Stingray in Rehobeth Beach

Knowing Your Shish From Shinola

It's been a stomach stretching week of global cuisine, fresh swordfish steaks, and burgers.  After a week of trying all that the big new Whole Foods in Friendship Heights has to offer, one specialty item rises above the rest: the shish.

Order when hungry; they give you a whole shish load of it.  You get to choose a couple of tapas (I went with Turkish eggplant and ezme salatsi) to go with your sliced lamb, pitas, and Persian rice. 

I was ready to dive in, but then my shish benefactor, some guy named Jerry, asked me if I wanted toppings.  Does a bear shish in the woods?  Before I knew it, my plate was loaded with Middle Eastern pickles, tomatoes, Israeli salad, seasoned onions and fresh cucumbers. 

The shish is advertised at 9 bucks, but seeing as how my platter now weighed about 2.5 pounds, I expected to pay extra.  Still, Jerry rang me up at 9 bucks - a very fair price, especially at Whole Paycheck.

The lamb is charcoal-grilled; shish was invented by medieval Iranic soldiers who used their swords to grill meat over open-field fires.  The taste was spicy and smoky, and, for a chain supermarket, the sides were authentic.

Plus, some novelty: according to Jane Mueller, Regional VP of Operations, no other Whole Foods in the nation boasts a shish counter.

Across the street, Giant (which, ironically, is dwarfed by Whole Foods) is hurting. 

Empty parking spaces at Giant.  You can see the bus behind me was not thrilled as I stopped in the middle of the road to take a few pics.

Kevin, the guy at the fish counter, said they've noticed a big drop in customers.  Right before the new Whole Foods opened, Giant lauched a preemptive attack by refurbishing the front of the store with a new dining area and flat-screen tv.  "That's nice," said Kevin, "but they should have added an outdoor eating area, too."

If they're really "quality food people," shouldn't they upgrade to some shish?

Lobbyists Make Sweetheart Deals with DC Bulgogi Cart

From a distance, it looks like a school bus has crashed onto the sidewalk at the 1400 block of L Street.

Instead of kids, the yellow box on wheels contains Korean bulgogi hawkers: Andy, who also happens to be an internationally competitive taekwondo master, and his mother, Yong Sun.  The food is fresh-tasting and cheap, the service fast and friendly, the name straightforward: The Bulgogi Cart.

An establishment like this seems out of place, not just because its scaled-down simplicity is plunked down so close to the fat-pocketed lobbying firms of D.C.'s Wall Street.  The Bulgogi Cart is also one of very few Korean food purveyors in all of downtown D.C.

On its face, the scarcity of Korean joints doesn't make sense; it's not exactly like Washingtonians are scared of ethnic restaurants.  The Post's online Going Out Guide lists at least 12 places to go downtown for Indian, Thai, and Ethiopian.  But the only Korean restaurant options are Yee Hwa on 21st Street and Mandu in Dupont, and a couple of mobile kitchens: the Bulgogi Cart, and, just a block away, the Korean Food Cart.

When it comes to setting up chopsticks downtown, most Korean restaurantrepreneurs don't see the point.  Why take your chances with caucasian neophobes - and pay about $26 more per square foot of retail space - when you can just join the Korea lovefest that is Annandale, Virginia.  Annandale is home to 66,000 Koreans and 929 businesses catering to Koreans - one-third of all Korean businesses in the Washington Metropolitan area.

All the better for the Bulgogi Cart, which faces little competition for the niche of Korean-craving lobbyists who can't make the lunch excursion to Annadale, chained as they are within the city limits by all those check-signing appointments at the Hart Senate Office Building. 

For just seven bucks, any of the tasty options below can be yours:

Bimbimbap with Spicy Bulgogi - Far be it for me to question food that looks and tastes this good, but why do they serve it in a box with a divider between the meat and the vegetables?  Bimbimbap means "mixed rice," but the styrofoam wall prevents mingling.  The spicy sauce is appealing but masks that garlic/soy punch that lovers of traditional bulgogi long for.

