Supermarket / Russia 5

I was intrigued to see lots of familiar brands in the grocery store in Siberia.  If you need a junk food fix, you're in luck.

The local hooch is cheap -- you could get a bottle of low-end Russian vodka for $3; Stoli is only $7.50 for a half liter.  (Why is the Stoli label all in English??)

By contrast, MY local hooch, made just down the road from us, is pretty steep -- $27 for a fifth of Jim Beam, $35 for Wild Turkey.

Compared to prices in US liquor stores, that's about a 50% markup on US booze imported to Russia, but about a 300% markup on Russian booze imported to the US. We might infer that Russia feels no need to impose sin taxes on liquor; they might even like cheap booze for its role in crowd control.  Just speculating.

Supermarket / Russia 4

I was struck by how much prepared food was available in the Russian grocery store.  Many, many vegetables and salads, cooked meats, side dishes.  Much was cooked on site, and smelled delicious! I guess Russian women are at work, not in the kitchen -- or maybe the kitchens are small.  Clearly some people have enough money to get dinner at the store.

Supermarket / Russia 3

The supermarket in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk had a feature I've never seen before: frozen foods in bulk.  At the end of the freezer case, after all the packaged fruits and vegetables, were a bunch of open bins with scoops.  Help yourself to one half plum or just enough broccoli for one!

I suspect that frozen foods are way more important in remote Russia than they are to US shoppers.  Winter lasts a long time -- this is Siberia, after all -- and I doubt there's a whole lot of fresh produce being flown in.  But I don't expect to go back in February to test this hypothesis.

Supermarket / Russia 2

If the fish looked pretty good in the grocery store in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the sausage looked fabulous.  I don't believe I've seen so many different varieties of sausage before, even in Germany or in the German butcher shop in Frankenmuth, Michigan.

And I think there was one more case that I neglected to shoot!

Supermarket / Russia 1

Two days sail from Kushiro, we had a shore excursion into Russia, to the oil and natural gas boomtown of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.  (Hey, anybody can visit Moscow and St. Petersburg, but don't you think Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk will win in a travel pissing contest?)

I enjoyed gawking from the bus at the unbeautiful architecture, and strolling through the city park, full of tanks and guns from WW2, but the best part of the trip was our half-hour stop at the shiny new shopping mall.  The other tourists from our bus headed for the global brand-name shops, but many of us went straight to the supermarket.

Maybe we expected to see meager piles of black bread made from sawdust, but if so we were sorely disappointed.  I didn't have time to inspect the middle aisles of canned and packaged goods, but the produce and meat departments were somewhere between perfectly acceptable and wow!

Since we were right on the ocean, let's start with the fish.  Not so many varieties as we saw in Kushiro, but more smoked stuff, and more ready-to-eat salads and sushi.

 

And no, I don't know what you're supposed to do with the fish head.

Supermarket / Japan 5

It's hard to say which section of the grocery impressed me the most: the fish or the prepared foods.  In addition to various sushi assortments, you could buy many kinds of tempura fried goodies and stuff on skewers.  This is just one section of a counter that went on for a long way.  Everything smelled delicious and had we not just had breakfast, I would have bought a substantial box full.

And what you might call semi-prepared foods -- here, beautiful trays of paper-thin sliced pork and other meats to cook in your shabu-shabu soup pot.  (I'll tell you about our shabu-shabu experience after I exhaust the grocery store photos.)

Supermarket / Japan 4

As you might expect, the rice section is big in the Japanese grocery store.  Ten kilo bags weren't even put on shelves, just wheeled out on a dolly.  These were plain white rice, the variety most used in the Japanese kitchen.

But for the adventurous cook, lots of choice of other varieties.

And there was a little bit of our more familiar carbo, this the famous Japanese shokupan ("milk bread"), described as sweet, moist and fluffy.  It's sold in loaves with the heels cut off, in really thick slices, because Japanese kitchens have toaster ovens, not pop-up toasters.  Bread only became popular in Japan in the last century and now it's a staple.

Supermarket / Japan 3

Still at the fish counter in Kushiro...

A lot of sea creatures and sea-creature products that we don't even recognize.

Salmon jerky, in long stiff strips.

Two different kinds of roe (there were more).

Dark red whale meat (Japan is one of a handful of countries that allow the sale of whale, despite a global ban. They fish it from "research" vessels and say the meat is the "incidental byproduct" of research.  Sure, we believe this.)

Tiny whiting, about an inch long, eyes and all.  Our American guide, who lived in Japan for many years, said that when his wife was pregnant, she was encouraged to eat lots of whiting for the calcium and other nutrients.  She did, but the minute she gave birth she said no more.

Supermarket / Japan 2

The seafood section in the Kushiro supermarket is overwhelming, as you might expect in a Japanese fishing village.  Some of it was already packaged, some was just sitting there on ice waiting for you to grab it.  The counters went on and on, as much space devoted to seafood as my neighborhood grocery gives to fish, meat and poultry combined.

