The Wet Market

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I think of delicious food often. I plan vacations around it! In every neighborhood there is a wet market of produce. Multiple vendors are in the area and the produce and food they offer is amazing. I can buy grains, beans, some staple supplies, tofu, meat, fish, eggs (quail eggs!!) and mostly veggies… The produce is fresh.

I have bought black forbidden rice, red rice, brown rice, something I thought was corn grits but was much coarser, a variety of different beans to use. In orientation we asked about shopping for produce and they were kind to walk us there after an already full outing. Many other shops are along the way, One sells hardware items, many small ones offer household goods, another is a small pharmacy, and there are some boutique type shops.

Here are a few pictures from my visits to the market. Look at those carrots! They are my favorite buy every week.

These are mangostines. They are high in antioxidants and have small white sections of fruit inside. They are delicious. The price is in rmb which is a conversion of 6:1 to the USD (So in dollars would be $2 per pound). Food is cheap here. The other fruit I buy often is dragonfruit and lychee. Of course they have apples, oranges, and bananas but am more interested in other fruits.

I have been buying one vegetable and fruit each week that I don’t recognize and then learn something about it and use in my cooking.

This is a cherimoya. It has the consistency of a hard apple but has a slight taste of pineapple.

I wanted to make muffins that have zucchini and carrot inside. I was not sure which vegetable was a zucchini so used the translator app to ask. To my surprise this was the zucchini:

What I would have guessed was the zucchini actually was a bitter melon. I thought it was a type of okra but it was not. It was bitter eaten raw and after cooked still had a slight bitter taste. At the time I thought it was a vegetable. Oh well, so I had already put it in spaghetti sauce!

They even have fish, squid, frogs, snakes, turtles…I know…I don’t like seeing them either. Those are snakes that are reaching the sruface of the water.

You can choose a fish and they will clean and fillet it for you. I plan to do that (maybe tonight?) I went to do that yesterday but all of my other errands put me at the market too late and they were cleaning up. Fresh fish sounds good for dinner. They also have just killed fish, squid, clams, etc. to buy. They will fillet the fish also.

A slightly longer walk takes me to an organic supermarket where I sometimes will buy my leafy greens. They seem to last longer and there is still some concern about cleaning the greens properly enough.