IT'S "VEGANUARY" AT AN ASIAN GROCERY~MY ADVENTURE AT LEM'S ORIENTAL MARKET by Laura A. Miniel

Lem's Oriental Market in the El Globo Shopping Center

I didn't set out to spend my entire week's food budget at a small, Asian specialty grocery store on Sunday. Tucked into a corner next to El Globo, Lem's Oriental Market is now one of my favorite places to bike to, although for years I had no idea this place existed.

This is my source for re-supplies of sushi seaweed, rice paper for spring rolls, and all the ingredients to make real miso soup - refrigerated miso paste, tofu, and giant, inexpensive bags of dried seaweed. 

Maybe I've always loved the walls piled high with bags of ingredients written in a language I can't read, giving a first impression of entering an old world apothecary. The small English translations at the bottom of the bags "Black fungus" "Fresh durian fruit" "Pickled Bamboo" heighten the feeling. Some of it looks vaguely familiar, like the green tea flavored KitKat bars from Japan. 

A friend of mine once found a package of "Puto" on the shelf and couldn't stop laughing. I still have not tried a Puto, which is apparently some kind of a white bread dumpling. Maybe I need more Puto in my life? Maybe it will be a revelation, the way discovering chipotle in adobo was, for me. 

Chipotle in adobo, I discovered, added to pretty much anything makes it taste better, especially things like hummus (chipotle hummus is better), or mayo (chipotle mayo is better on a burger) and salsa. This place promises a menagerie of flavors and ingredients unlike anything at the El Globo next door.

So I've long had a fascination with this store, but I'd never fully committed. I'd drop by, buy my soy sauce or my sushi paper, scratching the surface of familiar Asian dishes served in America that I'd tried before at restaurants. 

Friendly Filipina Cashier at Lem's

But you have to admit, that's the equivalent of going to an authentic Mexican restaurant and ordering simple quesadillas. I hadn't actually gone in and bought a basket of things I couldn't pronounce, just to crack open a can and see what it tastes like. Good? Bad?

Maybe the apprehension I felt is what tourists from up north feel when they come to Brownsville and face a menu entirely in Spanish. I'd taken visiting friends to the flea market on 77 and seen them struggle to make out the words, "Chicha-chic-cha-rron," eyeing a plate of machacado and nopales with hesitation. 

What is all of this Oriental stuff? Yet it smells so good, and the store is filling up with people on Sunday afternoon, I'm pushing past several others in the narrow walkway, as they peruse the aisles, filling their baskets with unusual-looking fresh vegetables, and imported specialty items not to be found anywhere else in town.

They say you shouldn't grocery shop when you're hungry, and maybe that was the catalyst. I'd skipped breakfast and suddenly all of these foods were calling my name. Though I couldn't pronounce them, the packages looked insanely delicious. Fried banana chips, jackfruit chips and taro? I'm listening. 

The cover photo promises it's crunchy, sweet, fried and salty. Yes, yes, into the basket, you. What else is there, those Kit Kats. Never tried Japanese strawberry Kit Kats. Will they be like ours? Ok, you're coming too. Pocky and sugared ginger candy, I've had that before. Red bean jelly rolls dusted with coconut, hmm, could be good. 

Really, you're doing this, you're going to buy all this candy like a little kid? Turn away! It's universal, all stores put the candy at the front of the store and this is the reason why. My candy compulsion is consumer psychology and impulsive behavior in action.

On the opposite shelf are the pastas. Shirataki! Ah what a find! HEB's supply is spotty and unpredictable at best. Shirataki noodles, aka "miracle noodles" are a calorie-free, carb-free, fat-free noodle made of a type of Japanese yam. 

The word Shirataki means "waterfall", because it is like a waterfall of noodles you can stuff into your face while not worrying about getting fat. The shirataki, of course, will cancel out the sugar and carbs from the candy and deep fried fruit I just bought. 

There are more varieties of ramen noodles than I ever imagined existed, thick udon noodles, bean thread noodles (love those), rice noodles for pad thai, fresh noodles, and .. ah, soba noodles, the brown, real buckwheat kind. I've never cooked with them before, but I liked them in restaurants. 

Take this home, let's experiment with noodle dishes this week! Already I'm imagining a garlic-peanut sauce noodle bowl sprinkled with sesame seeds, half buckwheat udon, half shirataki, all deliciousness. This could be really good.