Spicy Chicken - The Cart is named after the bulgogi, but you should also get their chicken, which is seriously tender.  I challenge restaurants like Yee Hwa with a full-sized kitchen to nail chicken like this.  I also challenge Yee-Hwa to remove the "w" from its name and offer all patrons cowboy hats at the door.

Mix of chicken and bulgogi without the spicy sauce - Every last piece of the chicken was plump and meaty.  I also go ga-ga for the bulgogi because of its texture.  I'd use a sweeter bulgogi marinade, though.

Death By Bok Choy

From NY Daily News: Can eating veggies kill you? Not quite, but an elderly Chinese woman's bok choy binge ended with her going into a life-threatening coma, according to Msbnc.com.
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The 88-year-old went to an emergency room here in the city last summer when she was unable to swallow or walk, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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She’d apparently been eating between 2 and 3 pounds of bok choy - also called Chinese white cabbage - daily for several months. The reason? The woman thought eating the equivalent of two or three large heads each day would help keep her diabetes in check.
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New York University School of Medicine's Dr. Michael Chu, a resident who took care of her, reported that she’d crunched her way through the boy choy with no seasoning, not even a pinch of salt.
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"I am not sure if she had trouble consuming so much bok choy," Chu said. "It never came up that it was difficult to do so."
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The woman, who contracted a severe case of hypothyroidism, was diagnosed with a thyroid-induced coma that required potent anti-inflammatory medicines and injections of a synthetic thyroid hormone to treat. The bok choy overload was dangerous since this particular vegetable contains an enzyme that can hinder the thyroid’s ability to function. Cooking the bok choy would have deactivated the enzyme.
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The happy ending? She recovered and went to live in a nursing home.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2010/05/20/2010-05-20_death_by_bok_choy_not_quite_but_eating_too_much_put_one_woman_in_a_coma.html#ixzz0pHOdu2bw

Picnicsssszzzzzzzzzzz ... Wake up to Clams on the Beach

Picnicssssszzzzzzzzz.

Very few topics related to food bore me, but when I think of a picnic, I conjure English aristocracy playing cribbage in an excessively manicured park while snacking on cold lettuce-y blandness. My eyelids get heavy. Maybe I should be more easily inspired, but a Kansas-flat rectangle of grass and a straw basket just don’t quicken my pulse.

I guess that having fresh clams on the beach technically fits the dictionary definition of a picnic, but doesn’t it belong to a superior category of scenic eating?

Clam model: Marcy

I had these razor clams this past week while vacationing in Delaware. The weather that day was perfect. The sand, sky, and water looked so pretty I wanted to go home and paint my apartment blue and tan.

The broth-slicked clams glistened in the late afternoon light. I attacked.

The great thing about devouring clams on the beach is that you’re already dirty. Sand in your hair and seaweed clinging to your legs wear well with clam juice all over your chin.

Bites of the meat were nice and tender, but just as enjoyable was spooning the broth, a salty sea of my own with flecks of cooked garlic at the surface like wave caps. The salty terroir of the clams joined forces with the ocean air in my nose and I felt like I was in a world where the only sensory perception was brine.

Doesn’t that beat tea sandwiches and pegsmanship in the woods? Haven’t we been snacking in the grass with the cows and squirrels long enough?

