I'm trying to decide where to take them for dinner on their first night on PEI. A part of me is leaning towards Rufus and Rory's Finer Diner so that they can see where I work, but this is also a chance to show them what the island has to offer for restaurants. I guess I have 2 days still to figure it out. I keep forgetting the reason that they're traveling the 5,500 kms is to see me graduate. Graduation seems to be the last thing on my mind right now. I made Pad Thai last week and it was delicious. The one thing that I learned though is that it is very difficult to find tamarind in this town (we borrowed it from Kelly) and there is just one little Chinese food store that carries it. Unfortunately the day we went to get some, it was closed. But after the success of the meal I decided that I needed to always have tamarind on-hand so I went back to the store to get some. Now I am officially obsessed with this little store and I keep finding silly reasons to go back. Today it was for rice wine vinegar and water chestnuts. Sure I could easily find these items in any regular grocery store, but that's boring!
This place takes me back to all of the trips to Victoria (BC) I used to go on and we would end up in these amazing (and large) Chinese supermarkets and spend a stupid amount of time just walking around and looking at everything. I remember this one giant store that had a fridge full of congealed cow's blood. Gross. What do people use that for anyway? But apart from the nasty items that frighten me, everything in these stores are just so colourful, new and unusual to me so I want to buy it all then go home and search for recipes to use the ingredients. Well, except for today I was looking at a bottle of pickled eel heads.
I have no desire to cook with that. And don't get me started on the candy and snack food aisles. We would stand in this aisle and find the most outrageous candies and buy them, hoping to find the tastiest of the tasty. Most of the time they weren't very good. Luckily this is a tiny tiny store so I can't spend all day reading everything, but every so often I find something that I just have to buy. Today it was sweet and spicy broad beans. They're kind of like honey-roasted nuts, but they're roasted in chili spices and sugar. The first few I ate I wasn't sure if I liked them, but the more I ate the more I liked. Tip of the Day: Don't be intimidated by foreign food grocery stores. Generally you can find great prices on foods you eat regularly (like rice, soy sauce and chili sauce) and most will have English in the labels as well. Chinese supermarkets are great!
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