Taking the Good with the Bad

Vege Long Shot

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.

vension man

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.

baker

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.