A Trip To the Market

October 23, 2006 - 11:32 PM by Allison

Hannah’s not on kibbutz anymore. She’s moved to the big city, and is busy uncovering the wonders of grocery shopping in Israel.

I love grocery stores. When I lived in Portland, I would go to the big grocery store in my neighborhood late at night and wander the aisles imagining all sorts of culinary possibilities. I was an expert on prices per ounce for just about everything. Now that I’m in Israel, grocery shopping is a bit more challenging but equally exhilarating. With all my current free time, I’ve been to our neighborhood SuperSol many many times often only purchasing the basics, but stopping to read everything (great for my vocab!).

I have made a few mistakes, I bought the frozen “American” schnitzel (basically big chicken nugget patties) instead of the schnitzel amiti (more normal breaded chicken). Luckily, Dor finds them acceptable enough to put in sandwiches. I won’t touch them, just the smell makes me nauseous. It also took me a couple of tries to figure out which canned tomatoes were the right ones for making pasta sauce and I bought plastic bags for food that I thought were like sandwich bags or zip-locs but it turns out they are neither, though still quite useable.

When I wanted to buy hamburger meat for our American night and I went to the meat counter and told the butcher I wanted meat for hamburgers she asked me how much, “Um, enough for three people.” A kilo? No, let’s make it 800 grams (I love the metric system in this way). She starts to pile it up and it’s not ground or anything, just pieces of beef in a plastic bag. I have no idea how to say “ground” so I say, “Um, can you please *motion for grinding*?” She looks at me like I’m a total idiot, “Why didn’t you say so?” Well, lady, I didn’t know that when you said you wanted hamburger meat you have to ask for it to be ground. I’m from America, goddammit. I just shrug and glance lovingly at my bottle of Heinz ketchup in the grocery cart (you just can’t compromise on ketchup) when she says, “You have to know what you want!” in a not-so-nice way. I am not sure if she is punishing me by handing me the ground beef in a almost-leaky plastic bag or if that is standard procedure.

Things that I have started to adjust to and am still amazed by: Going to the shuk and buying millions of different spices in bulk for ridiculously low prices (many that I have never even heard of), all the amazing locally made cheese (goat cheese is AMAZING and so is the dill and garlic Israeli cream cheese – gvinat shamenet shoom shamir), the huge variety of olive oil, cheap and delicious produce – including crazy tropical varieties and things like the pitaya (which is grown by Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava, by the way), and the variety of foods that seem to appeal to the many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds of grocery shoppers, some of which is now completely mainstream Israeli staples. In the frozen food section alone you can buy bagels, blintzes, pizza, meat-filled Russian style pasta, bourekas (phyllo dough filled with cheese, potato, spinach etc.), jachnun (Yemenite pastry dough in a roll, aka greasy deliciousness) and malawach (greasy Yemenite pancake).

Yum.

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