Something fishy
Let's start with a pic of some live turtles in a box:
I made it until today, Thursday, before needing to go to the store again, which was pretty cool. I spent exactly the $28 that was left, which I was hoping not to do, because I hate feeling limited for the rest of the week, but the rest of the week is only a few days this time.
I restocked at a Chinese grocery store a 15 min walk to the south of my home. Really cool. I know very little about Chinese food or anything, but recently I have been memorizing some Chinese food-related characters (in Chinese, that is) just to not feel so locked out. That did make this grocery trip a little less intimidating than it otherwise would have been. I recognized some characters, but the bigger help was just having been introduced to a few things I was going to see (like lotus root) ahead of time.
Rice Their rice section was pretty small, surprisingly. I wanted sticky-ish rice so that I can practice eating it with chopsticks. ChatGPT had told me that what I wanted was a short-grain rice. Most of the short grain rice there was called "sweet rice", and I haven't looked up what that is. I got "sushi rice". It was $10 for 5lbs... not all that cheap. I wound cooking it pretty well the first time. It's pretty adequate. It's rice. I'm curious about the sweet rice that I didn't buy, though. When I cooked the rice, it sucked up almost all the water really quickly. I thought it presaged disaster but it did not. Aparently that's what short-grain rice does. I'm sure it will take me a few tries to get the hang of the rhythm of boil, simmer, rest, but for a first try it wasn't bad.
Fish sauce I wanted fermented fish sauce. I had heard about this sauce before, and honestly, I was imagining all day long what I thought it would taste like. What was so strange to me is that the only place I could find fish sauce in this Chinese supermarket was in the (admittedly huge) "other Asian" section. The bottle I got is Thai. Why no Chinese fish sauce? They were pushing oyster sauce like it was going out of style, but no Chinese fish sauce. They had one whole aisle of just soy sauce, though, of course. I got something basic (cheap) but look forward to trying something more exotic eventually. The fish sauce was mustier than I had been fantasizing about, but it was delicious on everything I put it on. I even put it in the rice water as it cooked (ChatGPT's idea). It was good.
Turtles There were those turtles in bins... I didn't take a picture of the bin full of live frogs. I wasn't exactly surprised but I was pleasantly amused, for sure.
What I actually made I had a bunch of veggies from the free food bag, and I really wanted to be cooking through them so they don't go bad and get wasted. I wound up making a plate combining
- rice (short grain, cooked with a clove of garlic and a dab of fish sauce)
- carrots and green peppers cooked to death in butter and sprinkled with chili powder
- canned sardines, seared briefly in their own olive oil before putting them on top of everything.
It's all drenched in soy and fish sauce, of course.
I really am trying to get in the mindset of being able to cook anything I have. A grudge I have against a lot of "learn to cook" cookbooks is that they are still full of recipes. And recipes, to me, make me feel like one small deviation will ruin everything. I am interested in honing the more universal principles of cooking before getting hung up on exact winning combinations.
Today's dish was weird also because I had no oil. I cooked the veggies in butter. No complaints, I love butter, but I don't think that's very Chinese. But that's fine. I'm not trying to be Chinese. It was a perfectly pleasant combination. I really don't like carrots, but I denatured them so well by cooking and concealing them that I only remember tasting carrots once or twice. That to me is a win. Barely-cooked carrots are almost inedible to me.
It was DELICIOUS but I will say that rice fills one up way less than lentils do. I LOVED eating it --- oh boy, eating an animal again (the sardines) was so wonderful --- but I was still kinda hungry afterwards and kind of still am. Lentils always made me perfectly satisfied. So that's a good things to learn. Part of the point though is that I'm trying to make some space to get some better animal proteins. I did get chicken livers on this trip so I will see what I can do to those to make them palatable. Those should feel like something nutritious. The sardines did too but they were over so quickly!
It was a great cooking day. I was anticipating it all day and it turned out very close to what I was imagining. And I learned a lot --- one of the whole points of doing this!