flailing in my kitchen v3.1
How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
How can I be sad when I have
endless amounts of cabbage?
endless amounts of cabbage?
Guys, the day has finally come.
After 6 years (!!) of searching, I am finally able to eat mue pue ou nam糜配烏欖 - congee with black olives!
So I need to talk about these ou nam烏欖 - black olives. They're black and football shaped. They're very salty, but they don't taste anything like your black olive that you find on a pizza or a charcuterie board. And you have to get them whole, with the pit still inside.
Back when I was little, you could easily find cans of ou nam at the Asian grocery store. But at some point, I guess they stopped shipping them to the US? When I asked my Soy Go細姑 - aunt (dad's youngest sister) about trying to find them back in 2022, she told me something like "Child! Don't waste your time! They don't sell them anymore!" BUT I KEPT LOOKING. Every time I went into an Asian grocery store, I'd look for them. Whenever strangers online posted about them, I'd respond and ask them where they got them. I basically never talked to strangers online, but I always made an exception for ou nam.
I heard a lot of crazy theories from people about why ou nam are so hard to find in the US. They're too salty and too unhealthy. They cause cancer. I don't know. The thing is, I knew they still existed somewhere. They were even featured on a Netflix documentary about Teochew food! See that? Olives were the very first episode.
But after six years of searching and not finding anything, I really thought I was going to have to travel to China just to get some ou nam. And then just a month ago, I visited my dad's family and I talked to my Soy Sim細嬸 - aunt (dad's youngest brother's wife), and she told me she's seen them at the market somewhere in California. "Why didn't you ask me?" 😅
She started searching on Weee! and she pulled up a page and showed it to me, and yeah, there it was, and they were able to deliver them to my apartment. I had never heard of Weee! before, but apparently they've existed since 2015.
So we placed an order, and it actually took over three weeks to get them delivered to me. I had honestly completely forgotten about it when a mysterious little box showed up in front of my door. I'm used to getting ou nam in a can, so I was surprised to see them in vacuum-sealed bags! Soy Go seems to think this is better though. I mean, it certainly seems a lot easier and safer to transfer these little bags than it would be to transfer cans or jars.
Because they're so salty, they're usually eaten with mue糜 - porridge/congee. Plain mue. I know I've mentioned a few times already that I LOVED eating mue as a child, and even today, I think I could eat mue every day and not be sick of it.
It had been a while since I last made beh mue白糜 - plain ('white') congee, but the process is pretty simple. You just wash a cup of rice and add maybe 4-5 cups of water and boil that. Once it's boiling, lower the heat so it's at a simmer, and keep it cooking until it's at the consistency you like. I actually prefer my mue to be a little thicker and less jui jui水水 - watery.
And you guys know I love lah bhah臘肉 - cured meat as well, right? When I last visited my mom's family, Gong公 - grandpa would cook mue and lah bhah and have that for lunch every day! (And you know I am more than happy to eat this for lunch every day) Lah bhah is typically made with pork belly, but he also prepares other meats in a similar way. Before I left, he made sure to give me some lah bhah to take home ❤️
I've been having many meals of mue and ou nam and lah bhah for the past couple of weeks! I really don't ever get tired of it.
I feel like I want to try to have more of my favorite dishes from childhood. Because...can you believe ou nam is actually not my favorite thing to eat with mue? (Well, you'd know this already if you read my blog posts pretty closely) But that's a post for another day.
Speaking of eating food that's way too warm for the summer, I've been making lots and lots of mue糜 - porridge, congee lately. My aunt recently sent me a bunch of heu guan魚乾 - dried fish (I'm only about 60% sure I chose the correct Chinese characters there) from Cambodia, and porridge is really the only thing I ever eat with dried fish.
I do eat other things with porridge though. My aunt also sent me some giam chai咸菜 - pickled mustard greens. Really salty foods go great with porridge. Salty eggs, salty fish, salty and sweet Chinese sausage, salty and sweet pork floss, and salty olives. It's childhood for me. Growing up, I was a super picky eater and all I wanted to eat was porridge with salty things. I've expanded my tastes a lot since I was 5, but I still love coming back to this.
While I do love salted hard boiled eggs the best, those take about a month to prepare, and I don't have that kind of patience. But I remember those salted olives just came in a can that we bought from the Asian store!
So I drove to my local Asian grocery store last week, and I looked for these canned salted olives, but the closest thing they had to that were dried olives, and I wanted the ones in a can, with the pits still in them. I then drove to an Asian store further out, which was pretty big for Pittsburgh standards, but they didn't have these olives either.
I ended up going to eight different Asian grocery stores in the area and not a single one had the olives I was looking for. One place had Mediterranean olives. Another place claimed that they sold olives, but when the lady went to her computer to check the inventory, she exclaimed, in an almost comical way, "We're sold out!" I'm not totally convinced they actually stock the canned olives at all since I didn't actually show her a picture of them >.>
And, well, that's it. I never got my olives. I also realized that none of my Asian friends have even heard of Chinese olives, so maybe it is just that rare. (But they're out there somewhere! I know it!) I think I've also hit my quota of porridge for a while, but I'll come back to it. Next time I'm visiting family I'm definitely buying some olives to bring back.
And maybe, just maybe, I can make those salted hard boiled eggs too.
