Fishy Food & more

Here are the Meats of the Market!.....minus the pig heads - I haven't gotten a picture of that yet. Presentation is an art form here. Below are several different kinds of dried fish ranging from smaller to larger, dried squid and octopus shredded into strips, and I believe some silkworms (there's a better picture of them coming up!)

Now, if you'd prefer to buy in bulk, here you go!!! Big, big bags of the same above.
These columns give "fish strips" a whole new meaning! Dried fish either strung through a pole or tied with twine together. Our kids have looked longingly at these for so long, I finally got a strip for them, not sure if we'd be throwing them out or not. I'll blog some pictures later with the kids.

And here is what we think is a dried stingray....definitely for the eating! Any takers?

And then there is also chicken at the market...fresh chicken, I think---although John will not let me buy it here. I guess when you don't know what your chicken has come in contact with, the American mind gravitates toward buying it nicely wrapped from the store and take the chances of whatever it came in contact with there, instead of actually seeing what the chicken comes into contact with at the market. Mental block, I suppose........ But it is really fun watching them chop up the chickens when someone buys one. Also, do you see the large container of eggs at the bottom-right? This is how we buy our eggs: in a large flat which holds 30 eggs. The eggs are not usually refridgerated here because they are nearly fresh out of the henhouse to your table--unwashed, good ole fashioned farm-eggs! :)

Here are several different kinds of rice cakes. These are very popular here for snacks. They are good, too, once you get a taste for them. I can't think of much to compare them to in the States -maybe rice puffs? Except that rice cakes are very moist, not dry. The rice cake itself is rather tasteless - it's the texture and filling that are more remarkable about them. The texture to me is more like a solidified bowl of plain cream-of-wheat. I'm not sure what the filling is - we think maybe a red bean paste. We've all(except John) come to really like the red bean paste that they use often here. They even fill bakery pastries with it and have red bean ice cream here.

And last but not least are the silkworms. Buy them by the large cupfuls! This container was about gone, they are popular here. I've got to tell you my story about these silkworms! And no, I haven't eaten a single one of them! What happened was that my kids kept wondering why I wouldn't eat the little whole fishies with them. I tried telling them that I just couldn't get past the eyeballs and scales, but they didn't understand.....it wasn't what they looked like, they said, it was how they tasted, and according to them, the fishies tasted great. We would go around and around on this topic until finally I hit on something......these silkworms! You can buy them canned in all different sizes, or fresh in bulk, like this. So I offered to buy them some silkworms. They politely declined. When I asked them why not, they said they didn't like them. That was funny....they'd never eaten them before. I told them so, and they replied, "Maybe they do taste good, but we still don't want to try them...they look gross." So then I took the wonderful opportunity to draw a parallel between their unwillingness to try the silkworms merely based on looks, not taste, and my own aversion to the little fishies they like so well. Mommy is now enjoying peace on the subject, plus the kids' understanding of mind over matter. We all know that if we were in desperate straights, I could eat the fishies and they could eat the silkworms...but since things are not so desperate right now, we prefer to keep those items off our plates!