Posted by Wan Yan Ling, June 2, 2008 at 8:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read all her mission reports here.
Add enough sugar to anything and you’ve made candy, right? I mean, why else would you find oddments like candied baby crabs, anchovies, and cuttlefish in the Asian grocery snack aisle? Despite the initial ick-factor, they can be pretty good (except for the crabs… those are not my favorite… I have a texture issue with them). If you already eat beef jerky and bacon bits, and are not averse to seafood, then these are just, well, jerky and bits from the sea.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, May 19, 2008 at 11:00 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
Clockwise from bottom-left: dried oysters, shrimp, seaweed, scallops, and anchovies.
Chinese eateries are often accused of being heavy-handed with monosodium glutamate (MSG)—that cheap, nasty chemical that makes food taste good but leaves hapless diners grappling with the dreaded "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome": headaches, flushing, sweating, breathlessness, heart palpitations, etc. But, since—as Jeffrey Steingarten pointed out in a 1999 essay for Vogue—not everyone in China has a headache, what do Chinese home cooks use to make their food delicious?
Naturally Umami-Filled Foods
Long before "umami"—recognized as the fifth taste after sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—became a culinary buzzword, Chinese cooks identified the presence of umami's savory "mouthfeel" in lovingly tended, double-boiled soups and slow-simmered broths. The resulting full, rounded flavor of the stocks was attributed to their base of poultry, pork, or fish bones and assorted meat scraps—a flavor that that we now know to be chock full of naturally occurring glutamates. Today, it remains the home economist’s pride to be able to coax the magnificent “meat sweetness” or umami-ness of these stocks from nothing more than humble kitchen throwaways.
But when money is no object, the ingredients most prized for their ability to deliver the desired umami punch are the briny treasures from the sea. These commonly include dried oysters, shrimp, seaweed, scallops, and anchovies.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, May 5, 2008 at 10:15 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
Last week, the Russian housemate came back from the grocery with a pack of what looked like fossils. On close scrutiny, they turned out to be dried lotus roots—something I should have been excited about, as I’ve been craving lotus roots and had not realized they were available. But, remembering the foul mushiness that is canned water chestnuts, I dismissed the dried tubers with a haughty, "No thanks, they’ll probably taste bleargh!"
Back in Asia, I’ve always bought lotus roots freshly harvested. Coated in a layer of mud that keeps them moist, they look rather like severed human limbs that have been dredged out from the bottom of a lake. Bring them home, scrape off the mud, and give them a good scrub, and they look less eerily like body parts and more appetizingly like giant sausage links.
An underwater rhizome, the lotus plant is popular throughout Asia and is especially venerated in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. The lotus flower represents purity and enlightenment—having grown from mud and emerged unstained from the metaphorical quagmire of human desires. It’s also a highly economical plant, as every part of it—from the stamens to the petals and leaves—presents itself deliciously on the dining table. The stamens, for instance, are infused in water and served as a sweet-smelling tea in India and Vietnam, while Thais enjoy the petals dipped in a spicy, smoky fish sauce called Nam Prik.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, April 28, 2008 at 10:15 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
The Argentinean housemate is the one who introduced me to the magic that is creamy sweet dulce de leche. She doesn’t judge me (nay, encourages!) when I whorl the stuff liberally on animal crackers with a sprinkle of sea salt—my go-to snack and instant gratification take on the decadent alfajores her grandmother indulgingly mails from Spain. And she risks life and limb by making the caramelized milk goodness in a pressure cooker with me—despite being convinced the cans will explode and we’ll be maimed for life (plus have to clean burnt milk off half the free world).
She is a swell person, my housemate. And this weekend, she outdid herself by bringing home a large, flattish, cylinder of dulce de membrillo. (Truly, she has brought dulce into my life.)
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Quince paste. Hang on, I’ll fix you some!” she responds. And in two blinks, she's sliced up some sharp cheddar, slivered the orange-red moon of membrillo after flipping it out of its tin, and assembled them atop crackers.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, April 21, 2008 at 1:00 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I know what you’re thinking. “Acorns? Why on earth is she talking about acorns? The weather’s just getting nice and balmy, and she’s featuring autumnal nuts? Bah humbug… it’s spring!”
And so it is. But I promise you, this is a very springy kind of dish. It’s refreshing on a warm, sunny day, light on the palate, easy on the eye (and wallet), and will leave you feeling decidedly sprightly.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, April 14, 2008 at 10:00 AM
How to Stretch Your Tea, and Eat It, Too
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I don’t know about you, but filing my taxes has left me feeling kind of like the last prune in the bottom of the box—all dried out with icky crystallized sugar on top. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), rice recipes have been showing up everywhere—probably because everyone’s feeling a bit pinched on the money side of things, and rice is one of the most filling and affordable foods to be had for the money.
