You see dirty I see clean.
Around this time of the year, Maria and I decided to start cooking more frequently at home. We are both foodies with the additional perk of me loving to cook. Cooking for her is always a pleasure! I was lucky enough to have the best compliment I could ever dream of when making her my shrimps with garlic butter sauce🍤which she put high on her list of favorite dishes, right next to her moms! What an honor!🤩However, grocery shopping in the local supermarkets, the likes of City Mart and Marketplace, always seemed a bit steep. I work in food & beverages so i knew that we were getting ripped off, often for below standard quality produce. Seriously, you go to those places and you can find the meat turned green & smelly, the veggies dry and the salad looked like it spent one too many hours sunbathing 😆With a touch of exaggeration of course, but you get the picture…
We decided to give local markets a try. It’s where we found the best local products, meat, fish, all of it! You can bargain the price, you get to choose which one you want, you get 20+ happy smiles during your shopping experience (something even the most expensive luxury shop in the world cannot give you), you interact with the people, they genuinely smile at you and welcome you, foreigners shopping in their local neighborhood market, and you go back home satisfied and in good spirits! What more do you want? You go to spend money and you feel richer on your way back home! No better way to put that. Damn, my dad will be proud of me if he reads this 😂 I loved going to the market with him as a kid to get fruits, cakes and “alouda”; a sweet milk based cold beverage with psyllium, agar (a jelly like substance), vanilla extract and some pink food coloring, because let’s face it, which 6 year old (or oldie for that matter) wants to drink white milk from the market. Everything is better in pink😛But carrying the bags and waiting for him to choose the perfect tomatoes, potatoes and a whole list of veggies that can put me to sleep to this day was simply a pain in the a$$! Sorry pap, love you❤️
If you’re wondering why I started this post with that sentence, keep reading. Basically, in Myanmar, hygiene, especially food hygiene, is not a forte. You may go to a tea shop as well as a good restaurant and you never know when you might come out with a waterfall through your butt crack 🌋Imagine that!😈No but seriously, it’s a thing here. And eating outside can also be tiring after some time, not to say that I have tried all restaurants in town, but that feeling when you miss a home cooked meal..aah!🥗 Like I said, the expensive places, the supermarkets, are to me personally, no good for buying food. Except maybe pasta. The local markets are a treasure trove if you enjoy finding and choosing your own products. You get it fresh, you clean it well, you cook it delicious and pray you don’t fall asleep on your plate by the time you’re done. Believe me, this can happen😅 Our first time buying meat was in a market off the side of the road in Yangon. We went to look for an apartment and came back with nothing but a dead chicken. It was the biggest kitchen I ever bought! At least 5-6kg, with the head, legs and everything on. The only missing thing that made it stand out from traditional chickens was the feathers and the running around🐓💨💨We got that, went back home, and I was in for 5 hours straight of cooking; on the menu was coconut chicken curry, chicken teriyaki, grilled chicken legs, slow cooked chicken breasts and a chicken soup. We had enough food for a week! No eating outside, no being sick, no missing home meals. Damn that was awesome!
Side joke: I’m sitting at work and I hear the following “country road, take me home…”🎵📢 This is a sign! It must mean I’m on the right track 😂Try listening to it while reading this.
The lady pictured here was preparing our chicken. Of course we didn’t make it early, being the pandas 🐼that we are. We arrived there when they were about to close, around 2p.m and we didn’t have a wide range of choice. The big chickens were all gone. We were happy with our shopping trip anyway😊While taking this photo, it’s what came to mind. Where and how she was sitting, on top of a pile of crates with outstretched mats, the chicken arriving by “bicycle”, attached to the back of it (I’ll add the photo of that too in case you don’t believe me), spread out all over the place, and that’s where we step in. We come, look, point, weigh, pack, pay, smile (very important so they remember you & you get a discount next time) and leave. Honestly though, I never would have thought that I would buy meat from such a place. At first glance, it turns your insides, you judge and you want to run away from it. Then you pause for a minute and wonder; they all get it from here, don’t they? They’re all having the same thing. Aren’t they eating this and living off of it? Why can’t I? Let’s give it a try!
Can you guess what we did next?
We bought fresh fish and shrimps too! Haha 😂 It was utterly succulent!
How wrong were we to judge? As wrong as it gets. All it took was the courage to see it, the will to try, clean it, cook it and enjoy it.
I’ll let you make up your own mind on this one.
Over & Out!
R