Mississauga's Oriental Food Centre a great shop for produce

Yesterday, after another great dim sum (more on this tomorrow) at the Mississauga Chinese Centre on Dundas east of Cawthra, we stopped in at the Oriental Food Centre to pick up a few things that we can only get at an Asian grocery store.

Did we luck out on the lychees!

Exterior Oriental Food Centre Mississauga

I thought luchees must be in season as I'd seen them at mainstream grocers that week, but they looked so sad and beaten up, I gave them a miss.

But here, at the Oriental Food Centre, they looked fine, and better still, they were being sold in bags (about 3-4 lbs) for one dollar!

As soon as I got home, I emptied the bag into hot, soapy water, as lychees in the husk can get mouldy in a heartbeat, and this morning, I shelled them all to keep them from spoiling and popped them in the fridge.

It's fast and easy to shell a lychee fruit -- just make a split in the shell and squeeze the meat into a bowl. Your hands never touch the insides.

And Oh, what a lychee feast we are having! Replace the pit and stuff in some creamy cheese, or chop them and mix with crushed ice in a glass, or put them on ice cream and add a splash of fruit liqueur, or just eat them out of hand.

This busy supermarket apparently has a very high turnover, which means that produce is not only fresh as possible, but very well priced.

Beautifully ripe pineapples from Costa Rica were 2/$5, and and extravagant bunches of fresh coriander just 99 cents each.

A friend of ours who loves to boil up a mess of crab from time to time always buys it here.

Good thing we'd just finished dim sum, or we'd have gone wild.

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Related: Snapshotjourneys.com Oriental Food Centre Mississauga
Pictures Tropical Fruits chirimoya, passion fruit, mangosteens, longans, more.

Snapshotjourneys.com Mississauga Chinese Centre
PIctures, information on Chinese shopping centre, restaurants, dim sum


Books About Tropical Fruits on Amazon.com:

T & T Supermarket Mississauga Ontario Canada

Update: July 25, 2009
Today's Toronto Star reports that T&T taken over by a Loblaw subsidiary. I am not really happy about this, though I imagine T&T must be.

In my own experience, western grocery stores raise and lower prices at whim (my preferred brand of milk fluctuates between $4.69/2L to $5.19/2L every few weeks at the same neighborhood Loblaw store).

So I will have to keep an eye on what happens to our beloved T&T (T&T Toronto Store near Docks, photo) over the coming months.

Should it morph into the usual western grocery store, then I will keep shopping at the Asian supermarkets like Ming Yuan (googlemap).

Original Post: How T&T Web Site Hard to Find
To perhaps 99.95 percent of the general population, the name of this Chinese grocery store in Mississauga (T&T) means nada nothing zippo zilch. To the other point oh five percent, however, this is apparently big news, since many of them have been visiting my Mississauga Chinese Centre page, eager for food news.

The new 'T & T Supermarket' reference on that page is part of a quote about shopping for Chinese grocery items in the area west of Toronto. Though I had not even remembered the quote, the search engines certainly did.

As with all company names that include characters such as the ampersand (&) in print, they are tricky to locate in directories like phone books and search engines. And so for some months, I had many visitors to this page, which I attributed to a keen interest in Chinese lifestyle. That is, I did until I actually looked at the search term used.

Then I realized that, rather than my brilliant story, the big draw was this 'new' Chinese grocery store in town. Then I felt bad for the frustrated searchers. Imagine coming to this page, skimming through the contents and maybe even missing the T & T reference in all the other words.

So one day a month or so ago, I drove by the location and saw that construction was nearly completed and I posted a note to that effect on that page. Then our community paper ran a full-page ad (with the website name) announcing the Grand Opening. Turned out that the actual website for this company is www.tnt-supermarket.com. Now who would stumble upon that one? Looks like a shop for explosives, no? And these people were looking for food, not fireworks.

I'm mentioning this on the blog so the search engines will have yet another way to direct people to this Chinese grocery. It can also serve as a cautionary tale for anyone planning to name a web site or a business. Think about it long and hard before you plunk down the money to register the name. Make sure it's easy to spell.

And in case you are wondering if, perhaps, given the hyphenated name of my blog, that I am a bit hypocritical, well, this doesn't apply to blogs. Most of you get here by clicking the blogger scroll, a search engine link or hot link from my site or email signature. I'll bet real money that the only two people in the world who actually ever TYPE my blog name are me and my friend Teena in Australia.