"IT'S FOR A SIMPLE SCALLION SALAD!"
For Christmas this year, my mom and dad got me 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach. Lucky me. So today, I ventured to Food Bizarre.
If youâve never been to or heard of Food Bazaar, itâs a New York supermarket chain that has a great selection of ingredients not usually found in most food stores. By this I mean Korean (the owner is Korean), Mexican, Japanese, Brazilian, Indian, and so on.
Myself, I love it. I love looking at weird food - or food thatâs considered weird to me and you, white Americans afraid of most delicacies served everywhere and anywhere in the rest of the world, food that people take for granted as normal and delicious. It has been a goal of mine for years now to try any food that is presented to me, and to try and cook food thatâs not just mac and cheese, not just a piece of salmon and some potatoes. To cook outside my white American box.
But this gets me panicky. It started last night around 1 A.M. when I thought it was a good idea to leaf through the cookbook. Bad move. Soon enough Iâm worried, worried Iâll never be able to cook everything in the book; that I wonât be able to find certain ingredients; that even though all the recipes in the book are modest in scope and price, I am worried that I wonât be able to comfortably afford all of the tools and ingredients Iâll need to pull them off on a consistent basis. And I need to cook them often because I want to get better as a cook.
Though still fairly manic, I do manage to get to bed after forming a plan: a simple salad (scallion) and egg-based dish for dinner tomorrow (dashimaki tamago, basically an omelet with hondashi dissolved in it). Egg dishes are tasty and usually, compared to the flavorful reward, simple. I also plan to buy a whole chicken to marinate and then roast the day after tomorrow. Peter Meehan tells me that if Iâm not roasting chickens, I should. So I will.
I put on the second half of Craig Finnâs Faith in the Future and, thankfully, increasingly rare for me these days, I am asleep within a song or two â WAIT HOW MUCH DOES A RICE COOKER COST? â okay, Iâm asleep.
(What a beautiful record. I relate to the lyrics, to the sadness of the characters depicted: they seem like people I know. I think, lying in bed, I never used to know characters like these, so that must mean that I am getting old. I donât mind that I am getting old; I mind that I am getting nowhere.)
Walking to Food Bazaar (FB from now on because I am lazy), I run through the recipes in my head. Itâs so easy to forget ingredients; the more I think about the dish, the better the odds I wonât fuck the trip up.
FB is really big. I start to get panicky again. Thereâs so much great food! Dried fish, weird yams, gizzards, liversâŚI take a breath and get the vegetables I know wonât be a problem to find. They arenât. I get them.
Next, okay, Iâm looking for daikon, which is a winter radish. Like I said, FB is mad Korean: there are a lot of Korean people there, so I think theyâll definitely have the in-season radish I seek. I pass on old Korean lady contemplating a large bag of mixed frozen seafood. It is the first of many moments where I look at an Asian face and resist the temptation to ask them for help.
Just then, a large man asks me if I need help. I do need help, so naturally I tell him, No. I donât need any help. He nods and walks away.
But then, for some reason uncharacteristic of me (what my mom would call testosterone but I call fear of being found out as stupid) I call out to him and ask if they have daikon. He looks dubious but says that yes, they do, itâs on the other side of the vegetable section.
The vegetable section itself is larger than most markets. I go over to the other side but canât find it. Then, after about five minutes looking at stuff that I donât need to buy, I hear someone call out, âSIR!â from across the room. I ignore it, but I know, deep down, heâs talking to me.
He calls out âSIR!â again but I keep on plodding along pretending I donât know that heâs talking to me. But then I look up from some dried herring and I see him and he sees me and he calls out, âSIR!â and I wave and go to him. I think heâs either going to give me daikon or tell me that they donât have any. That doesnât happen. What happens is that he says nothing. After 15 seconds, though, a Latino man comes over, dressed in supermarket whites. They chat in Spanish and then the Latin dude shakes his head sadly.
âNo daikon,â he says. âNo daikon.â
I thank them both and go on my way. After picking up some ingredients I am familiar with, I get to the Korean and Japanese aisle. I need a bunch of pantry stuff: oyster sauce, soy sauce, rice vinegar, etc. Should be easy enough I thought. But no. Itâs hard. Itâs hard because all of the labels are in Korean or Japanese and, as you might guess, I canât read Korean or Japanese. I start to sweat again. I get panicky. Iâm the kind of guy that doesnât like to look like he doesnât know what heâs doing. That heâs lost, unseasoned. Which is crazy, because I am just that, clueless, and itâs becoming clear that I might not be able to get the ingredients I need as easily as I thought that I would.
But I wander the aisle back and forth looking at the different condiments, the pastes, the noodles, the things I have never heard of. I feel stupid. I feel like people must notice how long I have spent in these two aisles. âHasnât that fucking idiot found what he needs yet?â they are all asking themselves. I pass the Korean shampoo for the tenth time and sigh.
What sucks is that I always forget, in moments like these in public places, that people donât give a shit about me, that people donât care about anything other than themselves and what they are doing. No one has noticed or cared that I canât find the gochugaru, an essential item in Korean cooking.
I give up. I get the rest of the stuff that I need, but the gochugaru is a failure. It must be right there in front of my nose but the more time I spend wandering up and down the aisle, the dumber I feel, the more Korean eyes I imagine looking at me, all of them wondering why the fuck this white kid is trying to buy gochugaru in the first place.
âITâS FOR A SIMPLE SCALLION SALAD!â
One day I hope to cast this feeling out from within me into the wild where it will die and never enter my body again. I am confident that after more shopping and cooking it will one day leave me and I will feel okay just waltzing into the Koren aisle and identifying the gochugaru immediately.
Leaving the store, though, I am calm. Happy. I have what I need, Korean red chili pepper flakes be damned, and now I can cook. I am far more comfortable cooking because at home, in my kitchen, I am alone and no one can see me struggle to figure out which is the dark soy sauce and which is the light. At the time of this writing, I am still not sure which soy sauce I bought. But I do know that I will make it work and it will be a good meal because I made it.
