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| Today's haul, cunningly arranged. |
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Istanbul Spor: A Trip To The Pazar
Note to self: Next time I feel guilty about not exercising, I should just remember how often I buy a bunch of crap and haul it home on foot. Since our house had almost no food in it, today was perhaps a little more than usual. Also, the pazar is just really cool.
I admit I'm a bit sore, though it's hard to tell if it's from this, or from traveling and hauling shit around airports and in and out of cars, or both. And it looks like I'm definitely cooking tonight.
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11 comments:
I like the composition--looks like thanksiving.
Thanks, Erika! I was sort of pleased, though it's hard to make fruits and vegetables look bad. I was just kind of sad the spinach didn't show more...
My local pazar is down the street and every Sunday, I tote my basket on wheels and fill it up. (Am I getting elderly?)I am becoming a familiar to all the local sellers. Mainly because I smile and say thank you to them. I am not embarrassed to say that I like the whole atmosphere there.
HOWEVER... on Tuesdays they have a clothes and housewares pazar in the same place and after one "adventure" there, I swore off THAT forever. Too many women in overcoats and scarves with baby carriages and wild children who simply cannot understand the natural flow of human traffic. They stop and go and try to turn to go in the opposing direction or cross the lanes and generally throw everybody into confusion. And those old ladies can be quite pushy too. My nerves were in tatters after that and I decided that whatever they sold there it couldn't be worth the ordeal.
But Sunday is a different story. Last week, some old man sagely pointed at me and indicated that I was about to accidentally drop a 20 lira out of my pocket. I'm always impressed by their honesty there.
All the fruit and vegetables are incredibly fresh and cheap. Sometimes I buy too much for my fridge which tends to force me to make a big Sunday meal. I can say without question that I lived so healthily before.
The problem with American lifestyle is one has to make too much of a conscious effort to eat well. It's too much work. It is so much more expensive to have a healthy diet there. It should be as easy as it is in Turkey.
Last week I found... cantaloupe! I paid a high price (eeegads, 5 tl of one!!)but my friend was bowled over by that rich banana-y taste. All the local varieties taste like sweet cucumbers to me.
But I do wonder why they can't wash the chicken crap off the eggs a bit better! Is it supposed to a seal of freshness or something? Yick.
I'm definitely thinking I need to get one of those rolly tote thingies. Elderly or not, my shoulders are pretty sore today. I do feel the shame though, when I see those 70 ear old women carrying what looks like 20 pounds of vegetables in each hand and they're not even breaking a sweat! But since I no longer have access to a car, it will make shopping much easier, especially for stuff like laundry detergent. I'm such a cheapskate I refuse to pay for the smaller bags because they're more expensive than the huge ones...
We have a produce market that's pretty good, and a great fruit truck nearby. Unfortunately the pazar is on Wednesday so it's pretty hard to get to on work days. You're right about the diet, though. There are times I miss having some frozen or dried prepared food around for quick cooking, but overall it's nice not having to consider diet among my health issues-- I realized this when I was pg, and reading all the stuff I should and shouldn't eat, and I was all, "Hey, I'm totally there already and I just get to eat more of the same!" I didn't even realize I had a good diet until then...
Stranger,
Why don't you use the web ordering facilities from Carrefour and Migros? It wouldn't work for pazar-style freshness and cheapness but for items like bulk laundry detergent, paper towels, fruit juice etc. it does. I usually open both sites, comparison shop and order from both on the same day usually. Another tactic that works is keeping enough stocked up and waiting for special deals for credit cards (%10 in points etc. do happen and you can pay by those same points the next time). One down side is that you cannot count on getting all that you order. They don't track availability AFAIR. OTOH, you only need to find canned tuna at a reasonable price once a year.
Becoming like those 70-year-olds is also possible with minor practice twice a week or so. Just carry heavy-ish things using both hands for 5-10 minutes twice a week (walking up and down a corridor after getting those .90 TL/kg, web-delivered sacks of oranges [for juicing] would work and would be easy to do for someone who paces around the house anyway YMMV). For asymmetric carrying capacity, doing something like this every other day until you can hold it for a minute or two should help. If you can hold it for 10-15 sec. initially, the improvement should be very rapid. (Again, if you are the sort who likes tracking tiny but measurable improvements, this is easy and fun to do, YMMV.)
Wow, cool! I never thought of ordering stuff from the markets. Do they charge a delivery fee? It's got to be better than the backpack and stuff in both hands style I've perfected.
