Food Notes: 8/5
Gochujang, fried rice, kimchi, Rosner's Rules, purse tuna, and more!
We ran out of Gochujang. It’s not an easy thing to find on Cape Cod where garlic is considered an exotic spice.
Spicy sauces and ingredients are easy to find in Brooklyn, but when I’m headed to my parents’ on the Cape, I always stock up on essentials like Chile Crisp, Melinda’s hot sauce, and Gochujang. We left half tub in the back of the refrigerator last summer and I thought we were good. After cooking with it over the New Year, nobody else had bothered to touch it.
I reached into the back of the refrigerator a few weeks ago but instead of finding the thick sauce, what remained looked like a red moon surface, desicated and cracked. Turns out Gochujang does expire. But that left us with a problem: where to find some out on Cape Cod.
The Super Stop & Shop where I usually get groceries doesn’t stock it, nor does the hippie-haven, Friends Market, that mother prefers shopping at. The one place I thought for certain might have some, Atlantic Spice, was out of stock. I even looked on the shelves of the Eastham Superette just in case they were going to surprise me.
That’s when I decided it was time to check out Shaw’s. Now owned by Albertson’s, Shaw’s was founded in Portland (the good one) in 1860, and became a long-running New England Grocery chain. The stores are scattered across the Cape, and out here seemingly the main competitor with Stop & Shop. But I’d never been in one.
Stop & Shop has limited its competitors, especially out on the Cape where there is finite space for large format stores. The chain buys up land, adds restrictive covenants preventing other grocery stores from opening, and then sells or otherwise abandons the property. They’ve done this across the Cape, but it’s a lot more of a problem on the outer Cape, where the narrow bar of sand becomes an hour’s drive from the mainland.
On the outer Cape, Stop & Shop has two large format supermarkets — one in Provincetown, which serves just the tip, and then next store is in Orleans. In between there are a handful of small markets like Hatch’s, Wellfleet Marketplace (which I still call Lima’s), the Eastham Superette, and convenience stores like Cumberland Farms. But there’s a shortage of actual grocery stores.
It hasn’t always been this way. I’m old enough to remember, for instance, the old IGA on Route 6. It wasn’t a huge store, but it was a supermarket. It closed decades ago, and has been more or less derelict since (the subdivided space now sports a Dunkin Donuts). In Eastham, Stop & Shop added usage restrictions to an old golf driving range, before selling the land to the city for low income housing (There is now a weekly farmer’s market on the property, which seems like a dare to the Stop & Shop’s legal department). But across the Cape, when big retail spaces are put up for sale, Stop & Shop buys the land and adds restrictions on what can be sold to prevent competition.
Despite all this, I’ve never actually been in the Shaw’s. My father likes shopping there because he can search the app for products and it tells him what aisle to find them in . This seems like it actually takes a lot longer than simply grocery shopping like a normal adult. But it did inspire me to give Shaw’s a search for Gochujang — and sure enough, I found it listed online.
I still haven’t been in Shaws, but my wife stopped in on the way back from picking our kid up from day camp. To celebrate, I decided to use a lot of the spicy sauce and make some Korean-inspired dishes (emphasis on inspired).
As it turns out, we also had a number of leftovers I was trying to use up. First, there was what my mother had called Bacon Rice, a dish of white rice with bacon. I decided to use this as a base for some fried rice. I also had a bowl of Béchamel sauce from having made crepes the day before, so I decided to make Kimchi Mac and Cheese, a dish that’s more common than you might expect in Brooklyn. And finally, I decided to make a spicy pork stir fry imitating the flavors of Jeyuk Bokkeum.
The Rice
I was working with a big pile of pre-cooked rice that had bacon mixed in. I didn’t bother looking at a recipe, and I just kind of made it up as I went. I started out frying some peppers, garlic, scallions, and chopped up kimchi, along with some of the juice from the kimchi jar. With this simmering, I added the rice, and scooped in a tablespoon of Gochujang, a dash of soy sauce, and a dash of sesame oil. I fried it up and garnished with scallions.
The Mac and Cheese
I’ve made Mac and Cheese with Gochujang before, but this time I was adding kimchi too. I was starting out with premade Béchamel sauce to which I add 8 ounces of shredded sharp cheddar and 8 ounces of shredded pepper jack cheese. I had boiled some elbows, reserving a few for our four-year-old who prefers it the Italian way (i.e. butter and parmagiana). Into the cheese sauce I stirred in gochujang and finely diced kimchi, then folded in the cooked pasta. At this point the dish was totally delicious, and I would have been happy eating a bowl of creamy kimchi, gochujang mac and cheese. However, I poured it into a baking pan and topped with bread crumbs, baked it for ten minutes, and then topped with scallions. If anything, the kimchi tempered the spiciness of the gochujang.
The Pork
Here’s where I used a lot of the gochujang. I pulled up a couple of recipes to reference, and then rolled with the vibes. We got a big chunk of pork, and to cut this thing I put it in the freezer for about 20 minutes before slicing it. The extra cold meat actually did help slice thinner pieces. I made a sauce from gochujang, soy sauce, sesame seed oil, sugar, and garlic powder. I fried the sliced meat while prepping carrots, bell peppers, onions, and garlic. I probably had too much meat, and the wrong shaped pot—the frying pan was filled with rice rather than meat. When the meat had browned, I added the vegetables and the sauce. A the last minute I threw in some snow peas. The flavors paired well with the rice and mac and cheese.
Overall, the meal came together quickly — once all the vegetables were chopped.I kept the heat level mild since I knew my parents have a lower tolerance for spice. But a day later, when I reheated some leftovers, everything gained a little bit of heat.
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