Grandpas Meet Go-Getters at New Friendship Heights Whole Foods

Where do you find some of the largest Whole Foods in the world? London, Chicago and New York, of course. And Friendship Heights?
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The new Maryland location, which just opened this past Wednesday, measures a sprawling 49,000 square feet. Although that doesn’t equal the girth of the big city behemoths, it’s considerably larger than most other Whole Foods stores.
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Friendship Heights isn’t Chicago. It’s not even a city. But providing a village of 4500 people with a market the size of a football-field was an easy decision for Whole Foods, says Jane Mueller, Regional VP of Operations. “In Friendship Heights, we found a great variety of business, residence and commuters,” Mueller says.
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And, of course, purchase power. Whole Foods liked the area’s $126,942 median annual income, and, with stores like Louis Vuitton and Cartier nearby, they’re not the first. Whole Foods – or, as it’s known to some for high prices, Whole Paycheck – is a nice fit for the Rodeo Drive of the East Coast.
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The affluent – and considerably older – population will enjoy such attractions as the Severino family’s upscale pasta station. But Mueller and her team weren’t just focused on the rich. “We really set our sights on the commuters,” she says. Throngs of young people hop off the Friendship Heights metro every weekday morning for breakfast and lunch – with a bit of work sandwiched in between. Whole Foods takes aim at the younger lunch crowd with a row of “smokehouse meats”; the crowd at nearby Chipotle has noticeably thinned in recent days. Then there’s a trendy global cuisine station with such ethnic specialties as mojo pork and sweet and spicy tofu. Among yesterday’s lunch crowd were at least two octogenarians scrutinizing the Ethiopian kale with furrowed brows. No other Whole Foods in the nation boasts the innovative shish counter.
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Behind the pasta counter yesterday, Pete Severino, who’s helped open his share of Whole Foods over the past few years, surveyed the crowd. “Strange,” he said while wrapping a box of potato gnocchi ravioli. “Only place I ever saw a lunch crowd like this was New York.”

New Whole Foods Just Opened in Friendship Heights

New Whole Foods - 4420 Willard Ave, Chevy Chase MD

Yesterday, May 19, I became a father.  Yes, I now have a baby.

Not, like, a human baby.  It's a healthy baby Whole Foods, and I feel like it belongs to me because it just opened less than fifty feet from my apartment building.  Like this strange man or the dude-to-dad in the Verizon commercial texting pics of his newborn to everyone he's ever met, I'm swelling with pride over these shots of my new Whole Foods.

I know, I know, all fathers feel this way, but it's truly the greatest Whole Foods I've ever seen. 

It is gigantic - 49,000 square feet, to be exact, but stats don't do its size justice.  Instead, consider: there's a coffehouse cafe so big I couldn't come close to fitting it into the lens of my Powershot. 

There are 22 checkout lanes. 

There's an entire wing crammed with food stations that quadruples the number of stations at the next closest WF in Tenleytown. 

Numerous food stations at the new Friendship Heights Whole Foods

Despite the throngs, it's capacious aisles didn't feel that crowded.

Plus, I just read on this site that, somewhere in the store, there's a fishmonger cutting steaks from a 300 pound swordfish.  Yes, I didn't even happen upon a fish about the size of Shaquille O'Neal.  That's how big this new Whole Foods is.

Besides its girth, the new branch offers a bunch of other improvements on nearby sister Whole Foods stores.  First of all, for the two or three Whole Foods-loving carnivores out there (I'm one of them), they have a grilled burger station and a "smokehouse" section with plenty of grilled meats. 

There's also a cool global cuisine station that offers Ethiopian, Indian, Mexican, and a few other interesting ethnic flavors.  I closely examined each dish and mentally booked about twenty eating appointments with this station over the next three weeks.

But I really hit the placemat when I saw the specialty pasta counter, which is contracted to the award-winning Severino family from New Jersey.  The sheer number of available homemade sauces, cuts, and flavors - grilled asparagus & roasted red pepper raviolis, anyone? - is staggering.  Mangiare bene, indeed!

Like all children, this Whole Foods will require a lot of parental sacrifice.  I'm going to have to spend a pretty penny at the checkout to fully explore its potential.  I'll have to take some long lunches away from work to cover its football-field length and width.  And I risk annoying my friends constantly showing off the photos in my wallet.  Above all, though, I hope we'll be friends.  Or at least taste buds.

Russe Caviar Now Available at Whole Foods

People who have lots of money do very strange things with it.  Like multi-thousand-dollar ice sculptures that pee vodka (looking at you, former CEO of Tyco).  And buying 65 different parasols (Imelda Marcos).

And caviar?  Is the outrageous price of salted fish eggs justified by the taste?

I say yes.  That's why I jumped at the opportunity to buy some - sitting appetizingly on a bed of ice in front of the fish counter - this past weekend at the Whole Foods in Silver Spring. 

And I don't even have any money.  Instead of going all-out for the $65, 7 ounce tin of white sturgeon caviar, I decided to slum it with the $30 American paddlefish and scrape the barrel with a 10 buck tin of whitefish.

