One of my first professional culinary positions was as a freelance recipe tester at Fine Cooking Magazine. Being the lowest person in the pecking order meant that I had to do the food shopping. I remember thinking: Wait — is this a real job? And they’re really paying me for this? Seriously? This was not a favor, not an internship, but a position with a title, a paycheck, and expectations. I thought I had died and gone to supermarket heaven because there are few things more exhilarating to me than supermarket shopping (I know, get a life)!

And then came creating the grocery list. A week’s worth of recipe testing could mean 30 to 50 recipes or more, each calling for very specific ingredients with visits to multiple supermarkets, sometimes between states, and sometimes online. Marching orders included:

• Buy this brand and only this brand of fire-roasted canned tomatoes.
• Get salted and unsalted butter — domestic and imported — and check the butterfat content!
• Dungeness crab? No problem!
• 13-pound turkeys in July? Sure.
• Whole rabbits? Huh?
• 3 quarts of duck fat? I can find that!
• Smoked, hot, Hungarian, and sweet paprika? O.K.

I was being paid — PAID — to shop. Not just at one store, but across several; the big chains, the specialty markets, the discount grocers, and sometimes the tiny international shops where half the labels made you work a little harder, ending up at the mercy of the shopkeeper with hopes that you didn’t get thrown out for being so pesty. Regardless, it was exhilarating in a way only another food person would understand.

This wasn’t casual shopping. This was research. It took an entire day, sometimes, into the night.

In a test kitchen, the ingredient list is where the real work begins. Successful recipes don’t live in theory; they live in supermarkets on hidden shelves, lurking between the actual shelves (think Harry Potter, track 9-3/4). If the ingredients aren’t accessible, no one will make the recipe. Long, lingering supermarket visits teach you this faster than any culinary school ever could.

I loved the intentionality of it: walking into a grocery store, mid-morning with a large coffee, a long list, a purpose, a sharp pencil, my camera, and time. Lots, and lots of time to read labels, compare brands, and note what was abundant, seasonal, or suddenly impossible to find. After all, shortages and substitutions have always been part of kitchen life.

There was also something quietly luxurious about pushing a cart down an aisle on a weekday afternoon, knowing this wasn’t an errand squeezed in between obligations. This was the job. I wasn’t rushing. I was observing.

Back in the test kitchen, those groceries became data. Brands were cooked side by side. Notes were taken. Adjustments were made. Recipes were rewritten — sometimes from the ground up — based on what we learned from those ingredients on the shelves. Shopping wasn’t a prelude to testing; it was foundational.

That early experience still shapes how I think about recipes today. A good recipe doesn’t just work once under perfect conditions. It works with the chicken someone actually buys, the canned beans they can afford, and the spices that may have been sitting in the back of their cupboard a little too long. Grocery shopping taught me empathy — an understanding of who home cooks could be, and how they really cook.

And, if I’m honest, it stressed me, it exhausted me, and in the end, it taught me joy.

There’s something deeply satisfying about discovering that curiosity has value. That attention to detail matters. That getting lost in the supermarket and roaming aisle by aisle, asking what happens if… isn’t frivolous, it’s essential. Getting paid to shop wasn’t just fun; it was validating.

Years later, I still feel a flicker of that same pleasure every time I walk into a grocery store with a recipe in mind. I still notice. I still compare. I still buy one ingredient I’m not familiar with for exploration’s sake, and I still ask questions of the shelves. That first test kitchen job gave me more than a professional footing; it gave me permission to take what I was doing seriously, and on the best days, finally, take myself a little seriously.

I still shop with curiosity and care, thinking about the cook behind the cart — what can be swapped, what’s worth splurging on, and what makes a recipe truly work and worth making again and again. I’m always learning, always adjusting, always shifting, and still finding joy in the simple act of choosing well.

 —Chef Diana

---

If you’d like the recipe in this post, please let me know in the comments below, or contact me directly.