Today I woke up very late and packed the boys into the car
for a day of shopping for Indian groceries and vegetables other than the
abominable courgettes and pumpkins that seem to take up the lion’s share of
space at the local shopping centres. It is not as if Aussies do not know how to
eat, but largely the shopping centres cater for Anglo-centric tastes. This is
fine if your idea of fine dining is the old meat and three veg, or your curries
consist of raw chicken dumped into a pot with a can of apricot halves and some
Maggi Apricot Chicken Curry simmer sauce.
But for me and my own, born and raised though they may be in
Queensland
and the ‘Terrtory’ as some seem to call it that simply won’t do. Meals for my
little Australians have to occasionally involve mocha or banana flowers
curried with some shrimp or prawns and sprinkled gently with fresh coconut, lau
or snake gourd cooked with fenugreek seeds and milk and the theme fish of the
Bengali kitchen, ilish or hilsa, glorious on its own, fried or with
mustard in the even more sublime shorshe ilish. For this reason, we go
to the Central Markets.
Also, they have the best kimchi, miso and black bean paste
this side of the South China Sea . They have
such a range of vegetables as to make gourmet chefs out of teenagers, with
chrysanthemum leaves, garlic greens and large hands of ginger jostling for
space with bags of tiny pearly pea aubergines(egg plants) and galangal or Thai
ginger.
Once the bags are filled to groaning with bok choy, spinach,
lal shak which Mr Kim sells as red amaranth, okra, and other Indian
essentials, our collective thoughts turn to the other shops in the market. The Mushroom Man's shop has not just the usual buttons
but also porcini, oysters, morels, shitaki, enoki, Portobello, Swiss and
Chanterelles all year round. To bring that brown paper bag home and pour out
those freshly picked treasures onto a clean tea towel for some delicate
dusting! All they then need is to be gently warmed through with some butter and
flat leaf parsley until they are sizzling and firm. The place also sells
truffles from local oak forests as well as the Loire
valley. That unfortunately is a pleasure I have to do without until I win the
Lotto! Till then the truffle oil at roughly fourteen dollars for a tiny vial of
golden oil will have to do me. Tonight it will grace a big bowl of pasta
spirals along with parsley from the garden and buttery cashew nuts.
This I plan to decorate with melting shavings of another of
today’s buys. The Smelly Cheese shop stocks most varieties of cheese the
country has, and then some. There is cheese by the wheel and by the wedge from Italy , France
and England .
We got some Aussie cheeses. For crackers, the boys pick Castlewellan Blue and
Dutch Gouda. For tonight’s pasta, I buy some generously sharp Limestone Coast
Any one wishing to drool over cheese…..here is a link!
So lovely! Poushali and I were just discussing economics of cooking. Eating in the US is fascinating, by virtue of the sheer range of things one gets, but precisely because everything is made available all the time, one does not particularly want to eat all the things one gets. The dairy and meat is excellent, for example (though Europeans take exception to their cheese), and some fruit is fine, but their vegetables are mostly inedible (at least to me). And Anglo-centric shops, as you say, don't store a great variety of vegetables either. I've never seen my beloved bitter gourd in them, for example.
ReplyDeleteDrool, drool, drool!!! Your description titillates all my senses! And Smelly Cheese is owned by one of the next door neighbours of my childhood home :)
ReplyDeleteyou remind me of episodes from Food Safari with Maeve O' Meara!
ReplyDelete