For some people, the highlight of their summer is a trip to Sea World or Six Flags. For me, it’s a trip to the MT Supermarket.
The MT Supermarket is the largest Asian grocery in Austin, and it’s in the running for the largest grocery of any sort in the area. If it weren’t located far up Lamar at the end of the world, I would shop no where else. As it is, trips to the MT are special affairs, necessitating a manic shopping spree.
The MT combines my love of exotic food with my love of looking at fish. Here’s some of the koi in a pair of ornamental ponds near the entrance.
Whenever I’m at the MT, I’m always tempted to buy some of the funeral money, which the Chinese burn as a form of ancestor worship.
But it seems like it would be particularly rude to do so, and although I am not in any way a superstitious person, it would really suck if I bought some hell money and then someone close to me died.
Although once I die, I could only hope that I have ten thousand ghost dollars to spend as I wish.
But there was plenty of other things to buy at MT. This is a $75 pile of hard-to-find food.
Most of the items were a couple of bucks or less. What bulked up the cost of the purchase was my case of Mr.Brown canned cappuccino drink and some papaya bubble-tea mix. Expect to see Food Frakker entries about this trip for weeks to come.
Even before getting the food home, we had to break into the snacks.
The squid crackers actually tasted more like MSG than squid. The snow pea snacks tasted like Cheetos, if Cheetos had the dominant flavor of processed pea instead of processed cheese.
The ostensible reason for the trip to MT was so that my Food Frakker deputy Julia and I could cook a nice meal together. So right away we started on the Golden Threadfin Bream.
We chose this because it came pre-cleaned and marinated in spices. I was a little wary of reckless fish purchases. Although I figured I could google for recipes, I didn’t want to be stuck with some fish at home and then not have the ingredients to cook it immediately.
As I searched the web for advice on how to prepare some of my other fish purchases, I found The Clove Garden, a resource for "adventure cuisine." That’s my kind of website! I will no doubt be returning there frequently.
Here’s a closeup of the naked bream flesh. With snow crab mushrooms to spice it up.
Here’s the lovely Julia with our lovely prepared meal of golden threadfin bream, rice, and Julia’s roasted baby bok choy.
The threadfin bream did not taste as good as the gourami, but I had prepared myself for that. The flesh was surprisingly firm and had a distinctively fresh-water flavor. Julia compared it to tilapia, but I thought it had a more catfishy pungency to it. It also had an amazing amount of bones. My first bite came off the gut end of the fish, and there were so many bones that they crackled like broken glass in my mouth. I nearly vomited. But with plenty of patience I orally sorted the bones away from the flesh. After some practice and an improved understanding of bream anatomy, I was able to nearly eliminate the bone content of every forkful. All in all it wasn’t a bad fish. As Julia said, "If I caught these fish myself I wouldn’t be disappointed at all."