A Crispy, Pungent, Gelatinous Tour
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re back in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon, where I’m buying squishy green pandan sweets from little old ladies in pointy straw hats, amid the cacophony of horns and cars and motorbikes and sweat and smells. It’s perfect.
A Crispy, Pungent, Gelatinous Tour
I love grocery shopping. To be fair, I loved it when we lived in the US, too. I loved cooking, and shopping for ingredients seemed like an important (and enjoyable) part of that process. I particularly love a good farmer’s market; I spent so much time at the Raleigh market that many of the vendors knew me, and I had favorite farmers for various items (spring strawberries had to come from Strawberry Lady, but she also had fabulous sweet corn in the summer, whereas peaches were best from the large stall down at the end, on the right, but only after freestones came in).
Nowadays, I rarely cook. I make breakfast for myself whenever we stay in an Airbnb, but Lee would rather eat out, so except for the pre-vaccine days when we were hiding from Covid, we eat lunch in restaurants every day.
But I’ve hung on to my grocery shopping habit. I usually try to go to the local market at least once (or every day, depending where we are—I mean, really, isn’t market wandering the whole point of Paris?). And I consider grocery stores a legitimate tourism destination.
So since I’m not shopping for dinner ingredients any more, I buy snacks. Again, I maintain that this is a completely legitimate tourism activity (no matter what my husband says; don’t listen to him). You can learn a tremendous amount about a country by studying their snack habits.
For instance:
Icelanders love candy—so much so that there’s a tradition of candy shops offering a discount on Saturdays—you can stock up for the week to come. There’s even a name for it: nammidagur, which means candy day. You read that right: Saturday is Candy Day in Iceland. These are truly my people.
Mexico is the land of the savory snack—Mexicans love a crunchy, savory nibble, preferably with some sort of spicy or sour dip or drizzle or powder. Snack vendors are on every street, at every hour. You’re never more than a few pesos away from something tasty and crispy and potentially incendiary.
In Taiwan, the street food snacks often have a combination of sweet and savory, in ways that didn’t entirely work for me, to be honest. I love a sweet, buttery caramel with a sprinkle of sea salt, but at one point in Taipei, I watched a vendor fill a fresh cream puff with custard, then sprinkle it with green onions. That is not the kind of sweet and salty mix that I love.
But the grocery store snacks in East Asia are a whole world of fascinating, new-to-me tastes.
Before our Taiwan roadtrip, I stocked up on the following (snacks are one of the best parts of any roadtrip, of course):
Avocado chips (meh)
Pretzel sand (better-than-they-sound cookies)
Shelf-stable Camembert strips, covered in a paper-thin layer of cod (Google translate seriously failed me on these)
Marshmallows stuffed with ovaltine cream (Lee never got to try these—oops)
2 gigantic sugar apples (delicious, but gave me terrible gas—maybe eating a kilo at a time is a bad idea?)
Plain white cotton candy in a shelf-stable bag (softer and finer than the neon-hued carnival kind, but still not health food)
Shelf-stable cheesecake bites (as processed and delicious as they sound)
Something called milk candy (chewy, milky, sweet—maybe it appeals to people who don’t like chocolate, but I don’t understand those people)
More varieties/flavors/colors of mochi than you can shake a stick at
We’re going back to Japan in May, and I’m so excited. Japan has next-level snacks. I can’t think of a more engaging way to spend a few hours (days?) than browsing a Japanese grocery store.
In the meantime, I have my eye on some mala-flavored rice cakes. Face-numbing snacks? Yes please!
Take care,
Lisa
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