In Which I Visit India Sweets and Spices, and a Classic Giveaway: Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar!

Yesterday I ventured to the scary suburbs of Portland, OR, to visit a shop that Nummers told me about a couple of years ago. This is a component of strip mall hell, but inside is another matter. We are going inside India Sweets and Spices. That spot of yellow is a kid's t-shirt. He was bouncing a football against the wall outside the shop. He won't be the only kid hanging about!

You come in through that door at the end and you immediately hit the wall of spices and spice mixture packets. It was hard to take photos because there were five or six littles running around the shop playing tag. Chaos, but it was really fun.

Here you see Amchur, which I picked up thanks to Amey's post at Vegan Eats & Treats, and black salt for scramble!

All of the Marmite is sold upside down.

Hindu figures for worship. I think they are Lakshmi and Ganesh, mostly?

Aisle of Indian snack foods! Both sides! This seems to be the Indian version of what I would expect to see in a potato chip/tortilla chip aisle here.

Close-up of a few of the snacks/snack mixes, and puffy mini-puri.

On the left, dried mango balls coated in kala namak (black salt) and seed mixes for after meals. On the right, aseptic boxed juices: basil, triphala (this seems to be an Ayurvedic mixture), karela (bitter melon?), gooseberry, and lauki (bottle gourd).

Mango stack!

On the left, I'm looking at the leaves in the middle. These may be lime leaves, but they are much larger than the kaffir lime leaves I found at Uwajimaya last week. On the right, I think we have methi (fenugreek) greens and kavathi, which is an indian tuber. Amey? Anyone else?

This basket, which looks like it is full of maggots, is actually full of fresh turmeric!

Choose your preferred pappadum for frying! Right in the middle above the yellow disks, there are two little packages of items for frying. You know they are for frying because their name is the Fry Me. You can get them in kapu kathi shape or pillow shape.

All of the flours! Rice, wheat, bean, all different kinds and grinds for making all different dishes. Remember that there are kidlets running around the store this whole time, yelling and dodging each other and sweeping around the adults. The adorable little girl on the left intentionally inched her way into the photo while I was trying to back up further to get the whole rack. Then she smiled at me and picked up a bag of chick pea flour and started gnawing on it.

Hing. Keep a respectful distance from this . . . pungent spice. I can't read anything on those labels, but I know hing. You may also know it as asafoetida.

Just in back of the flours, there is another big rack. It has all different kinds of pulses on the left, and on the right, two-pound jars of powdered spices over the housewares. The back wall and to the right of the photograph is all pickles and chutneys.

There was also a lot of unloading happening in the back, plus this great big sign that says India Sweets and Spices. On the left, you can maybe see this silver house, which could be a shrine. You can also see how high the ceiling is! This concludes the visit to India Sweets and Spices. They also have food made to order and a sweets case, but they didn't understand vegan so I didn't photograph the sweets or buy any hot food to take home. That is too bad, but having access to this shop is pretty luxurious so I won't complain!

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Today's giveaway is for the vegan classic cookbook Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar! This lovely book by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero is the second in the dessert trio, which I hope you know also includes Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and the just-released Vegan Pie in the Sky. It includes the recipe for the infamous peanut butter chocolate pillows and 74 more recipes. If you don't have it, you need it. If you have it, you need it to gift! The giveaway is brought to you by the lovely people over at Da Capo Lifelong, who have furnished a number of titles for giveaways on this blog. Please consider having a look at their website, and/or following them on Twitter and Facebook, because they are seriously generous. They also publish beautiful and useful vegan books, like Isa and Terry's dessert trio, and many more.

To enter this giveaway, leave a comment below. Tell me about your favorite cookie, or someone who invaded your life, or anything at all. This giveaway is open to residents of the US and Canada, but others this month will be open to everybody everywhere. The winner will be chosen by random number generator and posted tomorrow below tomorrow's giveaway. If you win a giveaway on this blog at some point this month, please be kind and don't enter further giveaways--I'd love as many people to win something as possible!

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The winner of The Conscious Cook is xvavaveganx! Congratulations! Please send your name and address to me at miso...@yahoo.com. (<---make sure to click on the . . . link for the rest of the email address. This is a spam avoidance thing.)