Good food that won't clog arteries or add inches

A well-balanced meal of whole Spanish Mackerel, stir-fried asparagus and quinoa with Korean seasoned vegetables. The fish was poached in a sauce of organic diced tomatoes, red wine, Dijon mustard and non-fat Greek yogurt.

The fresh-fish display at H Mart, the Korean supermarket in Englewood, where the wild-caught, silvery Spanish Mackerel were $3.99 a pound on Thursday. Fresh-water carp was 99 cents a pound, but I would have had to buy the whole fish, which looked like it weighed 20 pounds or more.

Canned-fish salad (pink salmon, yellow-fin tuna and sardines) with Earthbound Farms Organic Spring Mix, Sunset-brand cucumbers and Italian olives.

I added a Gala Apple, above, and diced celery, garlic and onion to the canned-fish salad, along with Dijon mustard, ground cumin and fresh lime juice, all to taste.

The crusty, butter-free baguette from Balthazar Bakery in Englewood is still only $2. I slice and freeze it for sandwiches for other members of the family, but allow myself only the "heel" or end of the loaf with a big dinner salad.

Hemp is a legal variety of cannabis (marijuana) that is grown for fiber and seeds, such as the nutty tasting Hemp Hearts I found at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack last week, above with a salad and below. A 28-ounce bag was a pricey $14.89.

Manitoba Harvest raw, shelled hemp seeds are a product of Canada, vegan and made with 100% wind power, according to the bag, and are good for sprinkling on salads, cereal and yogurt.

Wild-caught haddock from Iceland coated with a Super Spice Mixture and served with brown rice and diced organic tomatoes prepared in an electric cooker. The spice mixture is made by combining every spice and dried herb I have in the house in a large plastic container, which I keep in the refrigerator.

Salted cod fish with whole-wheat fusilli pasta in bottled sauce, above, and with onion, sweet pepper, tomato and ackee, a Jamaican fruit available in cans, below.

All of the canned, fresh and salted fish I used in these home-cooked meals came from Costco Wholesale in Hackensack or H Mart, a Korean supermarket in Englewood.

H Mart also sells 16 ounces of seasoned vegetables for bibimbap, a rice-based comfort dish, but I used them with organic quinoa and didn't add the usual ground beef (Jinga Seasoned Vegetables, $7.69).

The best 100% whole-wheat pasta I've found comes from Trader Joe's, where it is only $1.39 for a full pound and organic, too.

Organic diced tomatoes, organic brown rice, organic quinoa and Earthbound Farms Organic Spring Mix are available at Costco Wholesale. 

Imported canned ackee in brine is available at ShopRite in Rochelle Park and Hackensack Market on Passaic Street. 

 

Celebrate with H Mart coupons, rebates

The Spanish Mackerel Dinner at Woochon Restaurant in Palisades  Park.

Editor's note: Today, I report on a shopping trip with H Mart coupons, and another great dinner at Woochon Restaurant, a recent addition to the Korean dining scene in Palisades Park.

To help shoppers celebrate H Mart's 30th year in America, the Korean supermarket chain sent out a new coupon booklet to holders of its store card.

"The savings are almost as good as 30 years ago," the booklet cover boasts, but that's a wild exaggeration.

On Wednesday, I stopped at the Englewood H Mart and picked up three coupon items, plus fresh fish, baby bok choy and Korean sweet potatoes for dinner.

Three bags of Nong Shim Shrimp Crackers were $1 -- a savings of $1.97. Two 1-pound bags of Arizona Farm Cactus Honey Powder, a sugar substitute, were $4 -- a savings of $3.98.

And an 8-pack of Premium Roasted Seaweed snack was $1.99 -- a savings of $2.

Last year, H Mart issued a Smart Card, which entitles shoppers to in-store sales and a 1% rebate or reward.

But you don't get anything back until you spend $1,000 at its Bergen County stores. 

On Wednesday, I picked up a $10 rewards certificate at the Englewood store. However, it's not redeemable for cash.

I plan to use a coupon for Choripdong 7 Grains -- a combination of brown rice, beans and other grains. A 10-pound bag is $9.99 with the coupon, good from Sept. 8-23.

But after seeing the many artificial ingredients and colors in Hansung Seafood Nuggets, I decided against buying any.

Even the non-sale items were a good value.

At home, we had a wonderful dinner of pan-fried whole whiting; baby bok choy with sesame oil, soy sauce and garlic powder; and boiled and mashed Korean sweet potato with garlic powder and olive and sesame oils.

We pan-fried fresh whole whiting. They were $3.99 a pound.

Baby bok choy were 78 cents a pound. We plated the fish and bok choy with mashed Korean white sweet potatoes, which were $1.99 a pound.

A meal to share

Korean food lends itself to sharing, as I discovered at Woochon Restaurant in Palisades Park.

