A not-that-brief word on my affinity for Chinatown grocery shopping

I do a lot of my grocery shopping in Chinatown. That’s (Chinatown is) the inspiration for the new name of this blog, in fact – there is a store where you can pick out one of a wide variety of live chickens (at least 10 different kinds – all the way from the white and brown chickens you think of to some real weird-looking ones) in cages and have it butchered and plucked for your very, very fresh dining pleasure. I haven’t done it yet, but there is always a line out the door, and they always sell out – I know they sell out because they’re always closed by early afternoon when I’m down there.

It’s a different experience than shopping at a Safeway, a Shaw’s, a Stop & Shop or whatever megamart-style supermarket you might happen to patronize, to be sure (shopping in Chinatown in general is different – not just at the place where you can get live birds). That difference, in and of itself, is why I started shopping in Chinatown in the first place.

I’d been going to Chinatown because I’d never lived in a city with a Chinatown (so I guess Denver has something similar – it’s more like a Vietnamtown, really, so it’s half baguettes and it’s intermingled with taquerias and other stuff on Federal – and it’s so spread out, it’s completely different from what you think of when you think of Chinatown in a San Francisco or a New York, or, on a smaller scale, in a Boston) before I moved to Boston, and I really like the food there. Then, once, while Kristine and I were walking to a restaurant, I noticed something called the Cheng Kwong Seafood Market. I had to wander inside. The first thing I noticed was that it smelled funny.

But I gave it a chance and walked in a little further, and to my left I saw these huge tanks with fish – tilapia in one, and catfish in the other – swimming around in them. I had never seen anything like it before – a place where you can choose a live fish, request that it be dispatched before your very eyes, and take it home with you (I still haven’t done this either, but I've seen lots of other people do it. Once in a while, the man behind the counter will net a fish out of the tank and set it on the counter to mallet-whack it, only to have it flop away. He'll pick it up and put it back, but the fish will flop away to the ground once more. It goes on like this for a couple minutes. This kind of resolve in the fish is inspiring until the fishmonger finally gets him with a hearty thud on the head and it gives one more little flick of the tail before submitting to its future in a fryer or the grill.). They had lobster tanks, too, but those are everywhere, including in Colorado, but I’d never seen them with fish, except for on Iron Chef. There were also crab tanks.

Next to all the live seafood was a case with things you’d see anywhere like shrimp (headless) of varying sizes and shrimp (head on) of varying sizes, as well as some things I’d never seen in a store before, like conch (I’ve also seen that spelled and pronounced “konk”) – the big mollusks that live in the big pink shells – and periwinkles (spelled “perwinker” on the sign in the case), mollusks at the complete opposite end of the size spectrum (little tiny snails found in the ocean). I’ve learned that these are pretty commonly used in stews and soups in some African cultures, and also that you can prepare them by boiling in salted water, and kind of finagling the little guys out of their shells using toothpicks or other pointy implements, being careful all the while not to eat the “little door”, which is the little moveable piece of the shell that they use to keep predators out.

Just to the South of the shrimp-konk-periwinkle case was the ice-lined fish display. In a display only about eight feet long, there were at least twenty varieties of fish in blues and silvers, including at least ten I’d never seen in stores (including mackerel and croaker – both of which are good and very cheap), and several I’d never seen period (all kinds of little flat ones that make me wonder if they even have much meat on them), all whole except for some really big ones that were cut into smaller sections but reassembled to remain whole-looking. And in front of the fish display was a big gray plastic vessel (like the ones used to move dirty dishes around in restaurants) full of little twitching blue crabs.

Immediately behind me, I soon found, was a meat case that no supermarket counterpart could prepare me for. Its contents, in addition to the normal stuff like cuts of pork and beef and chicken were: liver (beef, pork); stomachs (beef, pork); ears (pig); feet (duck, pig, chicken, cow); tails (cow, pig); intestines (pig); bellies (pig); and necks (turkey, chicken, duck, beef, pork).