Tin of whitefish caviar

American paddlefish caviar

I was particularly excited because I don't believe I've previously seen caviar available at Whole Foods.  They've chosen to get their eggs from Russe, a New York emporium that has a Madison Ave restaurant and boutique where you can go watch them salt and process the eggs (definitely an upcoming field trip for yours truly). 

The website isn't clear about exactly where they get their caviar, just saying that Russe "supports development of sustainable aquaculture alternatives."  Why do they need alternatives?  Because the U.N. banned exports of beluga sturgeon caviar from the Caspian Sea region in 2006, when the roe reached the brink of extinction.

But enough politics.  Here are some fun facts:

• When settlers found America, sturgeon was the most prolific fish of the North American continent. American Indians loved it.  Europeans disliked it so much at first that they only fed it to slaves.

• At one time, caviar was so common in America it was served in saloons to encourage thirsty drinkers. Hudson River sturgeon were so plentiful that the flesh was referred to as "Albany beef." A nickel could get you a serving of the best caviar available in New York, and many of the most lavish establishments, including the Waldorf Astoria, offered free-flowing caviar as an amuse-bouche opening to an elegant meal.


Which gets me back to the point I started with: if caviar used to be for drunks, is it not insane to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for it now?

All I can say is that I was very satisfied with my Russe caviar.  The poor man's whitefish eggs were salty and that had that popping texture that caviar-lovers live for. 


Whitefish caviar

The considerably more expensive paddlefish was equally salty but with a nuanced fishiness and less of a bubble-wrap mouthfeel.

This was my favorite bite of all - comte 15 month aged cheese with paddlefish roe on flatbread cracker

And, as I enjoyed the caviar, perhaps I closed my eyes and imagined my very own vodka-peeing ice scultpure.

Venu's Top Chef Pic

Many thanks to Ulka and Venu.  Luckily, they saw the DC Top Chef cast while shopping at the Silver Spring Whole Foods last week and snapped this pic of one of the contestants:

Unluckily, it's not the best pic.  Here's what I can discern about our mystery contestant:

His favorite color is blue.
He enjoys carrying balloons in his pockets.
His only purchase appears to be a can of OJ.

He also doesn't really look like any of the cast members on Bravo's site.  The closest match is this dude, Ed Cotton.

Like I said, he doesn't really look like any of the cast members on Bravo's site.

Maybe he's one of the production crew?  Some random guy Venu photographed to see how gullible I am?  This guy before he shaved his head and went shopping with Pete Doherty?

Bravo Announces Cast of DC Top Chef

 Image from Metrocurean

DC Top Chef contestants were just announced today, and Bravo once again tapped some local chefs for the chopping block:

Kevin Sbraga, 30 – Hometown/Resides in: Willingboro, NJ
Lynne Gigliotti, 51 – Hometown: Philadelphia, PA/Resides in Hyde Park, NY
Stephen Hopcraft, 40 – Hometown: Cleveland, OH.; Resides in Las Vegas, NV
Tamesha Warren, 24 – Hometown: Barbados; Resides in Washington D.C.
Tiffany Derry, 26 – Hometown: Beaumont, TX/Resides in: Dallas, TX
Timothy Dean, 39 – Hometown: Washington D.C./Resides in Baltimore, MD
Tracey Bloom, 33 – Hometown: Rochester, NY/Resides in Atlanta, GA
Alex Reznik, 33 – Hometown: Brooklyn, NY; Resides in Hollywood, CA
Amanda Baumgarten, 27 – Hometown/Resides in: Los Angeles, CA
Andrea Curto-Randazzo, 39 – Hometown: Vero Beach, FL/Resides in: Miami Beach, FL
Angelo Sosa, 34 – Hometown: Connecticut; Resides in New York, NY.
Arnold Myint, 32 – Hometown/Resides in: Nashville, TN
Ed Cotton, 32 – Hometown: Boston, MA; Resides in New York, NY
Jacqueline Lombard, 33 – Hometown: Boston, MA/Resides in Brooklyn, NY
John Somerville, 42 – Hometown/Resides in: West Bloomfield, MI
Kelly Liken, 33 – Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA/Resides in: Vail, CO
Kenny Gilbert, 36 – Hometown: Cleveland, OH/Resides in: Telluride, CO

Timothy Dean grew up in D.C. and owns Prime in Baltimore.  Tamesha Warren is sous chef at the Oval Room.  For those of you wondering why I've highlighted Arnold Myint, Nashville is my home town - this might just be Music City's highest profile reality t.v. star since the personality-challenged Dr. Travis Stork.

