Grocery Shopping

Tuesday morning for us means market day. Slowly, we are getting into a household routine, and part of that means trying to do as little shopping as possible in Superama (the Walmart owned supermarket a block from our house) and instead in the local mercados sobre ruedas. These are little informal markets that spring up around the neighborhood on designated days, taking over a few blocks of nearby streets. There are a dozen good reasons to try to shop there and not in a grocery chain: fresher produce (and chicken and fish and meat), lower prices, greater variety, local vendors (with the exception of the fish--we're landlocked!--most of the produce is trucked in from little towns an hour or two away from us.) The only problem is trying to coordinate and plan around market days--finding the time to go on a Tuesday before 2 or 3pm (easier now when I am not teaching), figuring out what you will need for the week, trying to cook all the greens you buy on impulse before they go bad!

We are also slowly getting to know the vendors and the variations between the markets: that the best (and cheapest) place to get fresh, not-very-fatty chicken is a husband and wife couple who sell on Tuesdays; where to get our favorite fresh cheeses and tortillas on Sundays; that our favorite vegetable stand on Sunday sells more expensive lettuce but cheaper tomatoes than the vegetable stand we like to go to on Tuesdays.

Our favorite place and always first stop on Tuesdays, however, is the woman from Milpa Alta (on the outskirts of Mexico City) who sells produce fresh from the pueblo: mini eggplants, green beans, broccoli heads, sometimes cauliflower, sometimes oyster mushrooms, usually fresh bunches of spinach with some dirt still clinging to their roots. We've fallen into the routine of buying from her what looks good and then looking for the rest elsewhere. No matter what we seem to buy from her or how much it always seems to be 40 pesos, and then she always throws in some extra herbs, cilantro or epazote, a few mini tamales...

Anyway, yesterday I bought a bunch of beautiful flor de calabaza (I was going to take a photo but after 24 hours in the fridge in a bag they are a little wilted), which are going into a soup today, and some greens called quílitiles (a Nahuatl word) that apparently are like spinach but more delicious. She gave me instructions on how to prepare them (you have to twist off the colored part of the root and, unlike spinach, they need to be boiled briefly before you can saute them).

After my first stop, I wandered down to the end of the market where they sell the biggest and freshest (and cheapest) lettuce. It's always a little chaotic--vendors calling out "hola güera, what can I offer you? (I am always referred to as "güera," or "light-skinned girl")," dogs running around, women wandering up and down the narrow lanes between rows of stalls selling garlic and small kitchen tools, men pushing crates of stuff in wheelbarrows, schoolchildren in uniforms swarming the stands with nuts and candies, music from the CD vendors ("original copies," of course) blaring. Usually it's salsa, reggaeton, or pop, but yesterday, incongruously, it was Merle Travis and Nancy Sinatra. Sixteen tons and what do you get?