Farmers Markets

Hello all! I am actually in Georgia visiting Daddy and Gloria for the holiday. We just got back from two farmers markets - Dekalb Farmers Market and Bufford Road Farmers Market. They are like no markets I have ever seen - they are massive indoor grocery store-like places with food from all over the world. I, of course, wanted to try one of everything. So far, I've tried a few snacks from other countries: spicy cassava chips from the Indies, soy sauce watermelon seeds from Taiwan, squash seeds, puffed corn, and puffed green beans all three from the Philippines, and seaweed wrapped rice cakes and purple corn from Japan. All were really good, except the watermelon seeds take a lot of work to crack for a very little seed. The rice cakes aren't like dried, puffed rice cakes. They were moist sweet rice cakes with pureed red beans and green peas inside - yum!! I thought the purple corn would taste like regular corn, but purple, but it wasn't. It was so much denser and firmer than any corn I'd ever had. It was on the cob, but you really had to eat it kernel by kernel.

We also got some fruits for me to try, though I haven't yet. We got lychee, persimmon, baby coconut, guava, sugar cane, two types of baby bananas, Korean pear, and two different kinds of mango, one as big as my head! We also saw jack fruit, which was so massive I could hardly lift one, but we didn't get one because we'd never be able to eat all that fruit - if my camera wasn't malfunctioning I would have taken a picture of the jack fruit, but I was able to borrow one to capture all the fruit we brought home. I can't wait to try something, but need to let all the snacks I tried to digest. I'll report on it all tomorrow.