Taking the Good with the Bad

Although Tom beat me to the chase on post­ing about the Wait­angi Park Mar­kets I thought I would sup­ple­ment his post with a few secrets from the mar­kets he may just have over­looked.

What I’ve enjoyed about the mar­kets, apart from haul­ing my sorry tuck­us out of bed at 8 or 9am on a Sunday, is the way it’s some­thing of a little com­munity.

Mind you, it’s a com­munity made up of people whose names I don’t know, and there’s even a few I for­got to pho­to­graph. But you get the gist.

Ven­sion guy here, for example, sells some pretty good salami. They’re brought in from some whole­saler called Base­Camp. We’ve got one hanging in the pantry gradu­ally aging. It’s covered in a white mold and is start­ing to get prop­erly stinky. Will prob­ably use it on a pizza, or maybe in an anti­pasto of some kind.

This guy on the oth­er hand might look like the fish­mon­ger from the Asterix books, but he actu­ally makes a pretty good vari­ety of rus­tic breads.

We call him, “the nine-grain man”, because makes this fant­ast­ic bread. Keeps for about a week, and takes a whole lot of eat­ing. It’s not del­ic­ate and refined like Moulin Bakery, but… who cares! You need to be mak­ing door­stop sand­wiches? Get on down the mar­ket.

The sign about says it all in the case of these people. They’re rel­at­ively new to the mar­kets, but have been mak­ing a splash. The lamb is incred­ibly inex­pens­ive (but not cheap), and they’ll bring down an entire car­cass cut to your spe­cific­a­tions.

We’ve a rolled shoulder sit­ting in the freez­er just ask­ing to be roas­ted with some rose­mary.

But, of all the secrets of the mar­ket, this unas­sum­ing stall is the greatest. And I’m giv­ing it away to you, dear read­er.

These guys (Viet­namese? Cam­bod­i­an? Dunno) sell the best fresh herbs any­where in the city. Their cori­ander is incred­ibly cheap at $1 a bunch for example. But… they also have bunches of kaf­fir lime leaves for ONE DOLLAR! That’s a sav­ing of $4 over the loc­al New World. There’s also a bunch of oth­er Asi­an spices I don’t really under­stand…

So. Get your­self up out of that hangover and get your­self down to the mar­kets for some super-fresh, super-hardy plants. There’s even some fresh meat for the omni­vores, and deep-fried meat on a stick for those tender stom­achs.

No decent cof­fee in sight tho. There might be a busi­ness oppor­tun­ity in that.