There are other things that are not so great. Before I get into that, let me tell you a story. At the Market one morning, in the middle of shopping Van informed me that he needed to use the potty. I found a store worker and somehow communicated that Van needed to use their toilet. A "public toilet" is not very common here, so the worker was doing us a huge favor by taking Van in the back to use their facilities. She motioned that I could not go back with the cart, and took Van's hand and took him behind the meat counter. In the five minutes I stood waiting, I watched the butcher chop chicken and beef with the same knife, on the same huge tree stump "butcher block." I also saw something that resembled pork chops laying to the side. Cross contamination anyone? Anyhow, when Van came around the corner, his eyes were HUGE and he was holding the workers hand so tight his knuckles were white. I thanked her, took Van's hand and asked if everything was ok. He looked at me and said, in a very quiet voice, "Mom, there is a cow back there without a head and there's lots of blood." Yes the meat here is very fresh... "That's a good thing" you say? Yes and no. If I want anything other than hamburger, I have an afternoon of work ahead of me. Hamburger is easy, I point to a slab of meat, take my hands and make a grinding motion, they cut the bone and grind all the meat together. Consuming hamburger here is a bit risky though, you have to chew it the way you would chew fish meat - always expecting a fragment of bone or cartilage.
When I have to get the meat in pieces to cook, or barbeque on kabobs, I do all the work myself. I buy the huge slab of meat and take it home. Then comes the "fun" part. I separate flesh from the sinewy strands that hold muscles together, try to chop out the bone - without chopping off my fingers, and separate the eatable meat from the hunks of fat and veins. This is very hard to do to for one as inexperienced with me. (Mom - I have come a long way from crying when I have to eat chicken that touches the bone.) This picture depicts the carnage left over AFTER removing all the meat that I could:
Some of you may think that the red stuff you see left over is eatable meat, let me assure you, it is not.
On the other hand the produce here is AMAZING!! These are cherries that we picked from our trees. We have both sweet cherries and pie cherries, which are super sour, but make excellent jelly and Pie. (I tried to make a non-pectin jelly recipe. It did not work. I was left with cherry sauce, but it was very tasty cherry sauce. I ate it with a spoon and dipped lavash in it!)
However the produce here is strictly seasonal. Come late fall/early winter there is none. I am told that they do have some small greenhouses, but the produce is very expensive, like $12-15 AMERICAN dollars a kilo. So I have been getting in touch with my inner Betty Crocker, Molly Mormon home storage type stuff. So far I have done 4 kilos of peaches, 2 HUGE buckets of raspberries, 2 kilos of apricots, a bunch of peppers, onions, and parsley.
2 comments:
Yeah so I think I would become a vegetarian! Haha. I can't wait to be out there and just see you hacking away at a cow :)
One can live anywhere as long as there is Nutella!
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