Fish Balls: Our first Asian grocery experience!

This afternoon after our homestudy appointment Kevin and I traveled to the nearest large city to check out some Asian Grocery Stores. The first one that we went to was an "International" store that catered to Hispanics. Unfortunately, they didn't have ANY Asian food. The trip was very worthwhile, because we bought some really good fresh salsas and got some favorite German treats including chocolate covered Nuremberg Lebkuchen and Milka Noisette chocolate. Ich liebe deutsche Süßigkeiten!

The next grocery we visited was a "little hole in the wall" grocery that only had three short isles. I was a little nervous about going in, but the Thai woman running the store with her 7 year old daughter were very nice and the place was well kept, and the prices were extremely low. Most of the food was Thai, but we found "fish balls" pictured above that I've read about, and several different kinds of noodles. I also found glutinous rice flour to make sticky rice cakes. I'm wanting to try to make a sticky rice cake (Nian Gao) for Chinese New Year's. Nin means year, and gao means cake. Legend has it that the more the cakes rise, the better the new year will be. I've read that most Chinese cakes are steamed, but I've never steamed a cake before so I'll most likely try one of the baked recipes first.

We think the third grocery that we visited was run Korean gentleman, as he had several local advertisement signs in Korean. The store was much larger than the "little hole in the wall" grocery. This store had a large frozen section with lots of different kinds of fish displayed very attractively. There was all kinds of snack food too from Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, and Korea. We bought a lot more at this store because of their large selection and found it very easy to navigate. We can see ourselves going back to this store because of their large selection and it's located near a large shopping area that we visit.