When it rains, it pours, my friends. PR and I have been baking a lot of ground beef curry buns, because ground beef is cheap, I’m a weeb, and seasonal pay is killing us. I was all set to share this awesome, easy lunch recipe…

…and the oven died…

So there will be no delicious baked goods for two weeks, while we wait for a new stove computer…did you know that modern stoves have computers in them?

Instead, I’ve got a convenient shopping list for you folks. Obviously, I have a deep appreciation (PR says “fetish”) for Japanese and Korean cuisine. I also am a silly white girl living deep in the Great White North, where anything other than steak and taters is “exotic” and General Tso’s Chicken is considered a real challenge for the palate.

Soooo…I do a ton of my shopping on Amazon – God bless you Amazon Prime! What follows is my “Top Ten Ingredients You Can’t Get at Your Local Price Chopper, Because You Are a Poor Hipster Gaijin:”

1. The Devil’s Three Way: Ok. Right off the bat I’m going to cheat because this will have three items, but “Top 12” is awkward. You can blame my husband. PR has this endearing/annoying habit of dismissing a food, a show, a musical (*cough*Hamilton*cough*) after one try, then slowly and furtively becoming a huge stan behind my back. Such was the case with both Kewpie Mayonnaise and Bulldog Tonkatsu sauce.

The problem may have been how he was initially introduced. I first bought Kewpie and Tonkatsu sauce as toppings for okonomiyaki (yes, I know I should have gotten Otafuku’s Okonomiyaki sauce, but I like the taste of the tonkatsu better and it’s usually a touch cheaper). That was a bad idea. PR, as I found out, cannot stomach nori or katsuobushi as toppings, so his initial impression of the sauce combo was soured (he also didn’t like how I would sneak tastes of Kewpie, like some MSG junkie, but that’s another story). But then, with the help of our famous friend, Sriracha, he started sneaking the DTW onto sandwiches. And scrambled eggs. And tuna salad. And horseradish sauce. And then he started complaining when we ran out. So now we have a recurring order with Amazon Prime to keep us flush with Kewpie, Bulldog, and Sriracha.

To break it down:

• Kewpie Mayonnaise – Japanese mayo made with egg yolk, rice vinegar and that delicious, delicious MSG. As per usual, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has thought way too hard about this: http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/10/sauced-japanese-style-kewpie-mayonnaise-recipe.html. Instead, just buy the bottles on Amazon.
• Bulldog Tonkatsu Sauce – Meant for Tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet), but I put it on Okonomiyaki ‘cause I’m a rebel. It’s a slightly sweet Worcestershire kind of … thing. Obviously great on tonkatsu, but I also pour it on cream cheese and eat the whole mess with crackers…’cause I’m a rebel…
• Sriracha –
  

  “What can I tell you about [Sriracha] which you have not already found out from those who do not lie just the thousand or so food bloggers in Brooklyn?” – John Lennon

  I’m the only person in the world who finds this hilarious. 

  It’s pepper sauce. It’s tangier than its American and Mexican cousins, due to the overwhelming wallop of vinegar. It saves the lives and palates of broke college students the world over.

  Buy these things and your scrambled eggs will thank you forever.

2. Gochugaru: Gochugaru is Korean red pepper flake. If you want to make any kimchi worth eating, you need to get this stuff. I have tried to make kimchi with the gochugang red pepper paste, but the results were wildly disappointing. I am sure there are food bloggers out there who can make a mean kimchi just with the paste, but I am not one of them.

But these flakes are no one-recipe pony, oh no! I use them wherever I would use crushed red pepper because, well, I lost my crushed red pepper shaker. </shame> They’re a nice addition of heat and sweet to refrigerator pickles. I use them in hot and sour soup in place of the white pepper. I haven’t tried it on top of pizza (Adirondack Style, natch), but I imagine it would be fine. Be aware that they tend to be a bit sweeter, with varying intensities of heat and, depending on the batch, a little saltier. I swear to God the last batch of gochugaru I got had additional salt in it, even though the package listed peppers as the sole ingredient.

3. Katsuobushi: Also known as bonito flakes or skipjack tuna flakes, depending on the quality, as one fish is sometimes substituted for the other due to price. They take a fish, smoke it, coat it in fungus and ferment it until it dries into something resembling an enormous weathered wooden fishing lure. Cut into some of the nicer whole katsuobushi and you get this beautiful resinous garnet core, ready to be shaved into piles of fluffy pink clouds.

I feel like Garnet would appreciate this post.

We will not be shopping for such rarity today.

We’re going to get the workaday bonito hanakatsuobushi, which is still pretty tasty. It’s katsuobushi without the final fermentation stage, but it works the same for most applications. I have added a few “real deal” katsuobushi and planer boxes to the Amazon list, but your mileage may vary. This is one product I haven’t been able to try – I asked for a fermented fish brick for Christmas, but I guess Santa thought I was nuts *cries* ;_;.

