Help for the crunch? Here’s a bunch

The following four places offer that kind of help, both for entertaining, or for just the family when you’ve had your fill of cooking.

Alba, across from the St. Vital Shopping Centre, offers not only Italian cold cuts, cheeses and olives, but also a number of delicious prepared Italian specialties. Some are snacks, like the tasty arrangini rice balls stuffed with mixed vegetables. Others can be served as meals or as part of a buffet. There are delicious meat, spinach and ricotta cannelloni, as well as lasagna and other baked pastas (vegetarian versions are also available). In the meat cooler are plump, house made Italian pork sausages, spicy or mild, which are terrific on their own or incorporated into a ready-to-bake casserole with penne and tomato sauce. You can also buy fresh pastas as well as the sauces — tomato or meat — to go with them.

While doing your shopping, take a break with a cappuccino, and try a slice of pizza ($2) — a marvellous meal-size square of fresh, puffy dough, loaded with cheese and topped by salami and green peppers. So good you may decide to buy a whole pizza for take-out ($18), or, if you’re a dedicated do-it yourselfer, to buy the house-made dough and the fixings to make your own at home.

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The existence of Winkey at the far end of Pembina should be a boon for those who don’t want to travel all the way downtown to buy their Chinese groceries. The shelves are stacked with every imaginable sauce and seasoning, innumerable teas, packages of Chinese sausage, dried mushrooms, tiny dried shrimp and anchovies, quail eggs and containers of everything from kimchee to chicken feet. There’s a good selection of fresh Chinese vegetables and, in the rear of the store, fresh meats and some fish — among them, on my visit, a monster-size grouper and a big basketful of little blue crab.

More to the point for stressed-out cooks are the racks of salty-sweet-glazed barbecued meats: Two kinds of pork — the tenderloin (the kind Chinese restaurants serve in slices) and side pork, complete with its crunchy crackling; barbecued ducks and soy-steamed chicken.

Another quick fix is the dim sum in a freezer at the rear of the store. Not only is there quite a good selection, but those I sampled were much better than some frozen supermarket dim sum I tried a few years ago (either the processing has improved, or these are better brands). Shrimp har gow were acceptable, but others, made of meat, were even better. Chicken with mushrooms, for example, or any of the dumplings made with pork — siu mai, shanghai pork with vegetables and (best of all, possibly) pork-stuffed soup dumplings which should be eaten carefully, probably with a bowl under your chin to catch the inevitable drip. Those who mourned Sevala’s closing on Provencher can find many of the buffet foods they loved there at this new Transcona location, albeit for take-out only. There are six different kinds of perogies, including my favourite potato, cottage cheese and sauerkraut fillings, and lovely little sauerkraut-stuffed pyrishky buns. Studenetz — really, really garlicky jellied pork — is available on Fridays only.

Also on Fridays only is a mini take-out buffet for $6.95, a convenient way to sample some of the products before buying them in larger quantities — among them borscht, perogies, sweet and sour pork, meatballs in gravy and kolbassa with sauerkraut.

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For some people, cold cuts are the answer to everything, from a buffet to a no-cook family meal. Metro Meats is a tiny corner store with grocery shelves so cramped it is hard to check them out, but the main attractions here are easily accessible: the superior, mostly Polish-style cured meats. The kielbassa and ham sausage are both terrific. So are the smoked ham, the juniper-flavoured salami, the head cheese composed of chunks of meat in glittering aspic and kobanasy, a skinny, chewy smoked sausage with terrific flavour. Also excellent is buckwheat sausage, Eastern Europe’s gift to the egg. Alba Specialty Food, 166 Meadowood Dr., 255-2973 Winkey Food Market, 2855 Pembina Hwy. , 261-4888 Sevala’s Deli & Catering, 126 Victoria Ave. West, 224-4900 Metro Meats, 121 Euclid Ave., 943-8217

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 1, 2001 $sourceSection$sourcePage