May 16, 2006
We coasted down Forest Avenue…it was if someone else was driving the car - the Toyota '95 Corolla sedan had a never say die engine and was new to us. On a facade in shopping complex I saw Chinese characters and burst out, "There's a place with Chinese characters!" feeling as if I had never seen them before. Everything was new...we were born again drivers intoxicated with the convenience of our personal rolling machine. We had made it without a car for our first year in Satan Island, and we had arrived.
Forest Avenue is not the outback to native Staten Islanders, but we were Brooklynites in exile, happily forced out of a neighborhood that had become so hip it had become ditsy. Ditsy is not the way we would describe Satan Island which can have a very abrasive, unaccommodating face and beautiful under layers. What first brought me to Forest Avenue was a tip from my neighbor about the garden section at Lowe's. It was there we were headed when we agreed to check out K M Food International on our return.
Stocked with bulbs from Lowe's, we pulled into the K M parking lot. When I saw the lines of shopping carts outside, I realized that this was no bodega - it was an all out supermarket. We walked straight through the shriveled things department - with shitake, sundry fungus and dried fish - to the produce. The Western produce resembled the dried goods (like most NYC produce) - the Chinese produce was fresh. Live seaweed in water-filled Tupperware containers, water spinach, and numerous kinds of bok choy caught my attention. Just seeing the water spinach was enough to cause "strange stirrings in my utility belt" to borrow a quote from the 70's T.V. batman Adam West. The department had the randomness of an outdoor market, and a rough & ready feel.
Next we moved on to the butcher and seafood counter. There were gargantuan shrimp, skirt steaks still with the skin on them and a trio of male humans looking eager to please behind the counter. I started to hyperventilate and get very excited - stirrings became major tremors and great memories of the Asian markets I had ever been to in New York, flooded back to me. We ordered some tilapia fillets and a cod steak, keeping it simple as the mollusks and crustacean counter was unattended. From the massive seafood freezer, we grabbed some fish balls for soup. Now we all know fish don't have balls, right? Chinese fish balls are often made from a base of egg whites, corn starch and pulverized fish and are generally one inch in diameter.
We separated and walked further into the wilderness of a place so wonderful and vast - the size of an indoor football field - it is a must for anyone interested in exploring Asian ingredients. I began to see things I had seen only in Patel Brothers, Kam Man, Sunrise Mart and Pacific Supermarket such as frozen parathas stuffed with potatoes and anise, and Global Tofu the only commercially available tofu that tastes anything like the tofu in Japan and is very hard to find. (For those if you who are intrepid travelers, I recommend the tofu in Koyasan, a Shingon temple complex in Wakayama, Japan.) Further down the aisle, I saw another ingredient that sends me into orbit - tofu skins in my all time favorite manifestation: huge circular skins that are almost 20 inches in diameter and translucent. The dried tofu section was just as encyclopedic.
We began to wonder, when did this place open? Who does the buying? Whose dream is this? Is this place as extraordinary as it seems or is it just the novelty of being outsiders of this culinary tradition? Anxiousness set in when I considered the impossibility of surveying all of these ingredients in one day, with a partner who wasn't in the mood to disappear into K M Food - a Metropolitan/Louvre Museum of Asian groceries, worthy of a dissertation, a manifesto, a seizure. I had found agar agar seaweed in lumps and in strings, and so many potentially favorite mystery stuffs. Wings sprang from my back just to make use of all of the airspace and fly off my berserkness.
Could this be better than the live shrimp tank in Dynasty market? YES. Could it be better than any natural or designer drug? YES. Could it help me to thaw the relentless, relished language barrier I encounter every time I shop in Chinatown? PERHAPS. We left bolstered with hope that perhaps we could weather Satan Island's restaurants closing at 9pm by home-cooking with this menagerie, entertaining delusions of fusion grandeur and imposing them on our friends. Imagine - just when we thought we gasping to death on the sand of the island's culturally arid culinaria, we find another oasis.
Cook-Eye's Fish Ball Soup
Ingredients:
two cloves of garlic
small bunch of coriander
handful of daikon sprouts
1/2 tsp of red pepper flakes
1 tsp of hot or toasted sesame oil
12 frozen fish balls of any kind
1 medium bag of mussels
1/2 cup of mirin or to taste
4 cups of chicken stock
2 stalks of celery sliced in 2" slices on the diagonal
4 shallots cut lengthwise in thin strips
1 cup of daikon cut julienne style
4 small bunches of bok choy cut in two inch slices
10 shitake caps rehydrated and quartered after simmering for 20 minutes in 2 cups of water 1/2 cup of dried arame
Precooked al-dente cellophane noodles al-dente and bread to add to soup
Directions:
Steam the mussels in 1/2 cup of water in a covered pot until they open and strain and reserve the fluid. Separate the mussels from the shells and save them for the soup (you should have about 20).
Combine all broths and simmer a small amount with minced garlic and red pepper. Hopefully, you reduced the broth from the shitake to add as well. When the garlic and red pepper have released their flavor, add the rest of the broth and the vegetables. Add the mirin and the fish balls and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes on a low flame. Now for the last phase add the tenderest of ingredients: the mussels, arame and cellophane noodles. Garnish with cilantro, a sprinkling of daikon sprouts, a teaspoon of hot or toasted sesame oil and serve in deep bowls.
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Cook-Eye
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