For dinner one night, I ordered grilled Spanish Mackerel ($16.99), then watched a procession of dishes arrive at my table.

First, 10 side dishes of tofu, vegetables and noodles were arrayed before me.

Some of the side dishes served at Woochon Restaurant.

You can order live fluke for an expensive, over-the-top sashimi dinner.

 As I worked my way through the side dishes, the fish arrived, along with a stone bowl of bean-curd soup and another dish holding the brown rice I asked for instead of white rice.

On the way out, I looked at one of the restaurant's fish tanks, and saw live fluke from Long Island hugging the bottom.

They were destined to come up for air, and be served as sashimi. 

After that big Spanish Mackerel dinner, I needed to come up for air, too.

Woochon Restaurant, 280 Broad Ave., Palisades Park; 201-242-9999.

This lunch made us forget about dinner

Woochon has a waterfall in the dining room and tanks of live seafood.

Editor's note: Today, I describe two great ethnic meals at restaurants in Palisades Park and Hackensack.

I came across a real eye-opener while looking over the lunch menu at Woochon, a new Korean restaurant in Palisades Park:

Hangover Stew with Clotted Ox Blood. 

We stuck with more conventional food during our lunch on Thursday -- my wife and I shared entrees of Grilled Spanish Mackerel ($13.99) and Soft Bean Curd Stew with Seafood ($9.99).

A large mackerel fillet comes with pickled ginger, watercress and a lemon wedge.

The bean-curd stew is served in an usually large stone bowl.

Menu prices include the side dishes of vegetables, fish and meat Korean restaurants are known for. 

On Thursday, we received 11 small dishes with fish cake, translucent noodles, spring-mix salad, peanuts, dark-green seaweed, mushrooms, kimchi  and other items, and several were replenished during the meal.

The restaurant serves summer water kimchi and white kimchi instead of the spicier mahk kimchi, which is made with a lot of red pepper and garlic.

The entrees came with brown or white rice, and with the side dishes, I was so full, I skipped dinner.


I was happy with tea, fruit and cheese until bedtime.

Some of the seafood in my bean-curd stew --baby octopus and squid -- was chewy, but a large shrimp in the shell couldn't have been more tender.

We also loved the juicy, skin-on mackerel fillet -- which came with a small bowl of soft-tofu stew -- and all the side dishes or panchan were delicious.   

When we walked it, we were greeted with shouts of welcome from the staff.

At the end of the meal, a male waiter bowed and presented the check on a small tray. 

Ten of the 11 side dishes we were served, above and below.

The restaurant, affiliated with another of the same name in the Flushing section of Queens, offers a full menu of sushi, tofu and barbecue.

Woochon customers also can sit at a sushi bar, rear.

An outside sign and a summer specials menu list dishes only in Korean. The restaurant is housed in an old corner bank building on the main street in Palisades Park.

Woochon Restaurant, 280 Broad Ave., Palisades Park; 201-242-9999.

Wondee's 

We had another wonderful dinner of seafood, tofu and vegetables at Wondee's in Hackensack on Saturday night, and the food looked as good as it tasted.

I remembered to grab a bottle of Mexican beer from the fridge, but forgot my iPhone and can't bring you photos of our meal.

Three of us had spicy shrimp-and-mushroom soup or wonton soup, an appetizer of fried tofu with a peanut dipping sauce, green papaya salad, large shrimp in a sweet chili sauce and stir-fried tofu with vegetables.

The shredded papaya is served over dark-green lettuce leaves you can use to wrap it, and the puddle of fish sauce-lemon juice dressing is terrific when eaten with a spoon. 

The wonderful shrimp came with a cabbage salad on the side. We ate white or brown rice.

We dined early, and three servers waited on us.

When we walked in, Chef Wandee Suwangbutra was having something to eat in the dining room before the expected rush of customers.

Wondee's Fine Thai Food and Noodles, 296 Main St., Hackensack; 201-883-1700 or 1715. Parking in rear, BYO.

Web site: Fine Thai Food


Related articles

• Going solo in search of a good meal

  ---

• A slice of Korea on Lincoln Highway

  ---

Shame on Hebrew National

Image via Wikipedia

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Have you seen the latest Hebrew National TV commercial, the one that calls its hotdogs "the best of the best of the best"?

I was watching morning TV on an exercise bicycle at the gym on Monday, not taking notes, so I might have missed another "best."

Later, this appears on the screen: "OMG, they're kosher."

More copy tells you the beef hotdogs contain nothing artificial, but there's no mention of preservatives or whether the cattle feed contains antibiotics, growth hormones and animal byproducts.

OMG, they're stuffed with antibiotics.

OMG, they're drowsy with growth hormones.

OMG, they're preserved to last forever.

