A Trip to the Ranch

99 Ranch Market, that is.

One of our favorite places to shop while living in California was a fantastic store called 99 Ranch Market.

What an amazing place!

A full-sized market, but the spin was...all the products were Asian! Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese...you name it. Matt and I would stroll up and down the aisles, picking up all sorts of interesting and unusual things.

The produce was fantastic; fresh and inexpensive.

We'd load up rice cracker snacks, wacky candy, noodles...you name it.

But one of the best finds was a freezer case filled with fake, that is...vegetarian, foods. Crab, shrimp...lots of it.

My favorite was the veggie shrimp; one of the few seafoods I ate before my vegetarian days was shrimp, and I do occasionally miss it. With these fake foods, I could have it! Battered and fried! Cocktail! In a salad with avocado...yum.

Then, as the story goes...I got pregnant, we moved to Tennessee, and all our sources for these great products were thousands of miles away.

But last weekend? We experienced a little 'taste' of home: there's a 99 Ranch Market in Atlanta, GA! Less than four hours away!

Matt was in Atlanta for a friend's wedding, and was planning to make a grocery run at a Whole Foods (which we also miss). The groom-to-be mentioned there was a big Asian supermarket nearby, as well; something called 'Ranch market'.

Matt did a web search, saw that it was, in fact, the same store...

When he came home from Georgia, not only was the cooler packed, but he had bags and bags of goodies!

The best part? All the fake foods!


Veggie sausage, chicken and ham...


Shrimp! Or a soy-based facsimile...


Crab and prawn, veggie-style


Assorted veggie fish

I've already had the shrimp, in a couple different dishes. Mmm...good stuff!

So, while it's not exactly a trip to our neighborhood grocer, we now know we can, in fact, find many of the products we loved and missed.