A bit of Off The Grid Grocery Shopping

For Supper Club this past weekend lemongrass was the theme. Since Asian cuisine is one of our favorites to cook and probably the cuisine we are most experienced at cooking lemongrass was one we excited to go with.

Lemongrass is as a woody Asian herb with a citrus aroma and flavor. It's fresh and fragrant we love to cook with it.

We found many years back when we started cooking Asian dishes that going to a local Asian market was the best place to find many of the needed ingredients for the recipes. We also learned you can find them at a much more reasonable price than the gourmet grocery you would likely to need to visit to find many of the ingredients.

So with our theme in mind I hit one of our local Asian communities; The Lincoln District to go to a few Asian markets. There are many little groceries, businesses and restaurants in this area. On this particular Saturday afternoon the area was hopping. There was nowhere to park on the street, people were hanging out it in the middle of the street, loud Asian music was coming from a the local pool hall. It was evidently the place to be on this spring day.

 There were quite a few things our pantry needed to be replenished with as well as finding lemongrass so this was needed trip. I first went to the larger Southeast Asian Supermarket.

This market it pretty large with a vast variety of items. I did pretty well at the first stop but I wasn't able to locate Kaffir Lime Leaves nor our favorite fresh wide rice noodles. So I hit a smaller market down the way called Lucky. And they had both of these items so success was had after all.

The larger supermarket had all of the produce on my list and then some that I picked up;

As well as some of the pantry staples I wanted to stock up as well;

And a few fun dishes made it into my cart too!

We highly recommend a visit to your local ethnic grocer when you are cooking ethnic recipes. You'll often find the exact ingredient you need and often get it for a better deal than your regular supermarket sells it for as well.

You'll be see many of these ingredients in some of our upcoming posts.