My plan had been to run into Lem's for soy sauce and dumpling sauce only. Soy sauce at Walmart runs $4 for a regular bottle, but you can get a giant quart of it at Lem's for about the same price. I had a shopping list written for my next stop, HEB, with the usual broccoli, salad, lasagna ingredients, rice, etc. HEB and Walmart had nothing on the rice selection here, there was purple rice, black rice, wild rice, white rice, brown rice, red rice, sushi rice, pudding rice, rice balls, rice flour. I'd never seen purple rice before, except in fancy Pinterest recipes. 

My Shopping Basket at Lem's

Lem's was expanding, a new produce section offered fresh, crisp looking vegetables and fruits, and freezers full of more fresh produce and who knows what else. Quite frankly, Asia Market's offerings looked much greener and healthier than what I had written on my list. I didn't know what some of these fresh greens were, but green things are generally healthy, right? You'd be hard pressed to name a fresh green leafy thing that wasn't a nutrient bomb ready to detonate healthy vitamin shrapnel all over your cells. My mind was giving way to a new plan. Forget HEB, shop here, take random things home and just start cooking! Even if I had no idea what it was? 

But what if it's gross?

But what if it's excellent?

One thing is for sure, it will be fresh, and different.
Already this sounds more fun than another week of broccoli rice, oatmeal and lasagna.

My stomach's rumbling. The greens look extra crispy, good enough to eat raw. There are a few ziploc bags of greens in the fridge, with long narrow leaves that I didn't recognize. I pull a leaf off and taste it. Like basil... it must be thai basil. What a huge thai basil, and so crisp! This is like prehistoric dinosaur basil. Enough to make a salad. 

Does someone have a garden nearby to supply something this fresh? I'd only ever seen a few wilty leaves of thai basil as a garnish, or in a spring roll. Next to the basil, were several larger bags of dark, big leafed greens. I pull a leaf off and quickly chomp down on it, hoping no one is watching me graze. This one, I couldn't place. It looks like giant leaves of spinach, but vaguely sweet and crispy. 

No idea. It's good though, real good. Like spinach, the way you wished raw spinach would taste. I grab a bag of both, and put them in my basket. More produce in the center of the room, long purple eggplants over a foot long, wrinkled cucumber looking things, and the crispest head of cabbage I've ever seen. Already my imaginary bowl of noodles is growing a topping of hot braised cabbage and greens tossed in sesame oil, sriracha and garlic. 

If I get tired of stir fry, I can use these greens in place of spinach in an Italian alfredo pasta with tomatoes, basil and olives. Perfect. But what dinner can you make with a two foot long eggplant? No idea. But it's going home. It's all going in the basket.

By now the owner of the store had come in. Stocking the shelves with others who worked there, conversing in a language I couldn't place. The place was filling up with people and my basket was getting heavy. Time to check out and go home. 

Time to go home and eat this stuff, right?

But no. Because at that moment, is when I found it. Or, I should say, the fridge in the corner. It had seaweed - not just dried seaweed (which I have at home, it's ok for miso soup), or seaweed salad, the tiny containers that go for $5 at Gucci-B, no, this was an entire bag of FRESH seaweed. I knew it existed, but had never seen it before up close. 

Refrigerated, fresh seaweed. I imagined Japanese dudes in diving masks, leaping off boats, down into the clear water off the coast into an undulating forest underwater. Like a gold panner who finds a gold chunk on his tray next to a silver nugget, literally, on the same shelf as this bag of fresh seaweed is nothing less than fresh, long white enoki mushrooms. 

Houston is the closest I would have expected to find treasures like this. I'm standing there in shock, staring at these delicacies here in Brownsville, a few hundred feet away from the El Globo.

So Enoki mushrooms are a tender, delicate ghost fungus of the winter forest. They thrive in cold, misty mountain weather, preferring a temperature of around 50 degrees, grown under high carbon dioxide concentrations to encourage them to grow long and tall, delicate ghostlike strings ready to play all the culinary notes of a forest guitar. On your tongue, they fall apart, after a slight chewy bite.

I guess this is why they say not to grocery shop when you're hungry. I'm totally romanticizing this stuff, imagining all these flavors and I just want to eat everything.

As a lifelong vegetarian / now vegan, it's like stumbling into some kind of vegan food paradise. The best thing about ethnic cuisine, is that most non-Western cultures long ago developed an entire food catalog around non-animal proteins. Even the native South Texas cuisine used to rely heavily on local plants such as mesquite beans.

Eastern diets are heavily centered on greens, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains like rice, while incorporating a variety of proteins from beans, lentils, legumes, greens. The introduction of large quantities of meat, dairy and sugars is more recent, and seems to be a Western influence. (Sadly, obesity, diabetes, cholesterol and heart disease have risen concurrently in areas that adopt these Western products.)