I doubt you guys need another recipe on how to cook rice, but how about drinking it? There are rice milks, alcohol, and those incredible sweet rice-based drinks Amazake, Sikhye, and Morro Horchata. But they’re all too involved for me in my ripped-off state. I don’t want to spend too much time at the stove, because that will lead to me angsting about holes in my pockets, stirring spoon in hand. Instead, all I want to do is be able to just add water.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, March 31, 2008 at 10:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I get asked this all the time, so I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of sharing it here before. But the tipping point came on Wednesday night, when the beau and I picked out three magnificent pomelos at Wegmans. In the 25-minutes we were there, we got asked, not once, not twice, but four different times "what is that?" First, by the old guy who had been gravely tossing oranges in the air next to us, making sure each of his picks were "full of juice and heavy for their size." Then, by the lady who watched us place the bowling ball-sized fruit in our cart and blurted out, "Are those giant grapefruits?" Followed by the teenaged cashier who eyed our loot and evidently decided they were mutant oranges, asking, "How do you guys squeeze those? That’s a lot of juice!" And finally, by a grandmotherly-type who spotted the bulge in our bags and beckoned us over, "I’ve never seen anyone buy those…are they any good? How do you pick them?"
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, March 17, 2008 at 9:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I was going to headline this “Asia’s Red Bull,” but my colleague—who was listening as I mused aloud—chirped, “Red Bull is Asian, silly... I have the T-shirt with the funky lettering!”
I wasn’t about to argue with someone who has a “been there, done that” T-shirt, and granted, that sugary carbonated drink with two charging bulls on the can was a Thai concoction. But the version most of us are familiar with was made-over for “European tastes”—the original being way sweeter (if that’s even possible) and nonfizzy—by an Austrian entrepreneur employed at a toothpaste factory. I guess that’s why he cut down on the sugar.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, March 10, 2008 at 11:15 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I’ve been craving these jellies for ages and went hunting for them this weekend, certain that with globe-trotting food trends, I’d find them sitting pretty next to the Taiwanese bubble tea hut, or the Korean fro-yo stand. But several jelly-less hours later, I was forced to concede that not only are these jellies nowhere near as popular as they are in Asia, they aren’t available at all! What gives?
Konnyaku jellies are a wobbly, vegan treat made from the starchy root of the konjac plant, a yamlike tuber that’s also called devil's tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam. When flavored with hijiki seaweed and sans sugar, konnyaku plays a laudable role in Japanese hotpots or oden.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, March 3, 2008 at 10:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
My housemates get visibly nervous when I offer them food—particularly if I’m bounding towards them, mystery item in hand, with a huge grin on my face. After the (well-intentioned) durian fudge cake of '06 and the Szechuan pepper-in-the-peppermill experiment of ’07, they’ve developed a cautiousness (rather unhealthy, to my mind, and completely un-fun) to the food I bring home.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, February 25, 2008 at 9:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
Long before I was introduced to the snap, crackle, and pop of Rice Krispie treats, I was sinking my teeth into these Chinese soft flour cakes, or sachima. Made with flour, eggs, maltose, and lard (yes, lard—which, gram for gram, has “less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol” than butter, so I’ve never understood why people get so antsy about it), these are chewy, sticky-sweet, and have that fun, universally adored “mozzarella stretch effect," trailing gossamer strands of golden malt syrup between bites.
No, you do not want to eat these with braces or a newly installed crown.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, December 18, 2007 at 12:30 PM
Or, 'Still on a Sour Plum Streak'
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
You know how most of us have culinary habits that we cleave to? Like my mom would disown me if I ever battered and fried really, really fresh fish—because it would be a "waste." The Chinese, you see, believe fish is best served steamed, a gentle cooking technique that is most unforgiving of mediocrity, with only the most impeccable specimens doing well. There's no hiding in steaming. It's like donning a spandex catsuit; flaws you never imagined break into a song and dance routine.
So I tend to be cautious about appropriating foods from another culture. I mean, you go to a grocery store, you spy something appealing, you bring it home and dig in—it's delicious! A few days later, you're gushing about it to someone, and he clutches you, nearly falling over in pain and indignation. Turns out what you've been doing with the item, how you've been eating it, is the equivalent of eating vanilla pudding on hamburger. Or something horrifying and unorthodox like that.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, December 11, 2007 at 11:00 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I remember my friends all thought me very odd when I brought jam and cheese sandwiches to school—despite the fact that numerous Asian pastries and desserts play on the sparky contrast between salt and sweet. Now with the rise in popularity of salt-spiked desserts (caramels, chocolate ganache, oatmeal cookies, anything with dulce de leche), it feels like I've been retroactively vindicated (though I was probably still kooky in a lot of other ways).