I didn’t buy anything that first day, or the second time I went to the Cheng Kwong Seafood Market (which is, sadly, not open and has not been for at least 5 months because of renovations – renovations that, when I peer longingly through the window, do not appear to be taking place); I fear it may not reopen). I awkwardly walked back and forth from the fish tanks to the shrimps et al, to the fish display and back, looking at the weird meats now and then, too.

Every time I thought about asking for fish or other seafood, I got scared – I’d never heard any of the men behind the counter speak English, and I didn’t like the idea of a situation in which I started trying to order something but couldn’t tell them what I wanted (this would inevitably end with me running out of the store before crouching and sobbing in the smelly alley next to it, I was sure). It took me a while to summon up the courage to ask for anything.

To some extent, I’ve overcome my anxiety about communicating my fish needs to Chinatown fishmongers. The first purchase I made was shrimp, along with a buch of dirt-cheap citrus fruit and some onions and stuff that I made into ceviche. I’ve purchased shrimp many times since (the phrase “one pound” has come in incredibly handy), and fish (salmon, mackerel, croaker – I’ve found I can simply point to the individual fish I want) a few times, and I even branched out into the world of squid once, when I made a version of Zuppe di Pesce (it didn’t have any actual Pesce, that one) for Kristine on Christmas Eve.

And now, since the Cheng Kwong closed, I’m going to a bigger Chinatown supermarket, called C-mart (692 Washington Street, Boston, 02111). It has an even more intense seafood selection with even more varieties of live seafood in tanks including eels and shrimp (on the sign as “shimps”), as well as an iced seafood display with about 30 or 40 kinds of fish each day. Since I can’t read the labels behind any of them (they’re all in what I’m assuming is Chinese, although I couldn't possible verify it), I’ve decided to go through and try each variety of fish. They’re all cheap (mostly not more than $4/lb). I’ll prepare them all simply the same way (salt, grill), so there’s a kind of control variable. I also may or may not make up a name for the ones I can't identify. Check Live exotic chickens for photos and descriptions of my trials.

I've got a fever, and the only medicine is more spools

I’ve always had a latent nerdy obsession with those big wooden spools. But I thought this latent nerdy obsession would always be admiration from afar – I never thought I’d be the kind of person who actually laid hands on one of the magnificent beasts. You know the ones: two big, wooden circles connected in the middle and used to transport large distances of cable and wiring to construction sites. Well, this week, my latent nerdy obsession got a chance at its 15 minutes of fame.

Kristine and I were waiting for the T when we saw a guy awkwardly wheeling this huge wooden spool (at least 5 feet in diameter) down Huntington Avenue away from Harvard Medical School.

“Kristine,” I said, pointing. “Spool!"

She didn’t want to miss the T, but she could see the disappointed nerd shame spiral looming were I to miss what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So she didn't protest as I risked missing the next trolley and chased the man with the spool down.

He said that the spools just get thrown away (a waste of materials, no?), and when I asked him for the thing, not only did he give it to me, but he thanked me effusively for taking it. This thank-you, as it turns out, was not without cause. He was awkwardly wheeling the spool because great big spools are very awkward to wheel.

I maneuvered the spool back down the sidewalk, across treacherous traffic, treacherous trolley tracks, and more treacherous traffic, over some snow banks, down the alley, and into the back yard.

On the way, a like-minded man waiting for the bus said, “Whoa! Where did you get that?”

I shrugged and said, “Some dude.”

And he said, “That’s gonna be a great table.”

“Yes it is,” I said. “Yes it is.”

Though she was skeptical at first, Kristine caught the spool fever. Either she found my enthusiasm about it so infectious that she couldn’t resist, or she just saw the light, plain and simple. Either way, she’s on board. She wants to find smaller, subsidiary spools that will be like this mighty spool’s moons (or like the chairs to the big spool’s outdoor dining table, more likely).


We’re going to weather-seal it.