Vieques: Super Descuento Morales- The Cold Room

Nothing warms the cockles of a cold Canadian heart like arriving in the Caribbean & discovering McCain's potatoes! This, plus an often anemic array of produce, awaits in the Morales Cold Room.To be fair, Vieques being a somewhat isolated island, fresh fruits & vegetables are only brought in once a week. One quickly learns to buy it when one sees it because tomorrow it will be gone, and what's left will already be starting to wilt! Thank heavens there are now a couple of decent alternatives, such as the Tuesday & Wednesday street market, for stocking up on produce.

Like many inhabitants of the Caribbean, Puerto Ricans love their Bacalao. It's stocked just below the "gourmet" sofritos. By gourmet, we mean it's not by Goya!
We once tried to cook bacalao here on Vieques using a Puerto Rican cookbook we brought down. It called for the salt cod to be soaked in water for 4 hours. We thought this to be an extremely short soaking, but what did we know from the local products?
The salt almost seared our tongues off when we tasted our results!
We can only assume that some diligent editor thought they were correcting an obvious mistake ("Who soaks fish for 4 days, that's crazy!"), when in fact they were committing a bigger error themselves. If you want to try to make bacalao, buy the fish on day 1, put it in some water, & prepare the meal just before you head home!

Like other places in the store, the cold room has some awesome juxtapositions. We love the giant livers & humongous pigs' shoulders right across from the Champers.

And best of all, why not pop the chicken "wingettes" in the deep fryer then wash them down with a nice shot of Courvoisier?!


This installment concludes our serialized tour through the aisles of Morales.
We hope you'll agree that if you're willing to look for it, the charming is often to be found hiding amongst the mundane.