Supermarket / Japan 1

I've just returned from a trip to Japan and Russia, and perhaps surprisingly, the highlights of the trip included visits to food markets.  To my amazement, the supermarket in Kushiro, a small Japanese town on the remote northern island of Hokkaido was so well stocked that I could imagine myself happily subsisting there.  Can't always say that about small towns in remote areas of the U.S.

I'll have a bunch of posts in subsequent days so I can show you everything I discovered.

Today: the produce section (don't you love the "vegetable" sign in English?)

In Japan food is always displayed artistically.

Melons with an elegant bit of stem still attached, protected in plastic foam nets, packed into beautiful cardboard boxes with a little brochure.

Green vegetables standing upright in perfect little bundles.

Blueberries from Oregon.

Free fish -- and it's pretty good

We bought fish at the seafood counter the other day and the fish man asked us if we would like a free sample of a new product.  We chose the lemon pepper sauce and were handed a big foil package with a chunk of salmon inside, hidden under a slice of lemon.

The directions were vague -- if it weighs between 4 and 8 ounces, bake it at 12 to 18 minutes.  I weighed it at between 6 and 7 ounces on my trusty kitchen scale. "Cooking time subject to weight and thickness of fish and are a guide only" the package said.  Since I couldn't see the fish I guessed and set the timer for 14 minutes.

I cut open the package and sliced the salmon fillet in two, and it was translucent pink and barely warm to the touch in the center.  Back in the oven for 4 more minutes.  By now my expectations were pretty low, but heck, it was free...

The package said that extra sauce should be poured over the fish after serving, but there was no extra sauce in this package, perhaps because it had evaporated during the 4 minutes of cooking after I opened it.  There was a bit of lemony goo on top of the fillet, and that slice of lemon that had been visible through the package window.

Oops -- somebody forgot to take the label off the lemon before slicing it.  My expectations sank a bit lower.

But to my amazement, the fish tasted quite nice.  The lemon pepper sauce was peppery but not too much, and unlike many supermarket marinades, which usually strike me as artificial-tasting, it was pleasant and did not overwhelm the fish.  The fish was done perfectly, despite my haphazard decision-making about cooking time.

Now, of course, you wait for the second shoe to drop.  In a couple of weeks the fish-in-a-package will be available for sale and we'll see how expensive it is.  Presumably the fish man will pick out your fillets from the case, put them in the foil bag, dump in a portion of sauce (the package listed sweet bourbon, rosemary garlic and cajun in addition to lemon pepper) and seal the bag for you to take home.  The package gives cooking directions (or should I say cooking hints, since they're so vague) for electric, gas and convection ovens.  No microwaves, of course, since the package is metal.

We'll have to decide whether we really want Chilean farmed salmon (which we usually avoid) at a high price (why do I assume the price will be high?) and whether the convenience is worth the markup (why do I assume there will be a markup?).  We'll have to decide whether the pleasant sauce will make us like fish varieties we ordinarily don't buy because they're too insipid.

I suspect we won't be getting the fish-in-a-bag very often, if at all, although it's certainly easier to pop the bag in the oven than to cook it myself on the top of the stove, and it creates way fewer dishes to wash.  But apparently Kroger thinks it's worth a shot, enough to give away a lot of free fish to try to get us hooked.

Good ideas at the grocery

I bought the last bag of beans on the supermarket shelf last week -- or rather, the last bag of beans that looked like all the bags of beans I've been buying for 50 years.  I also bought a couple of new bags of beans, featuring zip tops.

What a great idea!  For 50 years my cupboards have been full of half bags of beans, rolled up and secured with rubber bands or bulldog clips.  How much simpler to acknowledge that people don't always use the full bag in one recipe, and provide a closable package.

So far great northern beans seem to be the only variety in the new packaging, but I can hope that it will be phased in to the other kinds one of these days.  Now if we could also get zip tops for rice, flour, sugar and lots of other staples.

And cereal.  I would think I died and went to heaven if I didn't have to wrestle with those cereal bags, difficult to open without tearing, difficult to reclose even if you didn't tear them.

Eat your vegetables bait and switch

At the grocery this week and a new kind of pasta caught my eye -- instead of just tinting your tricolor pasta in different colors, they promise a full serving of vegetables.

But wait -- you have to eat 4 ounces of pasta to get that serving of vegetables.  That's a lot of pasta, as I know well because I weigh my pasta before cooking (I use between 4.5 and 5 ounces for two adults, when that's the only entree).  In fact, the "official" serving is just 2 ounces, as you can tell on the side of the box.

And here's another brand, same concept, same misleading display on the front of the box.

So why the bait and switch?  Why not just say "a half serving of vegetables in each serving of pasta"? That's good right there.

If your intention is to make it easy and appealing for people to eat more vegetables, then making them think they're getting more than they really are seems counterproductive.