So, the vegie markets. These are generally stalls set up on the side of the road (with often two or three competitors right next to each other in a row), or outside the delis. You can grab one of the kilo-boxes, or, for better quality and/or larger quantities, select produce from the loose stands.
You can get almost anything you can think of, during one season or another, plus things we don’t see much of in Australia like prickly pear and dates. Everything’s a little deformed, smaller than we might be used to, and usually without the sub-varieties (i.e. just one kind of cucumber, apple, lettuce, potato etc; the exception is the dates) but tasting fine. The potatoes are lovely (did anyone see that article in quality newspaper the West Australian about supermarkets importing potatoes to the detriment of Australian farmers…guess where they’re coming from).
When something’s in season, it is in season, which is why for a while there, there were expanses of melons everywhere, and why the seasonal fresh fruit juice can sometimes be pure strawberry (lush) and sometimes lemon (with added sugar, beautiful). Oranges are just coming in now.
Avocado and fresh mushrooms are rare but not impossible. Mangoes are very expensive and usually not brilliant - maybe better for juicing than eating. Cherry tomatoes, no sign. Cherries did show up recently, at $5 a kilo, not too shabby, but only for a week or two. Bananas are available all year around as far as I can tell, but they go off at the drop of a hat in summer, so it’s been frequent banana cake for us.
Depending what you’re getting, it’s pretty cheap, vegies being cheaper than fruit. Though that said, I once got to the vegie stand and realised I had less than $5, so decided just to pick up a bit of fruit. I spent half of it on a kilo of apples, and then asked for $2 worth of bananas, thinking I would get maybe half a kilo – ended up with two kilos worth – I could have got $1 worth of bananas, and $1 of tomato (ie five kilos - tomato is cheap here).
I once got, in minimum one kilo lots: beans, carrot, tomato, capsicum, onion, pumpkin, cauliflower, lettuce, cucumber, lemons, apples, pears, bananas, kiwi fruit, basil, coriander, some other thing I can’t remember, and it cost $20. Try that at home.
Note that ‘minimum one kilo lots’: you can ask for less (half kilo, quarter kilo), but I tend to get a laugh and a shake of the head when I do. I guess they find it puzzling – don’t I have seven kids to feed at home? It’s easiest when I can just self-service and load up the bags to the amount I want (ie getting one lettuce head instead of a kilo of lettuce – that’s a lot of lettuce), though it is also nice to be helped. It did take a while to get used to being helped, here and at the petrol stations. We’re so used to self-service at home.
The freshest and cheapest place to do your produce shopping is at Souk Thalat (‘Tuesday market’, but open every day); however, that’s a fairly long drive for me (well, not that far, it just feels far because of the traffic), it’s not especially comfortable to go there alone as a woman, and I’m mostly happy with the quality closer to home – and I can’t complain it’s expensive. But all fresh produce found at the stalls around the city apparently comes from Souk Thalat (which in turn gets it from local farmers or imports). That’s also where you find a lot of gardening, hardware and pet supplies, a whole street of spices, kitchenware, lighting etc – it’s like a cheap open-air department store.
Recently, a bunch of the local vegie stalls were shut down - any that had a temporary look to them were cleared off. This was incredibly annoying since the one outside my local deli and bakery went ie the one I found most convenient for mid-week emergencies. It's back now, of course, you can't keep a good illegal squatter down. It is impressive - the police had all the shelving struts cut off and the area completely cleared, and it still took less than a week to come back.
This is my last entry for quite some time: I have a trip to Australia, I come back in long enough to collect Dog and take him to Zurich for his annual rabies vaccination (have to get the proper certificate each year, to make sure he can still get into Europe, which in turns means he'll be able to get home at the end of our assingment, via six months in Europe), and then come back in again long enough to drop him home before taking off for Vienna and a month-long holiday in Austria and Germany (inshallah, the visas, the bane of all expats, will work out). So you probably won't hear from this blog until March.
Wishing all a good christmas/eid/new year/various other celebrations.
