Green Ecology Limitless Magnificence

WE LIKE THE NEW TASTE,WE
NEED THE QUALITY .AND WE N
EED THE BEST FOOD.HERE
YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU WANT.
COOL FASHION NEED COOLTASTE,
YOU ARE THE NEWMAN. HOW DEL
ICIOUSCAN NOT FORGET, SPECIAL
TASTE, RETURN THE TURE FLAVOUR,
GIVE YOU THE MINERABLE FEELING

All this from a package of preserved vanilla olives.

Sometimes, channel surfing foreign language TV channels can have its rewards. Sometime I’ll tell you the story about the mayonnaise lesson on Korean children’s television, but today is all about U Mart.

Last night, nothing particularly interesting was on any of the couple of dozen channels we get on our weird cable. I started at the Catholic channel at the top of the dial and began working my way down. Horse racing, City Council meetings, Italian game shows, Chinese channel. I paused at the Chinese channel, if only because the last time we flipped through, they were showing a fantastically bizarre broadcast of a woman singing in Chinese pitch with Western harmonies, surrounded by red waving flags, children and acrobats whizzing by.

I can’t recall what was on this time, but it quickly cut to a commercial that instantly transfixed me. I have no idea what they were saying, but they had a picture of a building and some words in English. The building had a banner that said, “Grand opening September 5, 2005,” and underneath was the name “U Mart”, and an address in Woodside. They showed a couple of interior shots – extensive fresh vegetables, large fish section, row upon row of mysterious and alluring canned and bagged goods. Since I’m becoming more and more certain that food is my religion, this morning we set out to visit its newest temple.

Ever since I visited Seattle and my friends took me to Uwajimaya, I have been on a quest to find Uwajimaya East, or at least one that I could reach without using bridge, tunnel, boat or plane. I had high hopes for U Mart, which weren’t entirely dashed. It’s much smaller than Uwajimaya, which makes perfect sense, since Queens is not known for its wide-open spaces, at least not in the way that Staten Island is.

The interior shots in the commercial did not lie. They had a great selection of Asian vegetables and fruit – lots of choy and cabbage, incredible fresh spinach, leeks, scallions, root vegetables, and the inimitable durian. The durian was only 99¢/lb. and not huge, which gave me hope that one of these days I’ll actually try one. In the garage.

The fish counter was fascinating. The familiar were reasonably priced – medium shrimp at $3.99/lb.!, and the exotic were probably, too. The basket of live, woebegone frogs was marked $3.99/lb. Live tilapia, carp, catfish, buffalo fish and more; myriad whole fish, fish steaks and fillets, clams, blue crabs $6.99/lb., mussels, geoducks (!). Buffalo fish parts glowed so brightly red that I looked for the red light source, but found none. Weird, little crooked fish with a 3-piece forked tail and a gaping mouth with needle teeth, like some creature from the deep, were pawed over avidly.

Then the meat, most of which was readily identifiable, at least as to animal. At the butcher counter, the cuts were different – “beef muscle,” for instance. Oxtail was $3.99/lb., and “pork muscle” was $1.89/lb. I got some pork muscle, which I think is a shoulder cut – it’s big enough for a roast, in any event, so I’m going to slow cook it. The prepackaged meat was a bit more interesting. They had black skin chickens, which I’ve previously only seen on Iron Chef (yes, I’m a junkie). They had all sorts of pig innards, reminding us of spying pig uterus in Chinatown in Montreal last summer. We didn’t see any uterus today, but we did see heart, spleen, lung, kidney, intestine, and perhaps most interestingly, “pig bunge.” Did they mean colon? Oh – and ox penis.

On to the packaged goods. It’s nobody’s fault, of course, but transliterated Chinese names tend to look so. . . suggestive. And then when you get them into English, they’re almost always either bizarre, or quite unappetising, or bizarrely unappetising. Ching Yeh Pork Fu, for instance. It’s got umami up the wazoo, so even though it looks like frizzy, fuzzy, shredded brown fiberglass, it’s incredibly tasty and addictive, and keeps you coming back for more™. But if you call it by its English name, “cooked dried pork product,” it’s more like, “what? me? You want me to eat what?” And to discover that it’s made in Iowa is a bit much.

We both picked out a few intriguing unknowns. Jim got the aforementioned preserved vanilla olives (if you have the patience to let the page load). They taste like . . . vanilla, slightly lemony candied olives. I’m still not quite sure, although they might be interesting in fruit cake. I selected preserved duck eggs. Half a dozen for 99¢ – how could I resist? Now that I've got them home, I've discovered that I really haven't the least idea what to do with them. It seems that there are a couple of types of preserved duck eggs, some of which need cooking, and some of which don’t. The only other words on my package in English that give me any clue whatsoever are next to a little arrow pointing to the inside of an egg, and say, “hard yolk.” As for the flavour, well, quite. Some sites describe them as creamy or cheesy, or a little fishy. One says that if you like salty cheese like feta, you will probably like preserved duck eggs. Then, there’s this tidbit:

Nigel persuades a group of people raised on Chinese food to try out a ripe stilton cheese, while a group of gourmet cheese lovers try a Chinese delicacy known as a 'Thousand Year Old Egg' - a preserved fermented raw duck egg. Both groups, trying these tastes for the first time, find them revolting.

As I would tend to fall into the gourmet cheese loving category, I’ll keep you posted.

After we paid for our purchases, the woman bagging our things slipped a yellow jug of something into a bag and said, “here, it’s free, for you.” I figured it was either a jug of cooking oil or cleaning fluid. It turned out to be Vitarroz Double Lucky corn oil. Cross-cultural marketing at its finest.

p.s. I just noticed the writing below the recycle symbol on the package of preserved vanilla olives. It says, “Protect environment – main ourself pride”. Yes, indeed.