Dragged Steverino to 99 Ranch today. Well, not exactly dragged. He doesn’t mind going to food stores. Costco is the place he really hates going.

99 Ranch is a semi-national Asian, mostly Chinese, supermarket chain with a heavy presence in Cali. There’s one very close to my home in a mall where Matt and his friends used to hang drinking bubble tea when they were in high school.

This huge market has whatever you might need to cook Chinese food. Their Korean and Indonesian stock have been getting better, too. The Filipino selection is decent, but for that you can go to a Seafood City. For Indian cooking they’re not the best, but they don’t have to be because there are numerous other places that specialize in that.

I’m happy about the Korean stuff being easier to get there because there is no H Mart north of San Jose in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the one comprehensive Korean supermarket in Oakland, Koreana Plaza, is smallish, with a parking lot that is not death proof.

I’m not complaining. Really.

In the SF Bay Area we have it made when it comes to ingredients for Asian cooking.

When I start to carry on about the lack of H Mart action I think back to 2014 and my attempt to make kimchi in Binghamton, New York. There was ONE STORE that supplied what I needed — because it was Korean-owned. When I asked for gachugaru, the distinctive Korean red chili flakes you gotta have for kimchi, and saeujeot (salted shrimp), the owner all but fell down right there in the aisle.

“You don’t live here, right?”

Don’t think I’m being snippy. Binghamton has lots of things I can’t get where I live. A decent chicken parmesan hero, for one. Spiedies, for another. And all the diners! And I mean real diners, not those SF Bay Area posers with their fancy-pants precious portions.

Thanks to that Korean store I was able to make the kimchi, but it wasn’t ready by the time I needed to travel back to Cali and I think I forgot to remind my friends to eat it by a certain date, so there is more than an even chance it overflowed in their fridge. And possibly became viscous. I wasn’t able to get the right kind of rice flour for the porridge, you see, so I improvised with something that does not age as well.

I owe them a good batch of kimchi and a couple of hours of cleaning of their choice.

I digress. I was talking about 99 Ranch. And heading toward the main topic of this essay: what I bought there today.

By the by, did you know that the number 9 is auspicious in China? It represents longevity. 99 is thus “double lucky.”

And lucky for me the store has a BBQ meat counter and a huge array of hot, prepared food to eat there or take home. One can purchase a whole roasted duck for $17, which is chopped while you wait by a cleaver-wielding woman on whom the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy has nothing.

So of course we had lunch.

Eating there isn’t genteel as the seating area is tight, there is heavy competition for a table and you have to dodge the folks perusing both baked goods and hanging roast fowl. The place is nuts, but I love that kind of energy.

For $10.50, total, you get a mixed hot food or BBQ-over-rice plate. It’s a deal. Steve and I each had duck and roast pork. If you get the mixed hot foods the rule is that the lid on your clamshell container has to close. More or less.

There’s an art to filling up the clamshell.

The first time I went there I didn’t have it down. As I was serving myself eggplant in garlic sauce while trying not to disturb my single piece of fried fish and and lone chicken leg, an older lady grabbed the container from my mitts, transferred the fried fish and chicken to the napkin on the tray, and proceeded to fill the business side of the clamshell to within an inch of its life with eggplant. She then put the fish and chicken on top, went back to where those items were on the steam table and added more of each, creating a tower by using the dividers — which I have to say were almost completely obscured by the eggplant — to stabilize the whole affair. When she was done I had five pieces of fried fish and four large chicken legs. Then she said something to me in Cantonese and motioned to the other side of the container. The dude behind us served as translator, jumping in and telling me that the idea is to “make like you can close it, even though it’s folly.” And to “be confident.”

The check-out person didn’t bat an eye, and the folks I shared my table with nodded approvingly when they took a gander at my fantasmagorical lunch.

That was some 20 years and many visits ago.

Finally, let me tell you what we purchased and why. The photo above shows each item described below.

1). Potato starch noodles for the Korean dish, japchae. This is easy to make and expensive to order.
2). Spring roll wrappers for Vietnamese imperial rolls, filled with a ground pork mixture, and pizza rolls.
3). Mung bean jelly for liangfen, a cold Sichuan dish where the jelly is sliced into strips and mixed with chili oil. It’s shameful that I’m buying this because it’s so inexpensive and easy to make.
4). Pickled mustard greens for mapodofu, spicy tofu and pork. I like to add this sour element to the dish.
5). Spicy tofu snacks for Matthew. These are individually-wrapped squares of pressed, seasoned tofu.
6). Silken tofu for soondooboo — Korean tofu soup.
7). Mustard green pickle instant ramen, because it’s good to have on-hand when you’re in a pinch. Instant ramen can be doctored up in numerous ways.
8). Dried soybeans for natto, Japanese fermented beans. It’s easy to make this once you get the process down. Natto starter and a means of holding at a temperature of between 100 and 115 F. for a day are all you need. An Instant Pot is a popular way to make natto nowadays.
9). Tonkatsu ramen kits from Sun. Sun Noodle produces some of the best ramen in the US. Unfortunately I can usually only find it in kits rather than bulk, but the kits are great. They were a dollar off this week, to boot.
10). Potato starch for certain pancakes and potato kugel. It gives a great texture!
11). Laoganma fried chili in oil with peanuts. The chilies are crispy and the oil has fantastic flavor. I put it on so many things. There’s prickly ash, AKA Sichuan peppercorns, in here, too, so it has that ma la (numbing) heat. Yeah, it has a bit of MSG, but I can deal.

Be adventurous when you’re at markets that specialize in the cuisines of other cultures! Get recipes for your favorite items and then try your hand at making them yourself.

And, if they have prepared foods, eat!