In the US, my first vegetarian meals were generally meat meals sans meat. Like spaghetti without meatballs, or grilled chicken salad without the chicken. In the US we are taught to throw away the protein- and nutrient-rich broccoli leaves and only eat the flowers, to toss the celery leaves in the trash and only eat the stems. In the Eastern tradition, on the other hand, greens make up the basis of the dish, and karma-loving protein staples such as seitan were developed by Buddhist monks over 1500 years ago. 

The monks discovered that whole wheat flour, if you knead it and then let it sit overnight in a bowl of cold water, allows the wheat protein to form into solid strands. Running it under cold water, washing the starch away, a protein rich component aka "wheat meat" similar in taste and texture to meat is produced. It's as high in protein as a steak. 

I find myself staring at a can of this centuries-old ancient protein in amazement. Nearly two millenia later, seitan is still a popular food packaged as "mock duck", and a can with three servings is on sale for $2. Now's my chance to try it, into the basket! I feel like I've won some kind of lottery. There was inexpensive tofu (another bean protein), edmame (more protein), varieties of protein rich beans, snake beans, mung beans, black and white sesame seeds, giant bags of peanuts selling for peanuts, yellow beans, exotic mushrooms galore, and yet another dried vegetarian protein called Thit Chay, which I had never heard of before. 

The freezers at Lem's provide even more bounteous temptations and surprises, with the infamous frozen Durian fruit (!! the stinkiest fruit in the world) of Bizarre Foods fame, and more invitingly, generous size packages of veggie spring rolls at 25 calories each (whuuut?) and spicy Kimchi dumplings. 

Are kimchi dumplings good in miso soup? I don't know, can't wait to find out. (Turns out, they are ok in soup, but best lightly coated with peanut and sesame oil, fried to crispy perfection then dunked in sauce).

Two weeks of stir fried greens, rolls, dumplings, salads, and noodle bowls later, I was hooked. Spending my week's food budget of $35 at Lem's (now known as Asian Market) resulted in restaurant quality deliciousness, literally the healthiest, greenest, most savory homecooked food I've made in years.

Stir Fry

Would anyone believe me though?  My shopping companion, Jim Barton, could cast the deciding vote.

So we went back, got another week's worth of veg and protein. Made a simple stir fry, rice with quinoa, Japanese seaweed salad, lightly fried Korean dumplings & spring rolls, and bitter melon with garlic and onion - a recipe suggested by his fiancee Ana. All of this was vegan and cholesterol free, made with the smallest amount of light olive oil and sesame oil just to keep everything from sticking to the pan. What do you think?

Vegetables Prepared for Stir Fry

So the basic secret to good stir fry is getting your pan very hot before you add anything. This gives you that golden brown crisp on all your veggies. To the hot pan was added minced ginger, garlic, onion and celery stems. Then enoki mushrooms, shredded celery greens, a few sprigs of shredded gai lan ( a broccoli relative that is mostly green broccoli leaves), two sliced snake beans, two shredded leaves each of green cabbage and red cabbage.

The "mock duck" or seitan, was marinated in a Korean BBQ mix of ketchup, soy sauce, rice vinegar, worstechire sauce, real maple syrup, a few drops of sesame oil, and dusted with corn starch. This was then put on the hottest part of the pan to give it a crispy sear, then tossed with the rest of the veg. Pan deglazed with soy sauce at the end, then plated.

Bitter Melon

Jim's fiancee' Ana's suggestion was to press all the water and bitterness out of the bitter melon first, to saute the bitter melon (sliced it razor thin) with garlic and onion. I'd heard before that bitter melon is a kind of nutrient powerhouse, and her suggestion to make it garlicky and delicious went well mixed with the stir fry.

Seaweed

Fresh seaweed tossed in sesame oil, soy sauce, rice vinegar and sambal olek (hot chili sauce) from the Asian Market. Same recipe as commonly found in restaurants, but without the added sugar.

Dumplings and Spring Rolls 

Less than a tsp. of oil put on a tiny pan. Kimchi dumplings and veg spring rolls defrosted in microwave for 1 minute, lightly rolled in the hot oil to prevent them from sticking to each other, then browned to a crisp on all sides before removing from heat, plating.

Rice 

Combination of white rice and HEB three-color quinoa that I stock in the pantry, about 50% rice to 50% quinoa. Quinoa is a complete protein-rich grain that I try to add to all my rice to up the nutrient quotient. Basically they both require the same amount of water and cooking time, so you put a half cup of rice and a half cup of quinoa to two cups of hot water, bring to a boil for 10 minutes, let it steam undisturbed for another 20 until ready to serve.

Finally, Our Vegan Meal, Thanks to Lem's