One of the best parts about our neighbourhood is that we’re right near two grocery stores. We’ve also had the chance to go poke about in a couple of local markets in Colombo, and even found a fancy gourmet store. Here’s what we’ve discovered!
Fruits and Veggies
Welp, we thought we knew a lot about fruit and veg. It appears that we were mistaken. At a rough estimate, fully 35% of the produce at our local Cargill’s and Keell’s was baffling. And that’s not even taking into account the local markets in Colombo, which have a much greater selection! There’s an even wider selection than in our market in Rome. So we thought we’d play a little game with you called ‘guess the veg’. Take this, for example:
Any fool can see from the sign that it’s thumba karawila. In English, that’s a baby bitter gourd and – having been too clever for our own good once and tried adult bitter gourd – we’re going to skip this one.
This fruit, on the other hand, we have eaten:
It looks a bit like a canteloupe (but smaller, baseball-sized), and is hard on the outside. Give up? It’s a woodapple! We bought a couple but could not crack them one open with the single knife we have at home. So we tried them in the form of woodapple and jaggery ice cream (jaggery is a minimally-processed cane sugar). It tasted a little like apple, a little like flowery perfume, a little like sweet stinky cheese. Not in a bad way, though. We have also seen it available all over in juices or shakes.
And this one is easy (isn’t it?):
Eggplants, on the bottom. Also on the top. Or, something pretty close to eggplant. We’ve eaten this little green fella in curry and the seeds are eggplant-ish. Plus, a lady in the store told us it was eggplant. Who are we to disagree?
Last but not least, our featured image, is a thing that looks like fiddlehead ferns. We asked someone, who said it was good for the heart. So that answers that.
Protein
This being a Buddhist country, we wondered if there would be much meat for sale. There is, but not packaged as we in the west are used to. For instance, whole and half chickens are for sale, fresh and frozen. But it’s fairly complicated to buy individual parts. We did succeed in finding an already-cut one, but had to buy the whole thing. Pork is available and so are beef and lamb. Also fish, lovely tuna and these reddish steaks below, which together cost us US$4.
And then there are the dried fish, a thing you find throughout Asia.
We haven’t got a clue what to do with them, but we did buy some of the itty bitty shrimps below, called kooni; they seem to provide flavour to curries, especially when ground up. We tried them in a vegetable soup and also in a sauce for fish and they were … fishy! Tasty, though.
There is also a lot of soy of different kinds, including texturised vegetable protein (more or less what Bacon Bits are made of). It’s not our thing, but there is an awful lot of it hanging about.
Grains and Dairy
Overwhelmed as we are by the above categories, we have been paying little attention to the grains and beans and dairy products. But there are, as you might expect, an infinite number of rice varieties available, and more lentils than we knew existed.
Many of the dairy products are imported from Australia, but the buffalo curd is entirely local. We haven’t tried this, but one driver we had assured us that it tastes delicious with honey. You never know; we might give it a go. We also found a Sri Lankan-made pepper gouda (black pepper) which cost a tenth the price of the imports and was pretty good!
Alcohol
Alcohol is available in one but not the other of the stores. It’s a small selection: wines from South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and Spain; major international brands of liquor at very high prices; arack (the local cane spirit) at much lower prices. There are, however, dedicated wine stores, and they have a much larger selection. (At even higher prices.)
Fancy foreign things
In our fancy foreign neighbourhood there is a gourmet food shop, which mostly carries Australian delicacies, but also Hob Nobs for you Brits out there, plus frozen lamb, pizza dough, dumplings, and a whole host of other things. We bought some olives.
In sum, every visit to one of the food markets in Colombo has been an adventure, full of things we can’t identify, let alone cook with. Wish us luck sorting them out!
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