FOOD | ASIAN FOOD | COOKING AT HOME
Bringing Asian Food To My Canadian Kitchen
If I can’t go to Asia, I will get my fill of Asian food at home
Ihave had a constant craving for Asian food for a while now. I’m not sure how it began, but one day I just knew that I needed to eat Asian food of some sort. It didn’t really matter what specifically.
Maybe it is the amazing food articles that I read here at Sharing Food. They tend to get my mouth watering like nobody’s business, most of the time.
It started well before we left Europe to return to Canada last March. One of my first requests of my parents when I reached my hometown was to go to the Chinese restaurant. Sadly, we did, and it sucked. The ownership has changed hands in recent years and the delicious food that they used to serve is, unfortunately, no longer.
This meal may qualify as the worst Chinese food that I have ever eaten, in fact! My Asian food cravings were not satisfied at all!
However, we have now visited a sushi restaurant and have also managed Pho in Vietnamese restaurants on a few separate occasions. We have also eaten at a couple of Indian restaurants and a Lebanese take-out joint. Sadly, dining out in Canada these days is a costly affair — you can expect to pay around $50 for two people, without drinks!
I meant to photograph our Pho before we started! Doh!
I have spent the odd moment since we have been back imagining us flying off to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines or any other Southeast Asian country, as our next destination. When I think of all of the delicious food that I could eat, my mouth waters so bad I feel like I may drown in it.
Alas, we may still get there sometime in 2024, but for now, I have had to take matters into my own hands.
The city that we are currently near in Canada has a large Asian population and even has an Asian Supermarket. It is right across the parking lot from the Superstore, and since discovering it, we always go there first on our shopping days. The aisles are full of an amazing assortment of goodies and each time we go we discover more and more exciting things that we want to try.
Not to mention, their vegetables are always superior to the ones that we find in the large grocery stores.
Our latest obsession is with ‘rice cakes.’ I had never heard of these before but they come in a frozen state. All we have to do is thaw them out and then fry them with the rest of our vegetables. They are soft and spongy, and kind of gelatinous when cooked. Of course, they are made of rice and sort of have the hardened consistency of rice paper until you defrost them and cook them in a meal.
They then absorb all of the flavours of the meal, which makes them soft and delicious! You can see them all puffed up in the lead photo.
I’ve also been enjoying some Korean Kimchi. This delicious fermented food of spicy pickled cabbage is great on its own, or I put it on a cracker. I know this might not be the traditional way to eat it, but it tastes great and that is good enough for me. I have not been to Korea and I can only imagine how good the food is over there.
Chris and his Aunt, whom we are currently staying with, both think that it smells disgusting. I shrug my shoulders and — guilt-free — continue eating it with glutinous abandon.
We have also brought home some lemon grass. Mind you, we really don’t know what we are doing with it, but chopping it up into tea is amazing. I also used it to season a lemon squash soup that I invented last week. I think I put too much in but the others loved it.
Chris’ Aunt is vegetarian so we have had many different iterations of tofu as well. We bought ourselves a small deep fryer from the second-hand store and it seems to be our favorite way to make it now.
We even found sushi wraps and I got down to business making sushi one night. I haven’t done this in years and it felt great to get back at it. The best we could do was canned tuna with carrots and green onion. Not exactly traditional Japanese food, but it sufficed. Plus, Chris’ Aunt eats fish.
We have also been enjoying the puffy bean curd that we can get at the store, plus we found frozen jackfruit. Of course, it is not as good as real jackfruit, but we will take what we can get these days.
I fried the bean curd in soy sauce, chopped ginger and garlic and added some honey to the mix. Then I topped it in fresh chopped green onion. It was delicious! We left a few pieces for Chris’ Aunt and decorated her plate with pieces of jackfruit.
Having not traveled much, she has tried many new foods since we have been staying with her. It’s nice to have a willing participant who wants to try new things!
We also bought some small rice papers and I fried some veggie rolls one night. Chris deep-fried the tofu and made a peanut dipping sauce — a recipe that he learned from a Thai lady that we worked with in the Caribbean. Of course, it was all delicious!
I’m sure there are those of you who are cringing at what we are doing with your precious traditional foods over here in Canada. But, truly, this is what it is like to eat in Canada. Our country doesn’t really have its own ‘food identity’, instead we have varieties of food from around the world that we combine together to make great meals.
Canada is a melting pot of people from all walks of life and many of them bring their food traditions with them when they arrive. I am grateful for this because if they didn’t, I surely wouldn’t be able to satisfy my cravings for various foods from the comfort of my own kitchen (at least the one that we are using these days.)
If you have any tips or tricks that you would like to share with me about the foods presented here, please do so! I am always open to learning and experimenting with new foods!
This story is published in Sharing Food, my publication that aims to highlight different foods from around the world. Please join us!
If you like my writing and want to read more, follow me and sign up here to get my articles by email. We would also be happy if you considered leaving me a tip by using the link to Patreon or Ko-Fi below:)
We have been nomadic since 2017! Join our journey by hitting these links:
Website | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn| Patreon| YouTube | Medium | Twitter | Ko-Fi | Unsplash