June, Delish's senior food producer and resident budget eats expert, answers some of your most asked questions in this video. Give it a watch to learn exactly where she gets all those groceries deals and catch the rest of her series, Budget Eats, on YouTube!
My, my, my, y'all really like Budget Eats, don't you? We put out a community post asking you what you wanted to know about the show, and it turns out you want to know A LOT. Julia selected two dozen of them for me, and I sat down with my cat, Fred and answered them all. You know what they say, ask and you shall receive!
Where do you shop, June? I need to know the exact address for it.
The one that I frequent the most often is Dollar Up Fruit, situated right by the Woodside station off the 7 train in Queens. Most of my dollar bag produce finds are from this little shop, including $1 bags of bones that are fantastic for making broth.
Two blocks away is Food Express Supermarket. It's a fairly standard Chinese supermarket, and it has $1 bags of salmon scraps and trimmings. It's also a great place to find popular Chinese snacks, condiments, and ingredients.
For more produce deals, I recommend that you move towards Jackson Heights for various locations of Mango Rico. There are three shops all in that neighborhood, two of which are on Google Maps. If you really want to know where the third location is, you’ll have to come to Jackson Heights, explore the area, the shops, the restaurants, the hole in the walls, the food carts, until you come upon it!
The concept for this brilliant series, who was the mastermind behind it?
Let's go back to the year 2019—remember those (relatively) innocent days? My friend, Devin, mentioned that he liked watching cooking shows but found the idea of having to buy 14 ingredients for one recipe a little impractical. Using just a fraction of each of those ingredients for a specific recipe means you are often left with a lot more ingredients that you now know not what to do with. Why not make a show that takes the viewers through the process of cooking with the entire contents of a grocery haul, all the way to the end of every single ingredient?
The idea was a great one—thanks, Devin!—but we didn't start producing the show until lockdown happened. With all of us quarantined away in our apartments and social distancing mandates making teamwork impossible, the premise of Budget Eats was naturally a good fit for a video I could make at home, on my own. We all had to eat, and with a pandemic world in place, we all had to cook.
If your cupboards were empty, what are the first five things you would restock it with?
Legumes: all the lentils, beans, peanuts. Popcorn, because snacks. For a quick meal flavor attack, Japanese curry cubes. They are super versatile! Whip up a quick meal with any grain, any veggie, and any protein in need of flavor and this is all the seasoning you’d need—just add water! I'd also get some sesame seeds. Not only are they a great snack, they're also a fun bit to put into baked goods, granola, brittle candy, and can function as a lovely garnish if you want to give your dishes a bit of visual excitement and gustatory intrigue.
Do you ever remake any of the recipes you cook from the series?
No. Do you??
Have you ever gotten sick from the foods that you try?
Not really, no. I always do the look-smell-taste test before I use any foods past their expiration or sell-by date and this has proven very successful in avoiding food-borne illnesses. Either that or I have a titanium stomach.
For more Q&A—including "What were you planning on doing with that chicken skin that ended up going bad before you could use it?"—watch the video above!