But this appreciation for flavor contrasts got me thinking about other unlikely culinary marriages—like watermelon and salt. I've been told "it's a Southern thing" to sprinkle just a pinch on the juicy, red fruit. The slight briny contrast makes the watermelon taste all the sweeter, and to my mind, might be just the perfect way to rehydrate and replenish lost electrolytes on a hot and muggy day—a coloring-free, all-natural, and much more cost-effective form of sports drink, maybe?
Beyond, the "Southern thing," watermelon with feta cheese and mint is a staple in the Mediterranean, and some of my Indian colleagues profess a love for pairing it with pickled onions. In Spain, there's melon and jamón—a close cousin to the melon and proscuitto of Italy. Not forgetting the salt, freshly squeezed lime, and chili powder treatment it gets in Mexico.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, November 20, 2007 at 12:55 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
There have been "countdown to Thanksgiving" notices everywhere for the past month, so it's safe to say anyone planning on hosting a gathering would have handled all the logistics by now—ordering the turkey, coordinating the sides, outsourcing the labor, etc. But what about the procrastinators among us? The ones who have left everything just this side of too late and are quickly realizing that a clean kitchen and peace of mind are what we would truly be thankful for?
It may be too late to order the organic, pasture-raised heirloom turkey, but it's not too late to dig out (beg, borrow, or steal) the biggest pot in your kitchen and get some curry going.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, November 12, 2007 at 2:30 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
My family travels several months out of the year, and it is unusual for all of us to be in the same place at the same time. While we travel light, the one item we always have space for is a bottle of my mom’s hae bee hiam or chili shrimp paste. It doesn’t look like much, and it doesn’t even sound like much, but when you arrive in a foreign country and the weather’s cold, the stores are closed, and you’re just not up to greasy take-out…this stuff is ambrosia over plain white rice.
Essentially a meal of just a condiment on carbs, I’ve had concerned housemates insist on my “eating properly." But I’ve turned down expensed sashimi dinners just because I knew I had a bottle of this in the fridge and was craving a taste of home. Made from a pounded and dry-fried concoction of dried baby shrimp, chili, candlenuts, shallots, belacan (fermented shrimp paste), and a touch of sugar, it’s considered the ultimate condiment—priceless because it’s tedious to prepare, chockful of shrimp, and completely reliant on the cook’s experience and “aggak” (estimation) skills to achieve the perfect balance of sweetness, savory-ness, briney pungence, and blistering heat.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, November 5, 2007 at 10:30 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I was asked to write about an "ethnic Thanksgiving" and I've been thinking about it all week. But there already are plenty of wonderful ethnic-American floggers waxing gustatory over what's on their (way more cohesive) menu. So I thought I'd share with you a little bit of my world: that of the international student.
Since we hail from all manner of ethnicities, we call our gathering the "United Nations Thanksgiving," and it's a night where we all bring a plate (a common newbie gaffe: to figure the host must be running low on crockery and helpfully show up with a stack of empty dishes).
We try to stick to the concept of "traditional Thanksgiving foods," so there will be turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, corn, and pumpkin pie. Except, because most of us call home and ask mom how to cook it, we end up with particularly unique renditions of these Thanksgiving stalwarts.
With so many vegetarians in the group, it's an unspoken agreement that the stuffing be meat-free. So we will have Indian biryani, Malaysian nasi ulam, Middle Eastern megadarra, Bhutanese red rice salad, and, as promised by the cute new grad student from Italy, his grandma's "kick-ass" panzanella.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, October 29, 2007 at 1:15 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
For years, my mom would not allow my brother and me to eat what she called "Western candy." No SweeTarts, Life Savers, Milk Duds, Tootsie Rolls—nothing that had a colorful wrapper and could be bought at a regular supermarket. She had somehow been persuaded by some heartless dentist that eating the same kind of candy everyone else in school was eating (you hear that, Mom?) would give us a mouthful of rotten teeth. Instead, whenever we whined about it heartily enough, she would hand us a stick of candied winter melon (after it had been boiled to death and leeched of all its sugary goodness in barley water) or a handful of honeyed jujube dates and dried longans.
However, if either of us scored full marks on a test, she would bring out the tub of maltose—the same syrup she would use to marinate her char siu (roast pork)—and let us poke a single chopstick in and attempt to twirl as big a glob of the sticky, golden stuff as could be supported on it. The resulting "lollipop" would keep us happy and sticky-fingered for a good 20 minutes—it being a lot more "lick-resilient" than honey.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, October 22, 2007 at 12:00 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
It's no secret that I love my housemates (both sets in Providence, Rhode Island, and Ithaca, New York—and yes, I know how lucky I am). I usually talk about my Russian housemate here in Providence because he's the one who spends the most time with me in the kitchen, procrastinating on "real work."
