Street meat and olives!

Shopping is such an interesting thing here I wanted to share some of it with you.  We walked down the hill to our local markets, fruit stand and butcher. 

Here are some photos of things we bought.

 I needed some olives and olive juice so my fruit/vegetable vendor scooped out these olives from a large plastic bin.  He poured some of the brine into the bag for me.  It is hard to make a dirty martini without the olive juice! 

 

These are the eggs we buy.  They do not refrigerate the eggs here. 

If you look closely enough, you will see why I bleach and clean my eggs before using them. 

(Chicken poop and feathers still attached!!!!)

We refer to the meat from the butchers here as "street meat".  They are open front stores with a couple of coolers.  They have whole chickens, big slabs of turkey, beef and lamb, livers, hearts and sometimes what looks like brains...(YUCK).  They also have fresh eggs, noodles and sometimes local flat bread.  Many of them have song birds in cages hanging from the ceiling.

 

The coolers are open in the back, glass front and when the weather gets warm the bees fly around near the meat.  But when it is your only option,  you look beyond!  The butcher will work on my chicken breasts and then go right to working on the ground turkey, without washing his hands, wooden butcher block or his knife!  LOL  No FDA approval here.

 

This is what my meat looks like when I get home.  This is ground turkey, which the butcher puts into a plastic bag (usually has a little ground lamb mixed in).  Everything gets wrapped in brown paper.

 

 

The chicken breasts are not cleaned so I have to wash, trim and get them ready for the freezer.  It took me a few weeks when we first arrived to explain that I wanted the butcher to take the breasts off the whole chicken carcass and to take the skin off.  Boneless, skinless chicken is not something they eat a lot of here. 

 

We take a LOT for granted in the good old US of A.  Like clean meat packing,  a huge variety of items, and bagged salad!!! Making a salad here is so tedious....it is a treat when we buy the ingredients and make salad!