Saraga Finds

The food court area has been re-organized since we were there last:

It had been way too long since we had been to Saraga so we were nearly giddy to get there last week. We bought some old favorites such as dumplings and red bean buns but we found some new goodies as well. Mrs. WYA! has a bit of an addiction to hoji-cha tea. She likes the bottled one from Teas' Tea but can only find it at the Marsh at Allisonville and 82nd Street. Well, we found a bag of loose hoji-cha at Saraga. It was too big for our tea steeper so we just put some in a pot of boiling water and it was wonderful. We also bought a package of Five-Spice tofu that has cumin, cinnamon, clove, aniseed, and coriander in it. We have tofu a lot and it was a nice change of pace.

We were introduced to Goya's Adobo many years ago when we went to Puerto Rico and a friend asked us to pick up some for her. We picked up some for ourselves and have been hooked on it ever since. It felt so exotic then but now it is everywhere and there are so many variations of it. We couldn't pass up the one with saffron in it and we can't wait to experiment with it.

As always, browsing at Saraga is a fun culinary journey.

We managed to take a picture of the sesame balls from Saraga this time before we ate them all. As we've previously mentioned, they are at the checkout and they are crunchy, not too sweet, tasty sesame treats. They have containers with 2 big ones instead of these minis but, with the minis, we get to rationalize that we're not eating that much even if we do empty the container.

Tasty treats from Saraga continued

Well, we tried another one of our recent Saraga Grocery purchases- cooked vegetable bun. In a word, YUM! Wheat flour dough encases cabbage, carrot, and onion. You'll find them in the frozen section, you get 3 in a package and they are easy to prepare in a pot, in the rice cooker, or in the microwave as we did. Another slam dunk from Saraga.

Saraga Grocery

We recently visited Saraga grocery for only the second time and were even more impressed this time. Even if it is out of your way on Commercial Drive between 38th St. and Lafayette Road you will want to make a special trip to explore it. As their website says, it is one stop ethnic shopping. We like to roam the rows and just gawk at the produce we've never heard of, the teas, the snacks, and especially the frozen food items. There are so many dumplings here and who doesn't love dumplings? We picked up several goodies and today we will rave about the "red bean buns". These aren't red beans in a dumpling style but rather ensconced in a super tasty bread- oh my! (Steam for 6 minutes and they are ready to go! we use a microwave steamer, some plastic wrap and a microwavable glass dish) They tasted even better than they sounded and, paired with some roasted vegetables, made a perfect meal. We'll review the other goodies that we bought as we make them but there is one other little scrumptious thing we can tell you about that we picked up as an impulse item at the check-out. There were plastic containers with "sesame balls". One had 2 big ones but we chose the one with minis. Not sweet, but oh so good. We could not stop popping them.