Food Quest

[example22]

My quest to be the stereotypical jaded-metro-yuppie-Guardianista-Islingtonite continues! So it's off to Borough Market to exercise my hunter-gatherer instincts in search of olive bread and nettle cheese (no, really).

But I go off the rails a bit on the way back, and pop in to the unappealing-looking Lithuanian shop under the arches at London Bridge. It also turns out to be unappealing-smelling, and of course it shakes violently every couple of minutes because of the trains. But it's packed with unidentifiable groceries!

So I am now the proud owner of: a rattan basket of biscuits that look like tiny beige snails and are called "sausainiai riču raču", a bag of glaistyti zefyrai ("coated zephyrs", it says here) which I think are probably chocolate-covered meringues, and an ominous sausage labelled "šaltai rūkyta KRIVIO dešra". Ping is not impressed, so it may all end up as a nutritionally-unsound packed lunch for Picocon. Anybody want a coated zephyr?

Comments

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

MMM, coated zephyrs. We did a very similar thing today in Brixton market and came back with Malaysian green cake - not as interesting as it sounds, it's essentially quintessential machine made soft madeira cake, but green (and Small and Tiny's favourite food in the whole world (Tiny says "cake, cake, CAKE!").
Brixton market in theory has every type of food known to man, but although I did eventually find brown cardamons in the chinese shop, methi (fenugreek) leaves still elude me. How can they be so difficult? They're a key ingredient of every single balti in our Top 100 Baltis book. Bloody London, thinks it's so great and can't even produce a good curry. I feel a trip to Tooting Broadway coming on (the South Northern Line mini Southall).

[example22.livejournal.com]

Malaysian green cake is pandan-flavoured, isn't it? There's a stall that sells it in Oriental City; I love the slightly rubbery, not-found-in-nature texture it has. Consider it added to my mental list of plausible bribes for tots...

Methi: odd, isn't it? The only place I ever found it was Brick Lane (in a box that would have lasted me for a decade, at least), but it's an ingredient in every second recipe. Perhaps true curry fans grow it in their gardens?

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it is Pandan flavoured - not that I'd recognise a pandan if it tried to copulate with my cat - or indeed if I ate it.
Our ancient methi supply (still edible but a little past its best) comes from a trip to Brick Lane in a long-ago lunchbreak - maybe such things will again be possible.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Just how much wind is in that coated zephyr?