are at Lucky's, the best deals on produce are at Concord Produce, and the best deals on everything else are at Safeway. I haven't shopped around enough here, but I do know that the best deals on produce that I've found so far are at the ethnic market on Lincoln just north of the 210, the best deals on "weird" foods and rice are at the Hawaiian in Eagle Rock, the best deals on most other things, including beer, are at Von's, and the best deal on a cheese platter are at Ralph's.
TIP: Shop at a lot of places. As I outlined above, sometimes your best bet in covering all your culinary conquests will be by having a gut feeling as to where to buy various groups of things. The only way you can find out what places offer what goods at what quality is to actually go there and "shop." You may drive by a cute little middle-eastern market every day on you way to your caffeine fix at Starbucks or 7-11, but you have to actually go inside that market to find out that they have the best deals on bulk herbs and spices that you've seen so far. There may be a Hawaiian market in your mall, but unless you face the smell of fresh fish and dive in, you may never find out that they have the best deal on fresh tilapia and/or green beans around.
TIP: Remember pricing is seasonal. Different stores have different suppliers, and those suppliers bring food from various locations to your stores at different rates. Remember that corn can go from $2 an ear to less than $0.10 an ear when corn is in season. You will have to shop around throughout every season to make sure you get the best deals, especially on produce. Even meat has a season. On this one, check the news. If they're publicizing an outbreak of something related to one type of meat, that meat will suddenly be very cheap, even if the "outbreak" was 5 cases in one state all related to the same restaurant. All of a sudden no one will want to buy ground beef on the outside chance that they could get what those 5 people got from that one restaurant that used ground beef in one recipe...... so you can really stock up when hysteria hits the general population. There are times when you shouldn't go against the tide, though, and that is any time that you're buying ground beef when bovine encephalitis has been reported. You can't kill that stuff by cooking it, and it's not worth the risk. A good steak is still safe, if you wash it really well. Follow Kosher law and your steak should be fine. Other times to not risk it speak for themselves. If you get a report that pathogenic E. coli is taking out your elderly or young neighbors, stay away from beef that is undercooked, and by all means pass on the carpaccio. Otherwise, stop worrying!! Humans have eaten animals without fire for quite some time, your one rare or even raw experience with meat most probably won't kill you. If it does, well, you read the warning posted on the door how, "Things in this restaurant can kill you, known to the state of California!"
Now, I've been hearing multiple helicopters circle my apartment, and I'm going to go do the "stupid" thing and watch them from my outdoor patio. I figure if a criminal is looking for a place to hide, all he has to do is break a window, and I've done that before, so why try to be safe? I'm already unsafe by definition by having easily broken wicked old windows at eye level!
Stay hungry!
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