Trader Joe's, Stop & Shop, Whole Foods Market and other stores sell uncured hotdogs made from beef raised without antibiotics, hormones or animal by-products.

H Mart coupons

I tried to use the H Mart coupons I got in the mail, but the produce at the Little Ferry store looked sort of forlorn today.

Gala apples, in the bag or loose, were bruised. The red-leaf lettuce was 99 cents, but I decided to continue eating the lettuce growing in my garden.

There were no coupons for the other items I was looking for: 

Fresh fish (Spanish mackerel was $3.49 a pound vs. $4.99 a pound at Whole Foods Market in Paramus); stewed tofu with red-pepper sauce and hot-pepper sauce in a squeeze bottle.

I also picked up Champagne mangoes, a box of 18 for $8.99, or about 50 cents each, compared to five for $5 at Whole Foods. Collard greens were 79 cents a pound.

I drink lactose-free milk and was surprised Lactaid conventional milk and Organic Valley milk were priced the same ($4.49 for a half-gallon).  

The Cheesecake Factory

Two friends asked me to meet them for lunch today at The Cheesecake Factory in Hackensack, where takeout slices of cheesecake are priced at around $7 each.          

I had a large salad with blue cheese and walnuts. 

One friend had a large bowl of pasta with meat sauce, and the other chose a soup-sandwich combo. I drank seltzer, they drank water, and each of us had coffee.

With a 15% tip, each of us paid $20. That seemed like a lot for lunch.

I was chagrined to see I was charged $13.95 for the salad, even though I asked the waiter to hold the chicken usually served with it.

Shopping for a couple of good dinners

Image via Wikipedia

Our cleaned Spanish mackerel weighed 1.17 pounds and served three.

Me and my wife did a lot of food shopping Monday and Tuesday to assemble a couple of home-cooked meals -- a big pot of soup with chicken feet and beef, and fresh Spanish mackerel braised in a red-wine sauce with a side dish of bok choy.

We had frozen, organic chicken feet from Whole Foods Market, so she returned to the store and bought antibiotic-free beef shank and short ribs for the soup, then stopped at Hackensack Market for root vegetables, sweet potato and chayote.

My meat-free dinner was a can of Progresso Mexican-style black bean soup and firm tofu, which I sliced, dipped in egg and corn meal and fried in a little oil. I plated the bland tofu and poured on a little Korean red-pepper sauce.

Today, I stopped at H Mart in Little Ferry to pick up fresh fish and greens for dinner, selecting my meal from more than a dozen of each.

I found a slim, silvery Spanish mackerel for $2.99 a pound, and asked for it cleaned, with the head and tail on. At home, I cut the fish into steaks. The baby bok choy, which had deep-green leaves, was $1.49 a pound.

I made the sauce for my fish from olive oil, chopped garlic, red wine from Argentina, the juice of a lemon and a splash of ponzu sauce, bringing it to a boil to reduce and thicken it.

Then I added the fish steaks, head and tail, turning them in the sauce, lowered the heat and put the glass cover on. They were done in about 15 minutes.

I washed the bok choy, blanched the four whole heads in hot water for a few minutes and then transferred them to another pan with warm oil. I seasoned them and heated them up before covering the pan and turning off the heat. 

The fatty mackerel was tender, though it had some bones. The bok choy retained its crunch. I ate them with a salad, but my wife steamed some rice as a side dish.

A celebratory meal in the city

Billie Holiday via last.fm

I'm celebrating my birthday this week with meals at restaurants familiar and new.

Last night, I had some terrific fish at Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill, across from the Time-Warner Center in Manhattan. Before dining there, I looked over the $275 tasting menus at Per Se. I was surprised that service (tip) is included.

At Blue Ribbon, I started with a crunchy seaweed salad ($7) and a trio of sushi rolls ($16.50) -- Spanish mackerel, California and tuna, which I eat only a few times a year because of its high mercury content. The rice in the rolls was warm and the tuna melted in my mouth.

My entree was juicy, pan-roasted mahi-mahi ($28), also known as dolphin fish. It was served on a thick bed of  julienned vegetables and crowned by a large tangle of  thread-like, fried carrot -- how did they do that? Unfortunately, the fish was bathed in a plum-butter sauce that had no plum taste and I blame the dim lighting for my not noticing that on the menu description (I try to avoid butter). If there is a next time, I'll ask for a soy-sake sauce.

I washed it all down with a 22-ounce bottle of Kirin Ichiban beer ($10). The restaurant is windowless and uses paper napkins. When you are led to your table, you'll hear shouted greetings from the five sushi chefs. The sound system has songs by Billie Holiday and Ray Charles, a fitting appetizer for the jazz concert I attended later.

For commentary on food coverage in The Record, see:

http://eyeontherecord.blogspot.com/