The Market

Our 4cu.ft refrigerator.

There are markets in our neighborhood every day except Monday. It's a good thing, because our refrigerator is doll-size: a head of lettuce (a big head, granted) takes up half of one of the three shelves, and the area for milk bottles on the door can only hold liter-sized bottles. (Good for wine, maybe not so good for the boy that loves milk at all meals.)

When I first arrive at the market, I like to stroll along the entire length while checking out the various booths. Here is the man who is selling stuff from Grandma's attic, including an old violin with a missing bridge; there is the man who sells chickens that have been cooking on spits for the last hour or so (very tasty.) There are farmers who sell their own produce; there are sellers who have just picked up a truckload of food at the international food market south of Paris - Rungis. Everyone has a specialty - from vegetables and fruit to poultry to dried sausages and ham. To those of us who are used to shopping in American supermarkets, where rows of immaculately displayed soft drinks and breakfast cereals dominate, the diversity of displays and the nuances found between them absolutely enchants the mind.

If you don't reserve your spit-cooked chicken by 10 am, you're out of luck!

My  first purchase, made out of dire necessity, was a pot: the Teflon has been mostly scoured off the pots  in my apartment, and I am completely sure that I am uninterested in finding black spots in my potato puree. This pot is very interesting: the interior  is made out of ceramic, and guarenteed to be non-stick. I must admit that I was more than a bit skeptical when this claim was made. Almost all my pots at home - from the Teflon to the cast iron, in passing by the copper clad - have had that claim made about them at one time or another, and none of them have resisted burnt milk for more than a week. I have now had this pot for almost 3 weeks, have burned a couple things in it, including milk (distracted much?) and I am as much in love with it as the sales rep promised me. I think that I will buy a set and bring it home.


I haven't been here long enough to know where the vegetables are the freshest, or best tasting. Is the long line at one vendor due to the quality of their produce, or perhaps to their prices, or  maybe it is because they are the only ones to have white pomegranites, miniature Egyptian cucumbers, and freshly picked chanterelle mushrooms? I have been dreaming about eating skinny French beans for months now, yet I found out the hard way that not every vegetable that looks fresh is, in fact, tasty.

My absolute favorite stands are the seafood stands, with their abundance of weirdly named fish, heads on, staring me in the eye, daring me to say "Yes, you have already been frozen, twice." The memory brings me back to my early days of working in the consulting world: my very first site visit brought me to a quasi-abandoned freezer unit on an international dock. Semi-frozen fish were being off-loaded from a trawler via pitchfork as our client explained that as long as there was not complete thaw, the fish could be sold as "fresh frozen." That was enough to turn me away from commercially caught fish for a very long time. Luckily, it's hard to make a fish eye shiny (at least I think that this is the way to make sure that the fish is as fresh as possible...) and a choice between at least 20 different fresh fish from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, ranging from sole to ray to snapper and other varieties that I couldn't identify in English finally was narrowed down enough so that I can close my "caddy" and retreat to my doll-sized kitchen for a fantastic meal.