There's a Safeway sized Asian grocery store on the way home that I shop at, that has an ok buffet in the back that I like to get a plate from and take home once in awhile.
Their best item is a veggie dish consisting of something with a slender stalk or stem that has smallish leaves on the end, steamed to a nice crunch, stacked like logs, and some sort of sauce poured over them. It's gotta be in the bok choy family. I can go into Chinese, Thai, Indian, etc, places, have a meal, and usually be able to reverse engineer what I had and prepare it at home if it's something I really like - unless it requires some spice I can't identify or kitchen utensil or something I don't have - sometimes with an assist from Google.
This buffet doesn't have any names on anything, I don't recognize the vegetable, the cooked version doesn't look like anything in the produce section, and I can't quite suss out the sauce - soy sauce and some garlic, mixed with something thicker - like plum or oyster sauce or something like that.
I ask the cashier what's that and she tell me ''green vegetable''. I describe it to others who I know should know, who tell me the same thing, ''oh we call that green vegetable''. Um, ok, what's the sauce? ''Soy sauce''. What else. ''Garlic''. Dang it, I know all that, and googling 'green vegetable' isn't going to help me much.
I'm never going to be able to make this at home.