I think it tastes like a campfire on the beach, which sounds awful, but lends a lot of richness and smoke to your food instantly. This is a good thing. Boil it with kombu (see below) for the easiest fish broth you’ve ever made. Use it to top all of your party foods – trust me, if you can remember your college cravings for post-party beef patty, you can understand post-party okonomiyaki. It is also a great cat treat! If you’re like me, and your parties guests include yourself, your husband, Netflix and your cat, katsuobushi is a great addition to the lineup. Go Whalers!

4. Kombu: There’s not much to say about kombu. It’s seaweed. You stick it in a pot of water, let it steep, boil it briefly, add your other ingredients and steep again to make dashi stock. It can also be soaked and cut up for salads, or roasted and ground into seasoning. Half the time I make a soup base for ramen, I just stick a sheet of it in with the pig entrails. If you need an umami boost in your soup or sauce, think about including some kombu as a vegan alternative to bones or guts. Don’t, however, suggest this to your husband, as he’s preparing his sainted grandmother’s ziti recipe. It will not end well.

5. Daikon radish: This has actually become easier to find in produce aisles over the years. We don’t get it often at the Chop, but when we do, I always pick some up. Daikon is a big part of a lot of Japanese soups and stews, particularly the cozy winter ones, like oden and nabemono dishes. Am I doing a hot pot night this winter? You bet I’m doing a hot pot night this winter!

But I like it best in do chua, or Vietnamese daikon and carrot pickles. Cut into thin strips, let them age in a sweet vinegar brine, eat as a condiment on sandwiches, or snack on them outside, where PR can’t smell them, ????, profit! They are very smelly, but so delicious.

I’ve included a link to the seeds, just because you can’t really get fresh produce from Amazon yet, but if you can’t find the fully grown in your local grocery, try a co-op (or any other crunchy hippy type of store). I’ve always had good luck with daikon at my local co-op, although the quality leaves a little to be desired when they’re out of season.

6. Nori: This is seaweed, but a different kind! Roasted and dried seaweed, this time, which means it can cover things like wrapping paper, or be pulverized into another seasoning. If you’re hip enough to stock nori in your home, you probably already know about its use in sushi. You probably already mix ground nori with sesame seeds and fish flake for furikake, or rice seasoning. You may even use it to wrap your onigiri rice balls, but my favorite application for nori, and the one that sees the most lunchbox use, is the hip new onigirazu. It’s basically onigiri, but instead of the typical dainty triangle or ball, it’s shaped like a Smashburger. You can fill it like a burger, too! I pull out all my leftovers, spread them on a bed of nori and cheap rice, cover that with another layer of rice, then wrap the nori around it tightly with the help of a little plastic wrap. The next day, I have a tasty, neat portable treat.

7. Sun Ramen Noodles: I’ve spoken at length about the fact that you just can’t get ramen anywhere around here. The closest ramen joins are around two hours away and are average at best. So we make ramen for ourselves a lot, and by a lot, I mean “when we can be bothered to work for 48 hours to make four servings of soup.” A lot of our reticence with this dish is wrapped up in the noodles. They’re easy enough to start – just mix flour and kansui, the alkaline salt solution that gives the noodles their color and chewiness. The problem is that the kansui almost makes the noodles too strong; the dough is a bear to work with. It’s like trying to flatten a mattress with a rolling pin.

Enter Sun Ramen Noodles. We typically only find them in packs with the soup broth, but that’s ok. Sun’s noodles are used in ramen-ya all over the country and the noodles provided with each of their single-serve packs are ideal for those of us who can’t jet down to NYC for dinner. Plop the individual servings of noodles into a pot for half a second, then serve with your homemade broth and toppings. PR’s fresh noodles do taste better, but just by a hair (and come on, when’s the last time you heard of frozen beating fresh?).

A caveat to consider: when last I bought the Sun Noodle packs on Amazon, they were much, much cheaper. Now that Sun is being carried by Wegmans, you may be better off hopping in your car and driving to your local grocery store, that is, if you have a Wegmans, you spoiled little thing! (grumble grumble)

8. Nissin RAOH Ramen: Of course, if you’re looking at some of the above posts and thinking “I am not putting that much effort into my Cup ‘O Noodles, then try the Nissin RAOH ramen series. About as much effort to prepare as your college cups, but much, much better quality and taste. And maybe… not so much styrofoam in your soup; sorry, I had a bad experience junior year.

9. Fish Sauce: This is another contested item in our pantry, but even PR has come around to it’s usefulness. It’s another putrefied fish product, so it’s going to smell rank. In fact, we used limited amounts to lure a family of feral kittens out of our neighbor’s barn. It’s that strong. But because it’s so powerfully flavorful, a dab will do ‘ya in soups, sauces, marinades, etc. Serious Eats has devoted a fair amount of web space to the uses of Fish Sauce. I put a splash in my kimchi-style refrigerator pickles for a little extra salt and depth.