Are those old ladies secretly doing pilates? It would explain a lot!
You can make you own prepared foods and freeze them. What I have done in the past is to freeze the ingredients of dishes and then mix them in different ways. For example, you can spend an hour making meatballs (with soy filler and dried onion bits whatever) and then cook them up in one of those large round pans. After they cook and cool, you can put them in portion-sized zip lock bags and store them in the freezer. That way you'll have them ready to add them with whatever vegetables or rice/pasta dish you whip up. It saves so much hassle. I've discovered in Turkey that I am just lazy enough to find an easier way to do things.
As far as the hand cart, it cost me 15 tl and it was worth every kurus because at this point, I do not dread getting my butt out of the house and exploring the market every Sunday as a regular routine, but if I had to haul bags of produce about, I am quite sure I would have given up by now.
They don't charge a delivery fee for orders over a certain amount (75 or 100TL, AFAIR) and their delivery personnel don't appear to expect tips. Apparently they've (both) been doing this for about ten years or more and the operations are reasonably mature. If you have never done it before, I'd suggest you start with non-critical and non-perishable stuff on a day when you have time. Don't select the option for them to substitute an equivalent or bug you on the phone for items they have run out of -- that may complicate things. Both companies have been good at hitting the time window I select (sometimes they are early though) but it may be different for your area.
BTW, big markets should also have a delivery option for store-bought stuff. I've never used that, but my mom used to use it ages ago and I have seen it happen at my sister's house too.
@Nomad, good idea about the cooked food! I used to store a lot of soups and stews, but kind of gave up because by the time I got around to eating them, I wasn't sure what they were-- mostly because my cooking is weird and it's hard to tell what strange concept or surprise ingredient was behind one beef stew or another-- and I often didn't like them much the second time around. Saving parts of dishes rather than whole concoctions makes more sense. Though I think I need a bigger freezer, as now it's pretty much full of frozen summer stuff, like spinach (I don't like winter spinach much) and basil, which I tend to put up because I miss it in winter...
@Bülent-- I've heard before about the online ordering options for big shops-- I just never thought of it as applying to me, maybe because I would never do it in the States.
I've often wondered if you can have stuff you've bought delivered-- not just for me. I used to wonder that when I'd see the occasional person with a month's worth of groceries for a family of 8 on the minibus to Silivri or whatever from the B.Düzü Migros. Maybe, I thought, Migros won't go all the way out the the villages, but since a lot of people have an apparent preference for buying on-sale bulk infrequently, how do the carless (and taxi fare-less) manage to get it home even relatively short distances that might require several transport changes? A lot of poor neighborhoods in B.Düzü didn't have any large markets, but I really doubt those people were paying the bakkal markup on large, heavy items...
Definitely worth checking out for little old me. Our walking-distance Carrefour is pricey and small, and the nearest Migros is a 20-min minibus trip, plus a walk, and it's also pricey, though stocked with interesting tidbits. The next closest Migros and Carrefour are at least 2 transport changes away, and with the boy and all, I can't imagine a toilet paper-paper towel-laundry detergent-olive oil-juice-milk-fruit supermarket trip...
So thanks! New ideas please me!
Oh and if you like basil and using it in pesto, you might try making pesto and freezing it in ice cube trays (freeze with all the olive oil added, transfer to ziploc when frozen and nuke on low to thaw while the paste is boiling). This wouldn't work for feeding a family perhaps, but one thing I used to do for a reasonably tasty/nutritious/quick meal was having nuts+tomato juice (while waiting for pasta to cook) followed by pasta+pesto+garlic+ayran followed by pomegranate juice. This scheme covers many food groups (nuts have fiber in them too), includes the magic yogurt+garlic that cures many ailments, everything can be stocked up and it takes about 20 minutes from 'I am hungry, what can I make?' to 'I am full, well-fed (and stinky).' Everything except basil can ordered online when deals happen. (Basil can be grown of course.)
Hee! Ironically, LE and I spent a while today making pesto and freezing it. I used to do the ice cube tray method, but now I just use several really small containers... We did regular basil pesto with 2 of the bunches I got. Then, because the thyme and mint were far too huge for us to ever finish, and also because I had a bunch of reyhan I'd bought in case I couldn't have green basil, I invented another pesto with those. It seemed pretty yummy and will work with meat too. I have a few small containers left in case I find more basil, and LE is totally into running the blender...
The cool thing about pesto is that it's like mayonnaise-- it makes almost anything taste better!
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