Shopping in Chinatown: Groceries and Observations

This week I went to a grocery store in Chinatown with one of my friends from China.  I like going grocery shopping in ethnic stores with people who really know that cuisine, because it’s educational.  My thirst for knowledge, however, was negatively impacted by a) the broken handgun lying in the grass next to where I parked my car; and b) a crazy man who apparently has never done graduate work, who overheard me saying something to my friend about my thesis.  He then started shouting at me about “Yeah, you and your PhD, think you’re so smart”.  Edmonton’s Chinatown is not the safest or nicest place to be.  My resolution now is that I don’t care how cheap it is at Lucky 97, I am not shopping there again.  I will drive across town to the West Edmonton mall and pay extra at T&T and fight the crowds instead.

However, I did go back to Chinatown last night to try a vegetarian restaurant run by Buddhists from Indonesia.  It was my first experience with seitan,  and I was surprised at how good it was.  I still am not a fan of tofu.  But we celebrated world vegetarian day properly, led by the example of my vegetarian friend who introduced us to the restaurant.

So, back to the Chinese groceries.  Forest started giving me a mini-lecture on soy sauce which was repeatedly interrupted by a guy with dreadlocks who insisted that he knew the best soy sauce I should buy.  I took the one dreadlocks recommended because I was afraid to do anything else since he came back to check on what was in my basket.  It’s the “Lee Kum Kee” brand, which Forest says is the a very reputable food company in China, based in Hong Kong.  He has a friend who works for them.  We moved to rice vinegars and he directed me toward a rice vinegar he likes for cooking.  It’s more pungent and more mellow than the kind I normally would buy, and I’ll tell you the name of it: Gold Plum brand Chinkiang Vinegar.  I also picked up a jar of these pickled chopped hot red peppers  that my friend Lei introduced me to.  She told me that in Hunan province, they like hot foods much as they do in Sichuan, but they use different methods of achieving heat in the food.  I wish I could tell you (and record for myself) the name and brand of these peppers, but they are directly imported from Hunan province and are covered with indecipherable Mandarin characters.  The jar has a green lid, and the peppers are red.  That’s all I know.

It’s remarkable in these very ethnic enclaves to see how little ready-made food is bought.  You see people buying great piles of vegetables and meat and fish, and not a packaged pre-made thing in sight (unless it’s some fish balls or dumplings, which are very time consuming to make) and you know all of it will be chopped small and quickly cooked.  I was debating as I stood in line to pay, looking at the groceries of the people around me, if Chinese cooking and Western cooking take the same amount of time.  They put the time into prep work, then have a quick cooking period, while we do little prep, and cook longer?  I’ll have to think about that.  And I need to think about the Chinese taste for bitterness.  We have so little that is bitter in our foods, out of the European tradition, but authentic (not Westernized) Chinese cuisine seems to embrace bitterness.

Forest has also  told me that in China people take tofu very seriously, and that they have tofu shops that sell many different kinds.  You always want the freshest tofu you can get, with the dish to be prepared dictating the texture you buy.  The soft, delicate tofu is not for cooking, but the firmer tofu is, because it can stand up to being moved and mixed with other ingredients.  The way he described tofu, with its delicacy of taste and consideration of textures, reminded me of France and its fromageries.

When I got home I got out some dumplings, cooked them, and ate them with a dressing of soy sauce, vinegar, and hot peppers.  Really good.

Back and re-dedicated

OK, I have been totally lazy and worrying about other things– like working, and grad school– and when I have found time for food I’ve been eating it or planning to eat it.  The summer was also disrupted by a wheat-free diet I did for three months.  Not pleasant, but it nipped a mild allergy in the bud, so it was worth it.  However (and I attach the photo here) I did start reading about organic vegetable production for the back garden and I grew the carrots and beans you see here myself.  So there’s proof I was doing something when I should have been doing work on my thesis.

 So, new resolution.  I will use this blog to deposit all my obsessive meditations about food to help clear my mind and alleviate everyone’s boredom around me because they are probably fed up with hearing me go on about food all the time but are too polite to say so.  Amen.

 This past weekend I had a group of people come over for a potluck dinner, now that we’re all back in school.  Everyone had to bring a dish related to a book they had read over the summer and be prepared to talk about it.  It was really fun.  I made treacle tart, since it’s Harry Potter’s favorite dessert and I wanted to try it.  I now know that I don’t like treacle tart.  But since I was experimenting anyway, I tried using Dorie Greenspan’s “Good for Almost Anything” pie pastry recipe and it really is good.  It’s a shortcrust, not a flaky pastry, but it’s nice and tender and a little bit cakey.

 Sunday I tried making James McNair’s Chicken Tamale Casserole.  It looks a mess but it is easy to make and I love the flavour.  I also tried Pierre Herme’s brownie recipe.  I didn’t like it.  I want brownies to be either fudgy or cakey, not something in the middle.  And I think that cake brownies should have walnuts and fudgy brownies should have no nuts.  But I’ll keep experimenting.  My guinea pigs said they liked them and that they were really good but I think they are too easily pleased.  I may have to replace my guinea pigs with more discriminating ones.