10. Kimchi: Ah, kimchi. If PR ever leaves me, kimchi will undoubtedly be listed among the “irreconcilable differences” within our marriage. He just can’t stomach it. If I have opened one of my homemade jars within 30 minutes of him arriving home, he will smell it, he will comment on it, and, on occasion, he will leave on an errand, just to outmaneuver the odor.

What’s funny is that he started the whole thing! He took me out to dinner at New World Bistro in Albany (Chef Ric Orlando of Chopped fame) and we shared an appetizer of pork belly with their house-made kimchi. PR adores pork belly in all of its rugged, gout-bestowing glory, so the kimchi didn’t really enter his mind while ordering. Also, their kimchi was more of a lightly pickled slaw than a true ferment, but at the time, we both enjoyed it, so when I started to see it in stores (always between the pomegranate juice and the beer. Always.), I picked some up. It was funky. It was fizzy. It was crunchy. It was hot. It was a great, low-calorie substitute for my raging chip addiction. It was…nauseating to PR. So, after much debate, we have agreed to limit kimchi purchases to once per month, aside from any homemade product. And I’m not allowed to open the jar while he’s in the county kitchen

The problem is, there’s a surprising amount of great kimchi up here! There are at least 3 small kimchi companies within a 2-hour radius of my house. It’s available at every local co-op in nearly every conceivable variation: radish, white, more bok choy, crisper cabbage, mild, spicy, and stupid hot. I don’t know why a community that values very little in the way of foreign food has latched onto kimchi, of all things. It might be the pickling/canning tradition up here – putting veggies up for the winter keeps people alive. It sounds hyperbolic, but I’m living on my homemade kimchi burrito bowls this week, so I get it.

Linked below are a few brands that I can get my hands on, both in my area and on Amazon. I mean, if I had to pick between PR and these jars, I’d probably pick PR? Yeah…probably.

Honorable Mention: Calbee’s Honey Butter Chips. I suffer from a terminal case of Peter Pan syndrome (by the way, what’s up with all the songs about Peter Pan this season? Millennial ennui? Anyway…). Due to a hellish confluence of poverty, immaturity, infertility (yeah, I said it…visibility is important), illness and straight-up lack of time, I haven’t yet begun that all-consuming vocation of motherhood (I will not say “building a family,” because PF is my family. That sh** makes my blood boil). My free time, what little I have, is still very much my own and, since I work with younger folks, I tend to spend that time playing games at their recommendation. Because I am a child. And they have really good recommendations.

When I was gifted a new phone recently, I knew just what my first purchase would be. A game that so brilliantly uses it’s unique mechanic that it elevates the entire otome genre. I’m, of course, referring to Mystic Messenger. The storylines are the typical, high camp otome fluff, but the game mechanic – interacting with your friends and suitors entirely through chat, text messages and calls – is such a cool little trick and perfectly suited to 5-minute casual play on your smartphone.

So I played through Deep Mode, ‘cause Mama didn’t raise no slouch, and of course, I played the route of the wryly comic hacker nerd whose Peter Pan persona hides turmoil and pain…

…what? Don’t look at me like that!

Ah, Clannad. Such a sweet, unassuming slice-of-life anime. 

…and I came out of the route desperately wanting two things:

1. A robot cat:

2. Honey Butter chips:

Great minds must think alike, because around the same time as I finished the game and began to develop a honey butter popcorn recipe, Maangchi made her own honey butter chicken/wing video! Go watch, she’s adorable and her knife skills are awesome. I can’t top that, especially without a taste of the real deal, so to Amazon I went (supporting the Buffalo Central Terminal restoration through smile.amazon.com). Two days later, I had the mythic, mystic bags.

They are…unique. The sweetness is almost sharp, the way it cuts through the expected, savory butter flavor. It is not entirely pleasant for the first few bites, but it does mellow out and become one of those addictive, salty/sweet things. As I told PF, “it tastes like movie theater popcorn and kettle corn had a baby.” It is a bit of a mouth coater, as well, with a fatty, creamy after…feel? You must be thinking that this is a pass, and it’s really not. They’re very good, but they do take some getting used to. Expect your hands to reek for a few hours, as well.

Oh my god, how on earth is his phone not covered in honey butter powder?? Gross…

So, *drumroll*…

Here’s the list below! Some of these items are imported, and at first glance, rather expensive. Think of them as pantry staples – they’re going to last for many meals and will help stretch your normal food budget with their versatility (again, kimchi burrito bowls, that’s all I’m saying).

Have fun and EAT THE FOOD!