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.