Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Shopping with the experts


This Tuesday Sayaka, Akemi and I took a shopping trip down to Seoul Oriental Foods in Oak Grove by Gate 6 of Fort Campbell. We spent over an hour poring through freezer cases of seafood, shelves of sauces and seasonings and cardboard boxes of produce before emerging, each with a basket full of goodies, and fancy ideas for dinner. It's not a huge store by any means. Maybe 1/10 of the size of Kroger. So you might be wonderng, as my husband was, "What took you so long?"

Ahh... but that's the way grocery shopping should be. It's sort of the "meandering through the fresh market approach" that makes many other countries so much more romantic than the U.S. See what kind of new treasure is on sale... test the Japanese radish and dig to the bottom of a gritty box to find a firm one. Pause to have a conversation about its uses... boiled in soup? Simmered with broth? Shredded for a light salad? And, as seen in the photo above, we needed time to whip out those electronic translators because we were definitely beyond ESL class territory!:-) Food words are complicated, but so much fun. I enjoyed this trip to the korean market immensely. And I brought home a few things to show for it.

Square rice paper wraps, a bag of fresh persimmons, miso in a recloseable tub, one diakon raddish, two kinds of fish cake, rice noodles, dried lemongrass (can't ever find fresh) and some non-gmo tofu.

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