[Sca-cooks] Food items?

[AEllin Olafs dotter]

I've been on jury duty this week, so of course I've been hanging out in 
Chinatown. (You didn't know that follows as the night does the day? 
You've never been to a courthouse in the County of New York... it's 
right on the edge of Chinatown. And we had long lunches, this week - 
things were slow.)

Now, New York's Chinatown is not by any means exclusively Chinese, these 
days. I lunched in Vietnamese restaurants, to try a cuisine with which I 
am totally unfamiliar. Besides, they had  Rice Dishes - meat and 
vegetables over rice with tea and sometimes a small bowl of noodle soup. 
Tax and tip included hovering close to $5.00. Can't beat that. It's 
good, too. I didn't add the myriad hot sauces, because I liked the taste 
of the sauces used for the cooking.

Anyhow, I nudled around the shops a bit, looking for Interesting 
Inexpensive Things that I could easily carry. Found good prices for 
things I am already familiar with, and will return to a few...  But also...

I am now the proud possessor of sliced dried galangale. I remember a 
discussion of the impossibility of grinding dry hunks of the stuff, and 
presume that's why it is sliced very thin. Now I need to figure out what 
I am going to do with this.

I also  have a cylinder of sugar. It's from Indonesia. The label says 
Gula Jawa, which might be the product and might be the brand, and 
there's a sticker on it that adds Sudah Disaring BERSIH.   What does 
this tell me? (Anahita??)  It says the ingredients are Arenga sugar and 
Cane sugar (which doesn't tell me much more than the Indonesian... 
what's Arenga? OK, Cane, I know.) Comments? Information?

Last week, in just over  one day, we went from a high of 60 to a high of 
90. Add this to the wettest June on record... we're not baked, we're 
steamed...

AEllin