When people talk to me about making Asian food, they talk about the grocery store, and how it is hard. Whole aisle of soy sauce. Four brands of fish sauce. Do we really need fish sauce, anyway? (You do.) They stare up the cliffside and blink. They do this despite the billion or so guides to help you.

I now know how everybody feels because I have been to Patel Bros, widely considered the best place to get OG Indian ingredients in America. There are a few in our metro area, including the original on Devon, which is where I went to shop and do recon.

I wrote about this a little already, but I need to expand on it because I’m truly not kidding about the recon bit. Sourcing is most of cooking, and I truly have no idea what I’m doing with this. Yes, I can watch videos and read guides. There remains no substitute for being on the ground, in front of the real thing. And so I had my camera out and y’all, I took so many pics.

Ultimately I took a pic of anything I didn’t know or expect, and then I set myself to searching online to see both what everything was and how it fit into the food system. Once I got into the dried goods aisles, I took pics to know the brands of everything, and what I should expect as far as price.

I also made mental notes of things that looked surprising or out of place. All of the meat relegated to two freezers that said “non-veg.” More 10-gallon drums of canola that I’ve ever seen in one place. A half-aisle for spices, almost all of which were sold in bulk. A pallet hopper domed over with bitter melon. All of this is normal to someone.

You can do this, too. Spend a half-hour in a grocery store that reflects an unfamiliar food system, and approach the whole thing with wonder & humility. Grocery stores are meant to be efficient, so if you go to a good one, everything is there for a reason and nothing is out of place. Remember this as you wonder why something is the way it is.

When I first bought my home, my realtor asked me why I was choosing this location. I told him that it was because a major Asian grocery store was only 3 blocks away. He had never heard of it. I told him to go, that there was a little lunch counter and everything was cheap. My realtor was a middle-aged dude from the old-money suburbs, and he had never been to an Asian supermarket before. I’ll never forget the moment I opened my phone to 18 unread from him as he marveled at a place I had gone to for over a decade. “What is this place! Wow!” It was pure. He started there. It was normal to someone else.