“I have found paradise, and it is a grocery store”

Last Thursday I wandered around Uptown, a neighborhood near mine with a sketchy reputation (which seemed quite undeserved, but my good friend Mister McFoolery tells me it changes at night). It turns out Uptown is home to a Southeast Asian neighborhood complete with Thai jewelers, DVD vendors and (I kid you not) neon sign makers.

I found a shopping center with this hokey pagoda archway over the parking lot entrance. There was a HUGE grocery store with everything from squid bits to chow fun noodles. They had bottles of fake soy sauce so heavy you could concuss someone with them ($4!!). Plus about 20 kinds of mystery greens, vats of 4 different animals' blood, and a cardboard box of sausage with a pair of scissors in the box so you could take the length you wanted.

Today we went back and in one aisle I found something called a Moon Cake whose ingredients were so ridiculously incompatible that I had to try it. Here they are: Winter melon candy, sunflower seeds, almonds, cashew, sesame seeds, lard, pork sausage, dry pineapple, corn oil, eggs, wheat flour, sugar, baking powder, honey, potassium carbonate. This was not in the refrigerated section, btw. I ate some and needless to say it was weird.

The Asian experience follows other recent discoveries of an amazing Middle Eastern market (frozen kibbeh, labneh and sacks of fresh warm pita, sigh!) and an entire street full of Indo-Pak stuff (nothing as good as Not Just Spices in Providence, but I’ll keep looking).

Never again will I want for cheap shiitakes or pomegranate concentrate! 

¶ 11:03 PM