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"   Tom Colicchio: Nine seasons of Top Chef, eleven years of Craft, endless ideas.  Colicchio, who grew up not far from here, in Elizabeth, enters the A&amp;amp;amp;P at midday. It is a cavernous and well-lit hangar. There&amp;#039;s a cheese case not far from the front door. On a shelf above a pile of Camembert are jarred sweet Peppadew peppers, which are about the size and shape of hollowed-out golf balls. See, what you could do is take some of these, get some canned tuna in olive oil, and stuff the peppers with tuna. Great little appetizer \u2014 just stuff &amp;#039;em. If you bought the same thing at an Italian market in Manhattan, it would cost you twelve bucks for a jar of maybe six peppers. You look around, you think of ways to use things. It&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;re taught in restaurants: Use everything. The chef wanders down an aisle of jars and cans. A large middle-aged woman says to the even larger middle-aged woman sluggishly pushing a cart a few yards behind her, &amp;quot;Come on, Pookie.&amp;quot; Colicchio notices this but focuses instead on a rack of marinated antipasto ingredients. You could go get a can of cooked beets, some giardiniera [a mix of pickled cauliflower, carrots, and peppers],a jar of artichokes, roasted peppers, oil and vinegar, and you got a great salad. Okay, here we go.[He is now in the soup aisle. Colicchio has the same enthusiasm for the supermarket as a source of discovery that you imagine he would at the local farmer&amp;#039;s market, or at a good fishmonger.] A can of vegetable minestrone. Let&amp;#039;s not look at this as a soup. Let&amp;#039;s look at it as a bunch of vegetables in a sauce. Add it to pasta. Or better than that, say you have a lamb chop. You could drain this and use the vegetables as a garnish on the lamb chop. You haven&amp;#039;t washed or chopped a thing. When I was at Mondrian[a restaurant in midtown Manhattan where Colicchio earned a three-star review in 1990 and was named one of America&amp;#039;s best new chefs], I did a rack of lamb with minestrone. Same thing, kind of. Take split-pea soup. Buy a smoked ham hock and cook it in the split-pea soup. The ham hock is already cooked, so all you&amp;#039;re doing is heating everything up, and you&amp;#039;ve re-created a classic dish. If you want to feel like you&amp;#039;re really cooking, buy a can of black-bean soup and a jar of chile peppers. Steam some clams open in water and garlic \u2014 or white wine \u2014 and mix in the black-bean soup and some of the chiles, and some cilantro. Whoa. The A&amp;amp;amp;P has a section of Asian foods that is as big as a small Asian market. This is a great section. These are all just cooking sauces. Same idea as the cream of mushroom. Buy some shrimp, cook &amp;#039;em, add &amp;#039;em to the curry sauce, you&amp;#039;re done. You could also use these sauces as a rub. Rub it on a piece of meat and grill it. That&amp;#039;s instead of making your own rub of curry powder, turmeric, coriander seed, cardamom, garlic ... I&amp;#039;m thinking I might come out from the city and shop at this store sometime. Colicchio picks up a bag of chicharrones, which are fried pork rinds, and smiles. Texture. You could put these on top of a stir-fry. Use them to crust chicken, the way people do with cornflakes. Crushed plantain chips would work, too. He finds himself in the vast produce section, standing before what seems like seventy-five thousand apples. My wife makes a crumble: fruit mixed with a tiny bit of flour, and then for the topping you just mix butter and instant oatmeal. Over by the cheeses again, there&amp;#039;s an odd case containing tubs of pickles, foil bags of brandade, packaged ravioli, and pierogies wrapped in plastic. The pierogies are attractive. There&amp;#039;s a little label with the name of the bakery stuck on the plastic. I went to a Ukrainian kindergarten. Twice a week, the lunch ladies would make pierogies and sell them to the public. Oh, they were so good. And see, these actually look good. They look like somebody, a person, actually made them. You know? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a12931/tom-colicchio-supermarket-0312/>