I spent the morning tracking down some particularly tricky ingredients to find. Superstore has a lot of things, really, it has an amazing selection of food products, but it does not have everything. My quarry today: fenugreek, fresh curry leaves, coconut and/or sesame oil, and asafoetida. Most of those seem like I could find them other places than a specialty store, but even you must surely agree that asafoetida is not a common seasoning (or whatever it is). So I traveled. I drove north and north to a specialty Indian spice shop. It was located in a particularly South Asian strip mall, neighbors to an Indian restaurant and also a Punjabi sweet shop. I entered the grocery store, not expecting too much. After all, the imported foods and spices section of Superstore is quite extensive… but I was very pleasantly rewarded. The first place I looked I found coconut oil (next to larger bottles of ghee!). Then, just above it and around the corner, there was dried fenugreek. Ah….. for the next two I needed help. Curry leaves was easy… but he didn’t know what asafoetida was… Was I pronouncing it wrong?
But after much discussion, in which I tried to explain how it smelt and what one might use it for… well… we found it.
Then I went for samosa to celebrate.
