Nathan Thai Video & Grocery has made it easy for me - it's very clear that it's a specialty Thai grocer. All your favourite spice pastes are there, plus interesting pickled ingredients like tiny pea eggplants.
It's a fun shop to poke around in, and reminds me of expat Aussie shops overseas, with lots of beauty products and junk food from the homeland. There are interesting teas:
The freezer is full of interesting goodies, like Thai sausages. They don't always have the brand below in stock, but do often have a homemade one in a ziplock bag, which is more of a sour style. On Saturdays, they may have the sour sausages on the counter, ready for you to take home and leave to mature on the bench. My sister has tried these and said they were just great, very garlicky, and that they could have easily stood in for continental sausages.
This Thai sausage is just delicious, "Thai-hot" and so flavoursome with big bursts of lemongrass and kaffir lime leaf. It's nice to have as an accompaniment to other Thai dishes with plenty of white rice, as it's very rich.
Quiz for the day: What is this? Look closely - it's a sort of rope encased in a hard, fragrant coating, somewhat like clay or very stale biscuit perhaps. Is it A. a chew toy for the police dog on the tea canister; B. part of some sort of brutal colonic cleansing regime; or C. something else? Leave a guess in the comments section!
Nathan Thai Video & Grocery
9 Paisley St, Footscray (map)
Phone: 9687 8588
an asian pretzel? Or rather a pretzel of inconsequential ethnic origin?
ReplyDeleteHi Temasek - it's actually a "dessert candle", in that it is a kind of scented, hard wax around a large wick. You light it and let it burn in an enclosed container, in which you either put baked cookies or the water to make cookies (haven't quite unravelled which) as a way to make them scented. Cool huh!
ReplyDeleteI think you are over thinking it, even asians call their grocer Asian. Its all in the connotation!! was told last night by my Thai restaurant friends to go to Nathans Asian grocer to get some items i am looking for, their is nothing wrong with that : )
ReplyDeleteYes Sue I agree, it's probably over-thinking it, although in an article I wrote for a newspaper someone wrote in complaining I had said "...speaking Vietnamese to little old Asian ladies", that they obviously weren't "generic" Asian ladies, they must have been Vietnamese. At the same time, a friend who was second-generation Indonesian called herself "Indo" and me and other Caucasians "Aussie", even though she was as Aussie as us. Language can be so loaded!
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