감사합니다, Home Plus!

As promised, my shopping adventure!

As I was mentioning, one of the things I have noticed recently is the surprising lack of vegetables. Of course, there is lots of rice, and large amounts of a ubiquitous yellow-dyed sweet radish served as a side dish to every meal. And veggies do come with meals, but not often in the quantity that I'm used to as a North American. It turns out Saskatchewan is more than the place my family is from!

One of the rice displays

It's also a bit more difficult to buy vegetables here. Coming from Vancouver, which has almost as many Asian-run produce stores as Starbucks, I expected to find Asia a produce paradise! To my great disappointment, there are no little produce stores for me to pop down to and grab the evening's veggies.

That was the reason for my late-night trip to Home Plus. Home Plus (or "the Plus") was the setting of my earlier 400,000 Won ($380) shopping trip for kitchen supplies, and now was the test of its grocery section.

As might be expected, their priorities are a little different than a western grocery store. Whereas your average Safeway and IGA has aisles of western food and one "Asian foods" aisle, Home Plus has aisles and aisles of Asian food and one "Western Foods" aisle. The picture I posted in the teaser post is actually a wall of bean paste, not pepper paste as I claimed - but there's a whole wall of it.

The rice add-ons aisle

They have a wall of soy sauce as long as the wall of bean paste. Of course, they have a whole aisle for noodles.

But most impressive is their selection of rice. They have not one but two huge rows of rice, resulting in a tremendously impressive variety of brands, sizes and prices. Most brands had their bags of rice lined up next to one another in order of increasing price - but I couldn't distinguish between the cheapest and the most expensive rice! Needless to say I bought a small bag of cheap rice.

That's not the end of the rice, though - they had a whole new aisle dedicated to rice additives. Like adding wheat germ to flour to change the quality, Koreans add a whole host of ingredients to their rice.

My post-shopping cupboard

I was able to find the basic necessities to stock my cupboard - vinegars, sauces, salt and pepper - as well as some for my fridge - tofu, noodles, juice. And then there were the vegetables.

The vegetable section at Home Plus was a little disappointing to my western palate. The basics were all there - onions, garlic and ginger for stir-frying, mushrooms, bell peppers and broccoli as the real veggies, and lettuce. But there wasn't much beyond that. Perhaps the vegetables are more seasonable here, but there wasn't very much in the way of potatoes or yams, no green beans, asparagus, salad onions, avocados, and so on.

My post-shopping fridge

But at least there were vegetables, and by about 1am, they were mine.

I have been very satisfied in the last couple of days with my shopping. I made a salad the morning after the shopping trip, which, although it wasn't the best salad I've ever made, was in the context ridiculously yummy. Yesterday evening I cooked pasta with mushrooms, peppers and broccoli and covered in Costco-bought cheese, and had Angela and Erin over for dinner. Delicioso!

So I'm one more step ahead in my integration into living in Korea. While I can't complain about the quality and affordability of the restaurants in Beomgye, there is something especially comforting and pleasurable about cooking for myself and for friends, not to mention keeping delicious vegetables in my life.

My mom will be proud of me.

Success is a salad!