Went to Assi International (pronounced ah-see) in our neighboring suburb of Niles, IL. I like to refer to the market as the Asian mega-mart. This is not to say that I don’t shop at the other one nearby, Super H Mart, which is larger, but more chaotic to me. Not only does Assi have a great produce section, there’s every kind of Asian cuisine cooking product you might ever need: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino. Oh, and I also buy my Cafe Du Monde coffee there, Makes a great Vietnamese iced coffee, I hear, but I like mine straight from a French press. But I digress.

I’ll be heading there tomorrow (Saturday) because I need to get some fixin’s for a Korean BBQ lunch. We have some marinated rib eye (bulgogi) that we’ll grill. Who am I kidding…my husband will grill. I want to buy a few different kim chee (or sometimes kimchi, kimchee or gimchi), for you non-Asians that’s pickled vegetables with varying degrees of spice and seasonings. Some of them are so red with chili heat, my forehead starts sweating just looking at it. I wouldn’t even touch the stuff before, but I’ve gotten used to the taste, and it really does lend a nice flavor if you eat it along side of your grilled meat and rice.

If you go on a weekend, they often have samples of products and you might be lucky enough to eat the right amount of food for a light meal. So, last weekend, my family and I were walking through the frozen section and we saw an elaborate setup of Filipino food by Pronto Foods. Holy cow, they had all sorts of fried spring rolls: chicken, pork, plantain. Actually the plantain spring roll is called turon, and there are different kinds other than plantain: Ube (taro root/purple yam), ube and cream cheese, plantain with cream cheese. They were sampling this with a gluten-free wrapper (corn) that had been fried three hours prior. It was still crispy! Definitely not oily, either. I was impressed. Granted, they weren’t shaped like traditional turon, which is wide and sort of rectangular. These were more like cylinders, a bit bigger than a cigar, I think. We’re looking forward to trying it at home.

**Update – taro root and ube are totally different. While they are both monocots, they are different plant species.

One of the Pronto Foods representatives who was working that afternoon, Eddie Chua, gave me quite an in-depth explanation of their cooking philosophy and product formulation. This was all okay because my kids and husband were busy sampling their full-size chicken siopao (steamed bun) and other spring rolls. So, he told me, as if in secret, to come back this Saturday because they were going to sample their crab rangoon, which has REAL crab and a cheese blend rather than cream cheese. Maybe we’ll run into Eddie again.