Fine cooking is possible with your warehouse buys

Warehouse stores are amazing. If you are a disciplined shopper, you go with a list, blinders and a budget. But if you are an avid cook, you are easily distracted by the unexpected goodies - a huge bag of exotic mushrooms one week, a sack of avocados the next, a wheel of brie the third - and your list (and your budget) goes out the window. Then you get the stuff home and suddenly you are looking at a week's worth of mushroom sauce or guacamole or baked brie. What seemed like a bargain starts to sound like a bore.

The folks at Fine Cooking magazine feel your pain. In every issue, they have a "Big Buy" column, featuring recipes from an item purchased at the warehouse store. And now they've had the smarts to collect these recipes in a book, "Big Buy Cooking: The Food Lover's Guide to Buying in Bulk and Using It All Up" (2010 Taunton Press).

The warehouse bargain is fine if it is something like canned tomatoes, which can be stored away, or dried mushrooms or capers, which keep virtually forever, even when opened. But the avocados, the brie, the bell peppers - these are crying to be used.

One of my warehouse Waterloos is the giant jar of roasted red peppers. I love them in sandwiches (with grilled eggplant and goat cheese) and on pizza (with artichoke hearts, olives and feta), but it turns out my family will stand for sandwiches and pizza for only so many meals in a row. And it also turns out that an open jar of roasted red peppers, stored in the fridge, will get moldy in a shockingly short time. So I am especially grateful to the Fine Cooking editors for new recipes for roasted red peppers - including a soup and a couscous dish. My family is grateful for meals that are not sandwiches or pizza.

• Marialisa Calta is the author of "Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family" (2005 Perigee). More at marialisacalta.com.