cook: bewildering at hankook instead of crying at h mart

Yesterday instead of shopping for banchan at H Mart in San Francisco, I drove instead to Hankook in Sunnyvale. First item on my list were the fish cakes.                                  

I texted Kat, BEWILDERING. I had no idea what she meant by fish cakes. I was assuming fish balls like I had bought at H Mart, which I didn't care for. These packages contained fish balls and cakes in all manner of fried and balled and flattened that looked a lot like prepared tofu but probably varied in their ingredients of shrimp and pork and whatever filler. Kat told me to head over to the unpackaged section. Aaah that makes sense! Some kind of buffet setup where you scoop your own containers of banchan, I thought. Only I see that everything is already prepackaged. I guess since the pandemic, grocery stores are not letting customers scoop and package their preferred portions of buffet items. 

Alrighty and away we go. Ooh, ooh, I see something I recognize--the pickled cucumbers.  And I finally see the fish cakes, Kat was wanting. I asked Kat, this right? And she replied Yaaasss.           

Kat was also texting me that the kimchi she had at home wasn't spicy enough and to pick up some more. And I finally see a sign for Jap Chae. Oh! They're sweet potato noodles I asked Kat? Yep, I had no clue.

 

Okay, but that's only 3 things I've got so far.

I wanted bean sprouts, but not this large a container! Kat said she was okay not eating bean sprouts. Okay no bean sprouts. So let me go find the next thing on the list which she instructed me to get--spicy marinated pork chops. I see lots of short rib and this below, nonspicy pork. Huh? Is there no more?

  

But wait, there's marinated pork and I read the ingredients on the package which include hot red pepper paste. The spicy pork is merely marinated pork. Okay into the cart it goes.

I feel like we need one more banchan, something like the eggplant I ate at a Korean restaurant in Berkeley with Bob and Lisa. Bugger! The tray for braised eggplant is empty.

 

I want one more banchan, something green I texted Kat to which she agreed and decided on this.

 

And what the heck is codonopsis? 

I read online that it's some kind of root from a family of plants grown in China and Korea to replenish energy or qi and used like ginseng. Only WebMD states that there's no evidence that Codonopsis slows down the growth of cancer cells, nor boosts immunity. Good to know! I ended up getting instead a package of a seasoned radish.