Saturday, June 30, 2007

Going to the markets

It's Saturday morning. While we wait for the markets to open, (although in theory they might since it's 6.30am) here is the post I promised earlier from last weekend's trip to Sacramento and the Jelly Belly factory.

We go to the markets every week. It's usually way cheaper than the supermarket and often what's in season is more apparent (and discounted obviously). Here I am in the carpark outside the markets, actually a drive-in movie theatre.
It's very busy - on one side are the retailers selling something close to a garage sale, and on the other side are stall-holders shouting out in Spanish the equivalent of, "Get your nice juicy avocados here! 3 for $2!" or whatever they're selling that day.

There are also a few Chinese market gardeners, selling the most unusual herbs, vegetables and things like bitter melon (I can see Mealz screwing up her face right now!) and horseraddish. They always try and give you extra stuff you don't really need for "just $1 more" and you have to know when to say no, but sometimes they also give you free stuff so I think it evens out.

Mmmm, look at all the yummy food! The big swathe of yellow in the left centre stall is actually the most amazing mangoes, I've already written about them in the last post I did about the markets, a few months ago. (Click on the image to see better.)

Here is a slightly rude photo of eggplants. The grower had no idea why they did that, but she thought it was funny too.

At the moment there's a guy who always talks to me in Spanish, I need to practice cos I only understand about 2 words of what he says to me and it's embarrassing. I buy cherries off him (usually $1/lb but currently $3/lb), though the last decent ones of the season were last week. Time to find a new snack food! (I've been buying big bags each week... yummy!)

Brendan always buys pistachios - once we had salt, lime and tequila-flavoured ones! Mexicans seem to really like chilli on everything, and so it's hard to find plain ones. And of course it's all over-salted.

Later, we went to Walmart to buy some sun shades for our car, since it's getting a bit unbearable when you open the car door after leaving it somewhere.

Here is our favourite diet-killing row of shelves: Everything chocolate-related!! Note at the top right, Reeces Peanut Butter cups minis in large packet form . We should have bought the chocolate for our wedding from here!!


Lastly, a little video made from photos I took while driving home from the markets. It's like the "as if you were there" of our driveway, though sped up slightly at the end.

1 comment:

Tina said...

Argh! Sorry the photos are screwing themselves up so I had to repost them, and Blogger won't let me edit the post at all now (everything disappears.) Sure it will fix itself soon.