Eating like an Immigrant, Part II: Ethnic Stores

Another step in Pittsburgh was realizing that the little ethnic stores scattered all over the city (but especially in the Strip District) had fabulous, exotic and inexpensive ingredients. Many times, it’s working-class people who are shopping at these stores, and it keeps prices reasonable. For example, getting cumin or curry powder from the local Indian store totally beat out anything I could find at the grocery store (the spices at the grocery store were at least 5x-10x more expensive than what I would find at ethnic stores), and it was so fresh tasting.

In one area of Atlanta, apparently there is a large Ethiopian population, and sometimes we’ll get injera (like an enormous sourdough buckwheat pancake), and then I’ll make some stews to go with it. And there’s a lot of overlap between countries with spices, for example, cumin and coriander are used in Hispanic, Indian, and Middle-Eastern dishes. We’ve found a place where we can get Thai curry paste for about $1.50 for a cup of it (which makes dozens of meals).

So, your challenge is to go to an ethnic store and check out the ingredients–I focused on the spices here, I know, but look at the vegetables and herbs, check out the meats, try to see what the backbone of the food culture is. Is it rice based? Noodle? Are there interesting ingredients you’d like to try out? Do you see any similarities between the kinds of foods you’re seeing here and other foods that you’re familiar with? And please leave a comment if you do this, I would love to hear about your experiences.

Recipes

*Shwarma is a fun, Middle-Eastern spiced variation on gyros.
*I’ve made a few Thai curries using the inexpensive pastes, here’s one of them, Thai chicken, vegetable, and pineapple curry
*Here’s our Ethiopian feast that we paired with the injera from the tiny, family-run food store, with links to some recipes for Ethiopian food (I found them to pretty adaptable to what I had on hand, more on that later–next time I’ll make it, I’ll blog about some of the streamlining I did)

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.