Food, glorious food

The food is really different here. I could write a book about it. But I'll try to keep this post to the essence of it.

First up, they don't do items in bulk. With perhaps the exception of rice which you can buy in 10kg bags (still nothing to get excited about; you can find 20kg bags in Asian groceries in Australia), and sake which you can buy in 3L bottles. But honestly, who wants three litres of sake?

To demonstrate what I mean, bread comes in packs of 3, 5, 6 or 8 slices. That's white bread, by the way. The only wholemeal bread I have found so far comes in packs of 3 slices. For $1.15 a pack.

Secondly, they don't do cheesem, rolled oats or beans in a can. OK, they do cheese. The individually wrapped slices of plastic stuff (6-8 slices per pack), or tiny blocks of plastic stuff for almost $20 a kilo. And beans are virtually unheard of. I really, really, really miss my beans. And my oats.

Fruit is insanely expensive (about $1 per item) but veggies seem to be pretty cheap. I must say it is nice to get a packet of bean sprouts for 49 cents.

Fish, pork and seafood (i.e. shellfish and all those revolting slimy things that make me want to vomit on sight like octopus) are their staple meats. We don't do pork or seafood. Incidentally, many, many seemingly unrelated products such as noodles have seafood flavour bases too. Bleurgh. We're not big fish eaters either, although that's probably going to change over time.

They love their chicken, so there's some respite for us.

They do beef, but it's expensive and fatty. Inedibly so. They don't do lamb.

Curiously, their love of fatty meat works to our advantage. The cheapest cuts of meat are the leanest. I had the amusing experience yesterday of finding one tray of diced beef that was $10 a kilo cheaper than all the others around it. It actually consisted of pieces of meat. And breast is the cheapest cut of chicken. Can't complain.

The other night, being the third of the month, we went to a restuarant for dinner. It was a smorgasbord place, with Western food. Ohhhhhhh! I loaded my plate with pasta, bean salad, thick cut potato chips and tomato sauce, more pasta, Mexican-style chilli, etc etc. It was sooooo good. Not a grain of rice to be had. (I actually don't mind rice. But not for every meal.) We also hoed into the steak, until Craig saw the chef rubbing the hotplate with pork fat. D'oh.

Anyway, we're slowly making adjustments. I have cooked fish three times since we've been here. That's three more times than I'd ever cooked it before. We eat with chopsticks a lot of the time. Um. OK, that's the extent of our changes. The rest of the time we're sticking as closely to our old diet as we can (minus a few much-loved items) so we're a bit slow on the uptake with this one. We might get there eventually, like maybe by around the time we come home again.