Saturday is feria day in Palmares. And after yesterday's disappointment with the San Ramon feria, today we were up early and ready to go - especially since we have a wedding to attend later.
While we're far from expert expats yet, we felt surprisingly at ease this time as we worked our way up and down the two aisles of vendors - commenting on prices, remembering which ones we had good experiences with last week, who had better prices on this or that. Our number skills are still pathetic, though, which continues to prove a challenge when it comes time to pay for items that are priced by weight. But we manage...and don't mind being the butt of the jokes and headshakes we surely leave in our wake.
Consistent with my pledge to try cooking with new foods whenever possible, we bought a few new veggies today: Choyote (which I believe we might have eaten in a soda yesterday) a red-skinned root that I think is related to the yucca, and a small yucca root.
We've had yucca a couple of times. Once was in a soup that our landlady gave us. The other time is was shredded and mixed in with a delicious tamal, a sweet baked masa. I think the red-skinned root and choyote may have also been in the landlady's soup, so I'm planning on trying something similar.
Milk, cheese, eggs and meat are all expensive here compared to the US, which is clearly why they are used more for flavor than for substance in Costa Rican cooking. Today we bought 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) of boneless skinless chicken breasts (~ $3.28 per pound) and about a pound of spicy chorizo ($1), which will be more than enough meat to get us through until next week's feria. All together we spend about 10,000 colones, or approximately $19 (US) for everything -- including the chicken and sausage and a kilo of large eggs (14 of them), for which we paid about $2.
A couple of things we found interesting: both the chicken and the chorizo vendors put on fresh gloves to handle the raw meat products. And the chorizo vendor held out a basket to receive our money so that he would not have to handle it. I presume that another person would have made change if that had been necessary. These are the kinds of things that give us confidence shopping and eating in this strange new world.
Pura Vida
