Sometimes things are right under your nose and you don’t
know it. For the dan dan noodle recipe that I wrote about in the Wall Street
Journal last week, I needed a specific seasoning ingredient – Chinese preserved
mustard greens, called ya cai (“yaah tsai”). I went to my Chinese market and
perused the dried vegetable and canned vegetable section. Nothing. I’d read
about the ingredient in cookbooks but none of them told me how to find the
stuff – where it may be located or how it’s packaged.
Then, while I was in the refrigerated section looking at
tofu (what else) and noodles (for the recipe), I turned around and saw a bunch
of boxes filled with index-card size packages of something. Remembering that my
friend Victor Fong told me how his family often ate some super salty Chinese
pickle with their rice, and that the salty pickle was sold in small packs, I
took a look. Lo and behold, there were boxes of ya cai – the good kind made in
Yibin in Sichuan province. I’d read in Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop that
the ya cai from that city was famous and prized.
There are a number of recipes that didn’t make it into the Asian Tofu cookbook. Why? We just did not have enough space. This remarkably easy and versatile Indonesian treat is among the recipes that I set aside to post online. If you have the book already, add this to your Asia tofu recipe collection. If you don’t, this is a recipe that highlights how tofu can be transformed as well as transformative.
Tahu telur (tahu means tofu and telur means eggs) is like egg foo yung with pieces of fried tofu. In its elemental state, a block tofu is subtle in flavor, a canvas for receiving other ingredients. However, if you fry tofu, it gets a little crunchy and nutty tasting, almost like crisp chicken skin.
For these pancakes, small flattish pieces of tofu (I use Trader Joe's firm) get fried and then mixed with egg. The tofu absorbs some of the egg while lending its fattiness to reinforce that of the egg, as if it's an egg extender.
Then the mixture is dropped into hot oil. The amoeba-like pancakes develop crisp surfaces and edges. The delicately rich and eggy result gets crowned with crunchy vegetables and savory-sweet-spicy sauce, typically peanut sauce or chile-spiked sweet soy sauce; both sauces are in the photo above. The combination of texture and flavors is amazing.
November began with Eater.com’s first ever Chinese Food Week, which included stories, insider’s favorite restaurants, and other foodie perspectives. Five American cities were featured. This content is good to keep in your back pocket:
In contrast to that Chinese food lovefest was Bonnie Tsui’s article in the Atlantic, "The End of Chinatown." Yes, economics and migration shifts are some of the reasons behind the decline of traditional Chinatowns in America. Chinatowns are moving outside of the urban core to the suburbs. My strategy: Follow the Asian markets!
Chinese Food Week and Tsui’s piece made me think of Andrew Coe’s Chop Suey and Grace Young’s write up on the history of chop suey in Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge. Chinese-American food and history buffs should check out those books!
Online Asian Markets
If you can't explore nearby brick-and-mortar Asian markets, do it virtually. Some interesting ones I stumbled upon: (If you have experience with these or others, do share!)
An online Vietnamese market based in the heart of Little Saigon in Westminster, California. Among the goodies at Vietnamesesupermarket.com are pho kits.
For lots of standard Japanese ingredients, Asianfoodgrocer.com, based in San Francisco, may do the trick.
I have no idea where Asiansupermarket365.com operates from but they have a decent looking inventory.
iShopIndian.com is well organized. There’s even a Chinese-Indian section and newsletter.
Food Art & Humor
Wondering about the photo at the top of this post? It is the clever work of Chinese artist Liu Bolin. I discovered his pieces in a slideshow on a Wall Street Journal site. Bolin gets painted up to melt into his surroundings. Aside from the slideshow, see his vanishing acts at the Eli Klein gallery.
Food, labor, and art converge in Sharon Lockhart’s compelling “Lunch Break” exhibit, currently at San Francisco’s Modern Museum of Art. Her photos and film record the daily life of workers at a historic Maine shipbuilding yard. I was flattered and honored when the exhibit’s Lunch Break Times newspaper and blog invited me to contribute the banh mi recipe from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. Banh mi is working class fare that requires lots of work yet is often priced so low.
Michael Pollan’s appearance on The Colbert Report is funny and makes you think about not eating at your desk. Watch it here.
Yes, there are health food markets in East Los Angeles. Per Javier Cabral’s charming Spanglish-laden post on Zocalopublicsquare.org, there are folks in East LA who love la soya!
If you celebrated Thanksgiving, hope you had a good one.
Along with the Sriracha incidents that I recounted earlier this week was a neat new discovery. Last Thursday I found myself in a semi-downtrodden Indian market in Fremont, California, a Bay Area suburb with a sizeable Indian population. It was late afternoon and a storm was coming. The market occupied two shop spaces but its inventory filled only two-thirds of the area. The store’s sad state didn’t bother me much as I’ve been in plenty of strange Asian markets. I was chasing down an Indian ingredient and the cashier didn’t know what I was talking about.
It started to rain and get cold. The cashier grabbed his jacket but kept the doors wide open to make it easier for the handful of shoppers to push their carts out. I started feeling downtrodden since I was freezing and couldn’t find what I needed. Nonetheless, I walked every aisle because you never know what you may find.
Chronicle Books, the San Francisco-based publisher that collaborated with me to produce the Asian Market Shopper app, invited me to write a guest post about the iPhone app for their blog. I didn’t want to repeat myself too much since I had already written about the app on VWK in “Cool New Tool: Asian Market Shopper app” back in June.
However, I had this idea: Could we make a simple (unscripted) Flipcam video of using the Asian Market Shopper at an actual Asian market?
For many people who are new to Asian markets, venturing to one can be intimidating. There are many unknowns. You’re going into an unfamiliar territory looking for something that you’re unfamiliar with. Then, there are the potential language barriers. On top of that, you’re hoping to whip out an iPhone to bridge the communication and cultural divide!
Plus, though the app has recipes, it's not a cookbook. It's reference tool to help you shop smart and purchase the right ingredients. A video would help people understand the app's potential. Would Chronicle Books be willing?
Peter Perez, associate director of marketing, was totally game and we made a date to rendezvous on Clement Street, a major Asian hub in San Francisco's Richmond district. It was awkward for me to demo the app and Peter had already tried it out, so he persuaded his colleague David Hawk to test drive the app on camera.
The market where we ended up shooting had lovely fresh vegetables spilling out the storefront. Alas, all the hand-written signs were in Chinese. Explaining our project was challenging. At first, the market clerk was baffled -- my survival Mandarin didn't cut it -- but then I showed her the app. She instantly got what we were up to and grinned ear to ear. "Okay, okay," she said, nodding with approval to give us the go-ahead to make this video:
It was one thing for me to use the Asian Market Shopper app myself but it was really cool to see how it worked for David. Along the way, we made an new friend with the market gal! I hope you have a chance to explore and use the app to its fullest too.
If you don't yet have the Asian Market Shopper and want to check it out, Chronicle Books is doing a giveaway of three (3) FREE downloads of the app. To enter the drawing, leave a comment on the Asian Market Shopper post on their site. Note that the video is part of that post.
