Jean Zimmerman

Beef heels, pork jowls, bulgogi. These are the cuts I didn’t get at H-Mart today. It’s a huge pan-Asian supermarket around 20 minutes from the cabin and is the type of place where you can get beasts chopped up in innumerable different formats (I didn’t need chicken feet, I brought some home recently for soup). There were piles and piles of produce, leaves and bulbs I’d never heard of or seen. Wild-caught fish, like the red snapper fresh with slime that I had the fishmonger clean (head off, please) to bake later. This place is an oasis in Shop-Rite-Ville, Westchester County. We don’t even have to cook dinner tonight since we got seaweed and fermented black beans and dumplings and kimchi to go.

Home from Holland, my parents brought me a wheel of Gouda. Or How-da, as they say. Howdy, gouda! Apparently the company that makes this particular brand of gouda maintains at least a dozen cheese stores around the country. Imagine. The only region of the U.S. that has that kind of devotion to, or need for, cheese is the midwest, where giant supermarkets offer refrigerated piles of blocks of the stuff, divided into yellow, white, and mottled (colby). You take your life into your hands asking a supermarket worker for blue, feta or, worst of all, parmesan. Well, you can get a green can of it in aisle 4.