Malibu morning picture of the day - Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

Tuesday has arrived and there are some gentle feathery clouds above the land today.

We're looking to the south, so a lot of that is over south L.A. County looking toward Orange.

Pointing to the west, we lose the cloud cover and are back to basic blue. There is a software over-correction above giving that sepia kind of look. Until I buy a copy of Photoshop I suppose I have to live with Microsoft forces me to have...

This last Sunday night I went out looking for a certain ingredient that only find in Chinese-operated ethnic markets. It's this stuff, what my mother called "choong choy."

It is a root vegetable that has been dried and cured in salt. It is a portion of the root (the lighter brown) and the dark parts are the leaves of the plant. It's all rolled into these  little bundles. The white flecks you see on them are the layer of salt. They are not canned, rather they are packaged in plastic bags. The English words that you will usually see on the label are "Preserved Turnip/Vegetable/Radish."

It's very salty and you can probably use it as flavoring ingredient to almost anything you want to give a push to. My mom would rinse off the excess salt, mince two or three of these things, and then spread them over the top of about a pound of ground pork in a bowl, set the bowl in a steamer and let it cook for about an hour. You then take out a scoop of the cooked meat & veggie mixture and blend it in with your rice in your bowl. There is a sharpness and smokiness to this vegetable that is unlike anything else. Eating this stuff reminds me of one of the more pleasant things in my childhood.

It is increasingly hard to find. None of the Asian grocery stores in my immediate area carry it any longer. Whenever I do find it, I usually buy out half the stock. The last time I found it was at a store in the East Bay city of Union City. Man, if you want to live among a LOT of Chinese ethnics, call a Union City real estate agent today.

I recently ran out of choong choy so I decided to run a hunting trip into the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) here in So Cal--I don't get to that part of town often, but like Union City, it is a pan-Asian ethnic enclave. You can throw a rock and you'll hit an Asian-owned grocery store, restaurant, foot massage parlor, travel agency, or other retail establishment. 

My bad knees and limited time don't allow me to just park the car on Valley Blvd. and just start walking into every store (you can do that in L.A. Chinatown, but NOT out in SGV), so I did an Internet dive and recommendations surfaced for three large stores close to one another: Market 168, San Gabriel Superstore, and Hawaii Market.

I'll pick up this topic tomorrow. See you then.

Love,

Pops