To market, to market

“To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,

 home again, home again, jiggety jig. 

To market, to market ,to buy a fat hog,

home again, home again jiggety jog” 

Today this line from a favorite nursery rhyme means more to me than just comic relief.  After living without meat for almost a week now, outside of a few take out meals, I decided to jump back into the local habit of buying meat at the market.  For the most part we buy quantities of meat at the grocery store in Chiang Rai (about 2 hours away) by the methods that Americans are comfortable with- all of which involve plastic wrap, Styrofoam, and a safe distance from those mysterious meat juices.  However, it has been almost a month now since we’ve made a grocery trip and we were missing our protein.  The local market is an open-air covered slab of concrete, atop which local vendors can set up stalls and tables, marketing everything from eels to bananas.  There’s quite a bit left to the imagination there so I’ll fill you in a bit.  Although there’s no guarantee that the ingredients you’re looking for will actually be available when you want them, this is the general inventory; tomatoes, green onions, white onions, shallots, ginger, lemon grass, white cabbage, green cabbage, long green beans, carrots, apples, various native Thai fruits, pumpkins, cucumbers, limes, kale, hot chili peppers, chili paste, eggs, dried shrimp, dried fish and garlic.  If you have any new ideas about how to create a meal, including two little kids, with those ingredients, please let me know.  Most people around here decide what they’re going to eat at the market, when they see what’s available.  Grocery lists and meal plans are impractical and often impossible if you’re relying on the market to complete your recipe.  But I’ve left out the main booth, the hot spot, the stall that’s often quickly sold out……the pork table.  Everything is laid out fresh and sometimes still warm, from every part of our favorite local animal, mr. piggy.  You can even look right in the face of the poor guy as his head is prominently displayed.  I suppose you could try to decipher the expression of the pig and determine whether the meal you make with it will be good, or not.  I generally avoid this table as I’m not totally comfortable with the meat handling practices.  There are no rules here about not touching money, knife, huge slabs of meat, television dial, face with the same hands.  There is no sink, no soap, no plastic gloves, no refrigeration or ice and no guarantee that you’ll be able to remain separate from the animal which you intend to cook that evening.  Oftentimes the meat you request will be placed in a small plastic bag and then placed on a big pile of fresh meat while you fumble with your money, trying if at all possible to give the exact price so that you don’t need him to make change.  It’s enough to give me the eebie jeebies every time and so more often than not, I just make vegetarian when our freezer supply of meat has dwindled to a no more than a few freezer burned hot dogs. 

As with anywhere else that we travel in the area surrounding our home, we are always a curiosity, always on show and on display for anyone who wants to view our strange habits.  I’ve often heard at the market, while I’m buying this or that, “Oh, foreigners can eat that?  Do they know what to do with it?”  Although a lot of what is on offer may be strange and unusual to the foreign palate, much of what they have is similar to us, the difference is in the preparation.  I sometimes have to say, “Yes, we do have shallots in America” or “No thank you, I don’t think we’ll be preparing grubs for dinner tonight”.  So, the next time you visit your local grocery store, enjoy all the convenience and cleanliness that it has to offer.