things that are hot, things that are fermented

A little over a week ago dickumbrage and I took a trip to the Asia Market. It smelled pretty funny in there, and by funny I mean like rotting vegetables, but was packed with a variety of Asian foodstuffs, mostly East Asian like Chinese, Japanese, Thai...you have to go to a different store for the South Asian foodstuffs. A year ago I was inspired to purchase a variety of Asian sauces on the recommendation of a friend who spent a couple of years working in Beijing, who claimed to be feeding himself and his housemates on little else than rice and six different flavors of Chinese sauces.

A while back a bought a jar of Chili Garlic Sauce, which, let me tell you, is the goddamn shit. About a quarter of a teaspoon of the stuff is enough to make one bowl of rice and tofu pretty pungently hot. It's a fast, sharp burn that seems to be putting a hole in your tongue and/or stomach but doesn't make your throat suffer too much. They make sure to pack in the sodium, too, to satisfy that animal craving for as many NaCl molecules as can be consumed.

At Asia Market, along with a few packages of Pocky, which is like crack in cookie form, I bought a couple more sauces: Black Bean and Garlic Sauce and something called Tasty Noodle Sauce or something similar that I can't seem to find referenced on the Internets. Last night I cooked up some food with the Black Bean and Garlic Sauce, which is made from fermented black beans. It is sweet and gooey, and not spicy at all, but quite delicious and also packed with plenty of sodium to keep those synapses firing.

I haven't yet had the courage to try Finely Ground Shrimp Sauce. It is described as "definitely aromatic," which I take to mean "smells like a dolphin's butthole."