Meat Department

Meat has been a small challenge in South Korea. We miss beef. To our parents reading this, we would like to place a order for the best and biggest steak (Angèle wants mushrooms) when we get back to Canada.

They eat a lot of pork in S. Korea and they don't clean off the fat as much as we would like. The only clean piece of meat that we found was pork tenderloin which was reasonably priced at approx $2.50 cnd for 1. We bought what we thought was bacon, as you see here with bone in it, but it didn't taste like bacon at all. We are assuming that in Canada they cook, smoke and season the bacon before packing it. We think this is bacon straight from the pig, untouched, bone and all. So, we'll have a side order of bacon with our steak.

Ground beef isn't common in S. Korea either, we only found chopped beef which is extremely expense as you see here this pack cost approx. $11.00 cnd and tasted like steak in our spaghetti sauce. We aren't sure if we will do that again.

We have yet to find a clean, boneless, skinless chicken breast either. They seem to only pluck and gut the chicken then chop it up into small pieces, in no particular order, and price it for sale. *Yummy!

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*hint of sarcasm.

Produce Department

There is a grocery store called the GS Supermarket that is 10 minutes away on foot and we buy most of our products there. We find just about everything we could need there but it is more expensive then the market shops. The produce department is pretty good and the cheapest item that we purchase would have to be oranges. We buy about 25-30 clementines (Christmas oranges) for about $3.00 cnd. You could buy them by the case, bagged or loose. If you bag your own you must give your bag to the produce employee who weighs it and prices it for you which is something that is usually done at the cash register back home.

One really cool thing is their lettuce. They don't seem to eat bowls of salad like we do, they mostly use lettuce to wrap the meat they BBQ. So buying a head of lettuce or romaine isn't common. Some poor Joe's job at the grocery store is to separate all the leaves from the heads of lettuce for sale by weight. This pile looks kind of picked through so the leaves aren't nicely placed like it usually is but you get to see the cool fog machine that keeps them moist.

We can buy watermelon (with seeds) and they are the size of a cantaloupe for $21.00 cnd. I hear they are huge and cheap in the summer so I'll have to wait. One item that we haven't seen is celery but I was never a big fan of celery anyway.

I know this isn't produce but I don't want to make a blog on just eggs. You can easily find chicken eggs all over and if you shop around you can get 10 eggs for $1.50 cnd but they only have brown eggs and we find that the yolk is much darker and has a stronger taste. The coolest thing that we got to try was Quail eggs which are also all over the place. We only had a hard boiled one at a restaurant as it came as a side dish with one of our meals. To our surprise, it tasted just like a normal egg but smaller.

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