Bravo's announcement of the new cast is bittersweet news, suggesting that the D.C. filming of season 7 has already wrapped up, and, with it, stalking season.  Padma, I'll never forgot your silhouette through the thick yet translucent drapes of the Dupont Hilton.

Other than that, my closest brush with the cheftenders was vicarious - friends Ulka and Venu spotted them shopping at the Silver Spring Whole Foods.  Venu claims to have captured a ghostly image of one of the chefs with his cell camera, but I've yet to see the evidence.


Picture of a Top Chef contestant at Silver Spring Whole Foods, courtesy of Picture Holster

Guest appearances on D.C. Top Chef will include House chef Sam Kass, Buzz Aldrin, and Nancy Pelosi.  Chefs will work the concession stands at Nats games and break codes at CIA headquarters.

The first episode of the season airs June 16 at 8 pm.

Zengo Chef Graham Bartlett's Recipe for Charred Kimchee

Chef de Cuisine Graham Bartlett was kind enough to pass along his recipe for Zengo's charred kimchee, which I recently called the best side dish in the District ...

"It's actually really easy:


take fresh baby bok choy, rinse and quarter lengthwise. Toss with a small amount of canola oil, and throw on a super hot grill. cook for about 5 minutes until leaves blacken and the stalk becomes a litle soft. remove, and toss in a bowl with a mixture of minced raw garlic, kim chee base (from a bottle), and korean chile flake . We make a mixture of the seasoning beforehand: 1c chile flake, 1/2 c water to rehydrate, 1t minced garlic, 1 c kim chee base."

My Moment of Zengo - Charred Kim Chee

All good restaurants have dishes you must have.  Typically, they're the ones that have satisfied the fickle tastebuds of a famous food critic, who, like a Delphic Orifice, then proclaims divine utterances about which plates should be made kings, and which ones stoned by the river. 

When asked about Zengo in Chinatown, the voices from the sky whisper to go with the Charred Tuna Wonton Tacos, the Braised Beef Short Ribs, and the tiradito.

Charred Tuna Wonton Tacos with guacamole, sushi rice, and mango salsa

Braised Beef Short Ribs with Oaxaca cheese mashed potoato, huitlacoche shitake, dragon sauce

Tiradito with sriracha and serrano peppers

I have to admit that all three of these prophesies came true.  The Wonton Tacos winningly pair sushi rice with mango salsa and avocado.  The Short Ribs are really tender, guarded by a moat of fiery "dragon" sauce and  balanced by a bed of Oaxaca cheese mash potatoes.  To the thin, raw slices of tiradito - the Portuguese version of crudo - celebrity chef Richard Sandoval adds colorful dashes of sriracha (a play on fish blood?).  With every plate, Zengo successfully engineers Asian / Latino hybrids that no one else has the cilantro-covered tofu balls to actually try.

In Greece, the seers were never doubted, but in DC, Tom Sietsema and company sometimes get it wrong.  And although they were right about the aforementioned foods, not one of them even mentioned the dish at Zengo I can't get out of my mind: the Charred Kimchee.

This is currently my favorite side-dish in the District.  The bok choy and scallions are fresh, and the charring process gives the kimchee a paranormal smokiness like the Oracle's underground chamber.  And who else besides Zengo has even thought about charring kimchee?  Of the thousands of cooking sites on the Internet, none of them seem to offer a kimchee recipe like this.  Luckily, Zengo's Chef de Cuisine Graham Bartlett emailed me the recipe.
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My own underground chamber is telling me that Annandale's Korean restaurants should add Zengo's version of kimchee to their panchan repertoire.

