When You Just Can't Find Pork Uteri Anywhere Else...

Unlike lots of other men (and women, too, for that matter), I really enjoy grocery shopping. The three kinds of stores most difficult to get me out of are those selling books, electronics, and foodstuffs. And yesterday afternoon we discovered the granddaddy of all great food stores, right in our neighborhood!

We're often looking for odd ingredients for different recipes (do you know how hard it can be to find eye of newt or toe of frog when you need it?), and are always looking for new ethnic markets to haunt for various things. On the advice of Cynthya, one of our dancing friends, we visited the Fresh World International Supermarket, also known as El Grande Mercado. It reminded me of some of the pictures Amanda has posted of the markets she's visited in Palembang and other places. It's huge, crowded, chaotic, and filled with everything you can imagine eating. Or not eating, in many cases.

In one section we found "Big Green Onions" which looked to us suspiciously like leeks...and, sure enough, we found the same thing in another section, labeled "American Leeks." We found "Cock Soup" (don't ask), great bins full of fresh, irritable blue crabs, tanks of live fish and piles of whole, fresh fish on ice. One woman was wandering around with a plastic bag full of live eels figure-eighting their way to her dinner table. There were piles of every kind of vegetable and herb you can image, battered boxes of things with impenetrable labels in Thai, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and other languages I didn't even recognize. There were rows and rows of bottles of every kind of sauce, oil, marinade, glaze, or other condiment the fevered mind of man can conceive.

It was fascinating. It was a culinary orgasm. And the prices were, in most cases, amazingly cheap for this area, particularly for some of the more obscure herbs and vegetables (I found big bundles of lemon grass for less than the cost of a measly plastic package of the same at the local grocery). If you are queasy of stomach, and not in the mood to see frozen packages of pork uteri, lamb spleens, and other questionable delicacies, it's not the place for you.

But we found it fascinating. Now Agnes just needs to get moving and turn that package of frozen passion fruit pulp into ice cream...

Have a good day. Cook something exotic.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo