Food Fetishes

Trip Start Aug 01, 2008
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Trip End Jun 30, 2010


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Saturday, January 31, 2009

So food is one of the few forms of entertainment available here, and it's also a bit of a battle to maintain and refresh the supplies of staple foods at home that make life hum along with a greater sense of normalcy.  I finally made it to the local meat wholesaler.  Previously, we had shared a large order with some friends and one of them went to pick it up and divided it up and delivered it.  The next time we received some meat from a friend who was also relatively new to town and mistakenly bought an entire box of about fifty pounds of beef tenderloin, then looked to divvy it up after the fact.  So we'd been about a month without the fine meat and unwilling to pay the hiked up cost at the local supermarket, but the nanny has been cooking for us a couple of times a week and that filled the gap nicely.  She cooks in large portions (being a mother of 7 herself) so that works pretty well.  Still, we'd been missing the steaks and chops, and yearning for some chicken cutlets to try to wean the boys off the heavily processed chicken nuggets that we end up throwing down for them about three times a week.   The problem is that the wholesaler is only open from 6am -noon Monday to Friday, 6-8am on Saturdays.  The couple of times I tried to get there were unsuccessful because I didn't know the schedule the first time and then I misunderstood and thought it was open until 2.  So finally last Saturday I got up before 7 and got down there with a wallet full of CFAs.  It is kind of an open market, with everybody congregating in little clusters along the loading docks.  Lots of cartons were piled up and people were backing up with taxis to load up and I wandered about just trying to see if the cartons were organized by style of meat or what.  Finally, someone directed me to the "chief", who provided me with the list of goods (not all of which were available).  I ended up with my own good-sized carton of beef tenderloins and another box of pork chops, for the grand total of about $400 (US).  I figured we could split it with friends if we wanted to, but we did manage to cram it all in our freezer and we figure we'll just keep it and maybe not have to go back there again this year (optimistic thinking).

Another aspect of shopping is that when you see the products you want at the local supermarkets, local expat wisdom says to buy as much of it as you can because you don't know when you'll see it again.  So about two months ago I spotted Green Giant corn in a can, unsweetened, and I bought up about twenty cans.  I continued to see it for the next few weeks, and I continued to re-supply with five or six more cans each time.  Then they were gone.  But this week I saw another couple of rows of them and I figure that that was the real last of them for a while, so I bought up another twenty cans.

Because all the foodstuffs come in huge containers by ship, prices tend to be pretty high.  For some reason, it's hard to find non-sugary non-chocolatey breakfast cereals except for about eight different varieties of corn flakes.  The boxes of Kellog's brand, normal family size, costs around $7 or $8 (US), but since we bought that one time we now have the kids eating the low budget variety of what we still call "chicken cereal" even though the Kellog's chicken isn't on the package.  This box costs about $3 (US).

Our favorite cafe, not too far away either, is Le Citronelle.  You can get some pretty good pizza there (sandwich bread sized) for less than a dollar, a good chunk of flan for a dollar, and madeleines (little plain sweet cakes) for forty cents.  They also have decent hamburgers and you can get eggs or crepes there for breakfast.  The service, as with all local eateries, is horrendous for the most part, although the expat owners (French?  Lebanese?) are very nice and speak pretty good English once in a while.

Last week we had to cut out on a big group of friends eating lunch at Le Pyramide by the beach.  We got there a little later than them and already hungry, but we quickly realized that we would not get our food for at least another hour.  It had already been half an hour and we hadn't received our drink order or been given menus.  We should know better, but sometimes we forget.  The other thing that's maybe a European influence on the restaurant industry is that you generally can't get served until six or even seven o'clock.  Not too convenient when trying to dine out with kids. 
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