Cooking -- Part 2

A Trip to the Supermarket

This store sells most of what you might find in a supermarket. In addition to dry goods, there's a selection of soaps, detergents, housewares, and personal care items. You really have to know where to look. It's a small space (maybe 1000 sq ft or 10 sq m), but large by Indian store standards. It's crowded, and the inventory changes daily.

This is the cooking oil section. Large (3 to 5 L) containers are the norm. For smaller sizes, oil is sold in plastic pouches.  (BYOB - bring your own bottle!) Those pouches that look like they should contain sugar or something "dry", are 1 L bags of oil.

On the back side of the oil "nook" is the grains and legumes "nook". This is a sampling of wheat flours. Atta is whole wheat; maida is refined white flour; rava and suji are more like wheat "grits". I'd never seen the Pillsbury bags before. 

Moving around the "nook" to the right, you see the selection of lentils (dal), and legumes, including chickpeas, peanuts ("ground nuts"), and many others that I don't recognize (yet).

The last corner of this "nook". Behind the large bags of rice are many other kinds of legumes. You just gotta know where things are!

The spice "nook" is huge, but not as big as the grains/legumes. I have no idea what most of this is. While I might recognize the spice if it had the usual English name, the English names on the packets are simply transliterations of the Hindi or Gujarati name for the item.