Today I cooked my first recipe with kombu. Kombu is the Japanese name of a sea vegetable mentioned in the recipe I wanted to make. I wasn't confident that I could find it. Oh, sure, there are Asian stores here in Phoenix, but have you ever been in an Asian store??? All sorts of things are labeled in Thai, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and I'm a total gringo who has never studied an Asian language. So before I shopped I went to Wikipedia and looked up kombu. Down the road there is a store that seems to be run by Korean people, so I wanted, among other things, to figure out that Korean characters for whatever the Korean equivalent to kombu was.

Go figure, right off the bat the Wikipedia article mentions that the Korean equivalent of kombu is dashima. I copied down the Korean characters and went to the store. In the seaweed section I found packages that seemed to have something sort of like the Korean characters, but I wasn't entirely confident. Up the row walked an Asian couple. The man approached first, so I asked him about kombu/dashima. He looked confused and said to ask his wife. Fortunately she had a much thicker accent and knew exactly what I was talking about. “Oh, yes, this is dashima. Are you making soup?” I said 'yes,' although chile is not exactly soup, but I had read that kombu's main purpose in Japanese cooking was for soup base. Then she pointed out the ugliest package of dashima I could imagine. “This looks like good dashima.” Yuck! But of course I'm not stupid enough to think that things that look like good pre-packaged assinine Yankee products necessarily taste the best, so I bought what she pointed out. (Picture attached.) It's so nice when complete strangers are so nice to you, even though there spouses are monolingual gringo-equivalents.