Grocery Store Meals: H-E-B's Steamed Seafood and Randalls' Soups

Yello Echo (L-R): Crystal, Mani, Chris.

Fun-filled weekend. We did the first photo shoot for Mani's band last Friday and landed a couple of gigs for the upcoming week. Tuesday they play Salt Bar and Friday at the Xnihilo Gallery for the "Streets Have Soul" benefit. You can check out their new drummer, pictures from the shoot and new demos on the MySpace page.

   We got our Houston Restaurant Week on too, followed by a showing of "Eat Pray Love." Take it from us, folks--don't waste your money. You're better off thumbing through a Danielle Steele novel or Chicken Soup for the Soul...or both. It's more trite, self-congratulatory platitudes than it is culinary-inspired travel. We should have spent our $10.25 per ticket on "Piranhas in 3D" instead.

And today we picked up a few items from Central Market's Hatch Chile Festival to celebrate the Steelers pre-season game on TV tonight. We're making chicken-green chile tacos on green chile tortillas. 

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As much as we love cooking, we are often short on time and find ourselves having to to cut corners here and there. It isn't always easy to maintain a busy work week and stick to our pre-planned cooking schedule.  Sometimes we're too tired or burned out to get down and dirty in the kitchen by the end of the day. Even so, we try to maintain our girlish figures by steering clear of fast food. Sit-down meals are great, but they too easily add up and wreak havoc on our pocketbooks. 

So what are we left with? Usually the grocery store. There are many hidden treasures to be found there as we've discovered. 

Behold:

Steamed seafood at H-E-B. The new H-E-B off Buffalo Speedway is a wonderland of food. At the risk of sounding mega-dorky, we sometimes stop by in our free time just to hang out amidst the glorious foodstuffs. The place is amazing--bulk spices, self-pour infused olive oil, freshly-made tortillas, the works! 

And their seafood offerings are always supremely fresh. Best of all, they'll steam-and-season anything you want for free. It's a real bargain too. We had a friend over for dinner recently, and we bought three pounds of easy-peel shrimp and three clusters of Alaskan snow crab for under $20. That amount fed us handily, and we still had leftovers. We would have spent three times the cash at any seafood restaurant easily. You can choose from a handful of seasonings, but we always ask them to put in a little of everything. Steaming takes about seven minutes, so we usually get our shopping done and then pick up the seafood on our way out. 

Randalls soups. This find surprised us too. We've tried a few varieties including Tuscan-Style Italian Wedding, Texas Chili and the two pictured above, and all have tasted great. And yes, they taste like real soup. We'd venture to say that they even come close to restaurant quality. Sure you wind up paying a couple of extra dollars per container more than you would on a can of say, Progresso. But it's nice to be able to read, recognize and pronounce all the ingredients on the back label of Randalls' soups. We usually have a bowl with a sandwich or salad for lunch. 

Next up, we'll post about our Houston Restaurant Week experiences. We went to Max's Wine Dive this weekend and will hit up Catalan next week for Val's birthday. They extended HRW until 9/6. It's for a great cause, and you can't beat $35 for three courses at some of Houston's top restaurants, so go get you some!