Harissa at Cava Mezze Makes Me Question My Childhood

Studies show that people strongly prefer the same foods they ate during childhood.  Branen and Fletcher found that, "Despite their struggle for autonomy and experimentation, adolescents eventually revert to preferring the same foods as their parents."

Maybe that's why I still crave harissa.  My mom set her family's mouths on fire for years with this tangy Moroccan condiment, ever since she discovered this recipe in a 1989 edition of Glamour magazine:

Harissa
4 t crushed red pepper flakes
1 garlic clove, minced
1 t ground cumin
3 T olive oil
2 T tomato paste
2 T freshly squeezed lemon juice
In small bowl, combine red pepper flakes, garlic, and cumin. Using fork, blend in oil, then tomato pasted and lemon juice. Makes about 1/4 cup.
 
 
Now, I'm really not sure why Glamour magazine thought its target audience wanted four teaspoons of crushed red pepper flakes with their celebrity gossip, love calculators and lip gel ads, but, whatever the reason, it worked out well for the Fuchs family.  My mom spread the harissa over a Berber stew with couscous, raisins, carrots, green peppers and the like - it was the chum that set off a Moroccan feeding frenzy.
 
No other version of harissa has since compared. 
 
Other recipes I've tried with sugar, paprika, or spearmint have disappointed.  The harissa at Leblandese Taverna lacked flavor.  And even the bellydancers at Marakkesh couldn't convince me that their harissa had enough cumin or garlic - it was all fire and lemon.
 
Could it be true that the world's best harissa recipe came from a decades-old ladies' housekeeping journal?  Had I really climbed to the top of Mount Moroccan Condiment?  I felt like Alexander, weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer. 
 
But this past week I went to Cava Mezze in Rockville.  Before the meal, the waiter dropped off a small plate of harissa and pita for the table.  The first thing I noticed was that the harissa wasn't very spicy, but I didn't mind because the garlic and tomato flavors were fantastic.
 
It was so good that I paid 7 bucks to take home half a pound.  One of the great things about harissa is that it keeps in the refrigerator for months, but I eviscerated Cava's version in only a couple days - as fast as the Tunisians, who have harissa as an appetizer for every meal.
 
 

 
No reason to mourn my empty to-go box, though; Cava contracts with a plant called Potomac Fine Foods, located in Rockville, to produce the restaurant's harissa and hummus for supermarket shelves.  I scored this at the Tenley Whole Foods:
 
 

 
 

 
$5.75 might sound like a lot for 8.5 ounces, but it seemed like a steal after what I paid at the restaurant.  And it was considerably spicier than the restaurant version - maybe Cava thinks the hardcore harissa lover willing to track it down at a market expects some real zing.
 
So, why is this harissa so good that it almost makes me forget about Glamour magazine?  I'm suspicious there's a top-secret tablespoon of butter involved, but a less cynical theory, especially given that it's produced locally, is that they only use fresh ingredients. 
 
Mom, get back to reading those women's magazines - you've got some competition!

Free Thinking vs. Free Food Samples at Wheaton H Mart

The car lot has the test drive.  FYE kiosks have the 30-second music clip.  Crack-cocaine dealers have the free smoke. 

Free samples are everywhere.  They give you the nibble, inertia takes care of the rest.  Marketing strategists measure success in units of addicted customers.

Supermarkets brandish this advertising hook through tasting stations. But these samples almost never inspire me to brandish my wallet.  Just check out Whole Foods' cheesy free sample logo (left).  I like to turn the sales strategy on its head by ducking into Whole Foods for a mid-afternoon snack and hopping around to all the sample tables without spending a penny.

I thought I was a pretty tough mark until I discovered the irresistible stations at the H Mart in Wheaton.

H Mart, the artist formerly known as Han Ah Reum, is a chain of 17 stores stretching from New York to Georgia that specialize in fresh produce, good deals on fish, and verbal misunderstandings with English-speaking customers.

Every weekend, H Mart fills the spaces in between tanks of live conches and wriggling crawfish with about a dozen demo cooking stands.  Sales reps, mostly Asian women, work all day long diligently dicing, frying, and wrapping fresh ingredients into amuse-bouches for the easily-enticed crowd.

