Hmmm. When you look at it like this, that chorizo really does look like salivary glands.
Okay, now on to new business. I thinking about transitioning to buying groceries mainly from specialty ethnic markets. Here’s a haul I got from New Oriental Market:
From left to right, there’s the sardines (which you’ve already seen), quail eggs, vegetable buns (which were quite delicious with some microwaving and some sauce), enoki mushrooms, dumplings (which turned out to be filled with red beans — yuck! it’s either savory or a desert, make up your mind, Asia!), and a mackerel.
I also got this giant jar of kimchi.
I figure I’m an adult. I deserve my own kimchi supply.
I fried up the enoki mushrooms and put them in with some of this green tea chlorella ramen.
Honestly, no matter what you put in the ramen, it pretty much just tastes like ramen.
Likewise, the quail eggs, rather than being the alien exploration into exotic poultry ovulation I hoped for, were, well, basically they were tiny eggs.
I’ve also been eating more often at the little lunch counter at the back of New Oriental Market. Here’s a couple of dishes that I got for just five bucks!
A soup with dumplings, rice cakes (rice wafers? rice noodles? rice gelatinous ovals? — you know what I mean), and beef.
It was so big that I couldn’t finish it all. And I’m the guy who can finish everything!
This morning I got the bilgimbabbogimgobobbob thing. You know, that one dish with the fried egg and the beef and the cucumber and carrot threads.
My frakker deputy Julia sent me this from the Pacific Northwest. Elk jerky!
Tasted like the freedom and majesty of the American wilderness, but flayed and smoked.
Here’s a barbacoa gordita from a cart down by Caesar Chavez and Pleasant Valley.
Delicious and crisp.
I’ve been sampling the snack fare available from this east Manor Rd. convenience store.
Starting on the left, those green tubes, the churritos de maiz, tasted pretty good. Kinda like those snack sticks you find in food co-ops, but much saltier. The multi-colored sticks in front of it, are thick plastic tubes filled with a stiff gelatin. It was not easy getting the candy out of the plastic containing it. It was less like a snack and more like one of those food-based tests they use to gauge primate intelligence. The havas, are roasted and spiced lima beans, which makes them taste marginally better than lima beans usually do.
In the glass is a Mexican Coke, which tasted exactly like Cokes usually do, only more expensive. I was just thinking the other day that "Mexican Coke" is the only time that "Mexican" is used as a prefix in a non-pejorative manner.
This convenience store has literally ten different varieties of fried pig skin. Here’s a sampling:
I haven’t yet been able to figure out the code, but these products represent a continuum of texture that stretches from light and crispy and ends at tooth-shatteringly hard (although if you suck on the really hard skins for a bit and gnaw at them like a labrador with a rawhide bone it is possible to eventually devour them). I think the code corresponds to the continuum like this: Skins -> crispy -> curls -> strips.