But this week, having carted a paper bag of pawpaws back to Provy from the Cornell Orchards store in Ithaca, I have to say I may love my Agentinian housemate most. I crept into the house all apprehensive, holding my precious pawpaws behind me, wondering if I should bide my time before springing them on her. For those familiar with pawpaws though, you'll know there's no hiding one.
"Is it alright? Do you mind?" I ask. "Because I can stash them beneath my bed and keep my room's door closed. I know they smell quite strongly."
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, October 15, 2007 at 5:00 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
So I've been peeking into other grad students' offices and using this column as a way to not look like the resident moocher. (You know, the guy who wanders around the office cadging a fistful of chips here, a cookie there, and when you ask him why he doesn't keep food in his own cubby, his response is always to pat his tummy and say: "Oh, I couldn't... I'd polish it off in seconds!" before reaching around you for an extra caramel.)
Anyway, a new discovery I've made: The leverage you get when you've got a professional-looking SLR on your arm is considerable. It's like, "Oh, look at your spiffy camera! I see you are on a quest to further the bounds of human knowledge. Here, try this x-y-z I traded a monk my GPS in Timbuktu for, carted back via camel, and smuggled through customs!"
Anyway. The one thing grad students, especially international grad students, can always be counted on is to have food in their office. And it doesn't matter how busy they look, they're always happy to talk about food from home.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, October 8, 2007 at 2:30 PM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
Has anyone else been in a situation where you bump into someone from somewhere completely fabulous—say Cambodia, or Fiji, or Mozambique—and, horror of horrors, you find, after asking them a million and one nosy questions about the food back home (questions you've always wanted to ask but could never find the right books or expertise to), that this fabulous person, with such a potentially fabulous culinary background, isn't much of a food person at all?
How tragic is that? There is nothing more heartbreaking than hearing someone say, "Food schmood—it's all fuel." (I justify such blatant bigotry on my part by equating it to a dog lover saying, "He's an amazing guy, but we're not going to work out. He's just not a dog person." And yes, props to all you food bloggers out there—the world is a livelier place for the wonderful work you do!)
So it drives me nuts that the Russian housemate isn't much of a food person. Now, don't get me wrong, unlike the aforementioned tragedy of complete indifference, the guy appreciates a tasty bowl of marinated mushrooms like the rest of them. It's just he's never thought about it. Never asked his grandma why, why do the 'shrooms need to sit for hours in sunflower oil? Why the sidekick of raw, sliced onions? What are the little brown and beige seeds bobbing alongside?
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, October 1, 2007 at 11:15 AM
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
It's mid-afternoon, and I've managed to drag the Russian roommate out of bed (with promises of French toast and a TiVoed Heroes premiere) to accompany me to the tiny Russian grocery store to "translate."
"Okay, show me the funky stuff!" I command, only to have him retort "I grew up with this stuff, remember? It's all normal to me."
Teething problems. But I zoom in on the foodstuffs I had puzzled over on previous trips that had so tantalized yet evaded me in my inability to read the language.
"What's this?" I ask, holding up a promising-looking packet with a tableau of an ancient, magical forest.
"Erm… ketchup," he says, amused.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, September 17, 2007 at 5:00 PM
Editor's note: You might remember Wan Yan Ling from her summertime series Snapshots from Asia. Ling's back in the U.S. and will be bringing us new snapshots, this time from various ethnic grocery stores and under the rubric "Grocery Ninja," which we quite liked here at Serious Eats HQ. Here's the first of what will be a weekly column. Enjoy! —Adam
The day I moved into my new home in Providence, Rhode Island, my heart nearly stopped. I was poking around in the kitchen cabinets, looking for something to munch on while the general clean-up operation was taking place. I had high hopes for crackers or some such, but what I found were mouse droppings. Lots and lots of mouse droppings. Not being at all used to mice—I have lived in tiny apartments high up in the air my entire life—I was even more freaked to find, seconds later, what I thought were the droppings of a giant, mutant rodent. They looked like shriveled up beetles, with smooth backs and grooved underbellies. And, because I wasn't about to pick them up or sniff them, it took a panicked phone call to the housemate (vacationing in Europe) to find out they were actually coffee beans, dropped and lost over the years.
I probably shouldn't have made that confession in public (how could I not recognize coffee beans?), but I reckon if my housemate had found these beans scattered in the pantry, her imagination would have taken flight too:
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