One thing you quickly learn at H Mart: some Korean women really don't like having their pictures taken

Partially hidden behind a fortress made of bok choy bowls, towering stacks of bean curd, and long ladling spoons sticking out like guard spears, these women make sure you notice them with fierce screams of broken English: "Fry fillet!  Basa fish!  Real simple!  I show how!"


Basa lady: small but fierce

This pitch came from a tiny woman working a hissing sauce pan. Next to her was a bucket filled with basa fillets that were the color of cherry blossoms and priced at just 2.99/pound!

Fresh basa priced to move

"Just quick fry all it needs because so fresh," the rep explained before scissoring me off a few bites.  I topped it with sriracha and enjoyed with another customer, an Indian woman, who told me she comes to H Mart every weekend just to get cooking ideas.

We strolled over to the next station, where a seemingly shy bespectacled Korean lady was hawking boxes of curry sauce mix, which she stewed in a hot pot with carrots and peas.  My little cup was salty and fiery and my tasting partner said it stood up to her home-cooked Indian curries.  Sensing I was still on the fence, the Korean curry jockey suddenly piped up: "To make, it so easy!"

I dropped a box into my shopping basket. 

A mean curry sauce mix

Next up was a broad table holding what seemed like a flow chart on the kimchee life cycle: baskets of newly plucked bok choy, scallions, and garlic cloves (arrow to) a mixing bowl in which the Hana rep massaged chili paste into cabbage leaves (arrow to) kimchee soaking in a big bowl of water (arrow to) the plastic packages containing the final product. 
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I fantasized about buying the entire setup, chef included, and having it available 24/7 in the corner of my kitchen.

Kimchee paradise - this would look great in my kitchen

Alas, the chef lives nowhere near my kitchen; she said she had taken the Chinatown bus from New York that morning just to make it down to the Wheaton gig.


H Mart Food Court

I was already enjoying this eat-while-you-shop bash, but the intensity ratcheted up when I spotted the food court.  If the rest of the market was like a friendly house party, the court was like the VIP room of an Ibiza night club: instead of shots and beautiful women, it was the Korean blood sausages, fried chicken, and seafood pancakes that were in generous supply. 

Korean blood sausages: these were outstanding

Korean pancakes and dumplings: so-so

Korean fried chicken: terrible, mine was a lot better if I do say so

The cranky Korean women in the open kitchen were like the bouncers; they flexed their muscles as they pumped cauldrons of spinach and gave me threatening looks when I watched them too closely.  And they shouted Korean profanities and shook their fists at me when I snapped a few pictures of them hanging out in the kitchen. 

A Korean cook - petite yet terrifying.  I'm pretty sure that, while I took this pic, she was debating whether to pick me up and dump me in her cauldron of boiling spinach and nosy photographers

I atoned by buying damn near everything they had and ordering a bulgogi lunch platter to boot.  I sat down next to a guy named Howard who was finishing his soondooboo, a spicy tofu stew, which he said is the best thing going at the food court.  "I dream about it," he admitted.

I could relate.  What is it about guys like Howard and me that propels us to obscure Asian food courts when many of our Caucasian brethren can just hit Five Guys to achieve eating nirvana?  Guess one man's hoisin is another man's hell.

Kindred soul, Howard, in a sea of Korean ladies

My bulgogi was fine, though a little soggy.  The surprise star of the platter was the egg-drop soup, which incorporated some very fresh-tasting eggs.

Bulgogi lunch platter

Next time I go to H Mart's food court, the experimentation will continue in full force

Yes, there was at least one thing I was NOT up for trying

I asked Howard about H Mart's free samples.  "I prefer Costco's samples," he said.

I've never had their samples, I realized.  I eyed my shopping basket, brimming with samples I'd decided to buy, and began mentally plotting a Costco trip.  I'm afraid my transformation from free-thinking consumer to every marketing strategist's brainwashed pawn may soon be complete.

More friends from the sample stations ...

Bean curd with seasoned rice

Red Bean Cake

Dumplings with citron soy sauce