Farmers' Markets swings, misses and DLF maximums

For the last two weeks we've hit up the local Lethbridge Farmers' Markets.

The polka-dotted scarves are the standard garb of the female Hutterites, a clan who are omnipresent at the markets. More seasonal produce than one could, and indeed should, poke a stick at. We nabbed some 'korabhi', or something similar, which was toted as 'like a sour radish'. That was more than enough to have my left hand throw it back into the pile, while my right grabbed Di to try to escape the madness. But not, I was overruled and we now have a brace of korabhi sitting in our fridge, waiting to be eaten. I have declared that I would need to suffer horrific olfactory and glossal injuries before entering the dragon and eating one of those; perhaps that explains the firecrackers I found in my cereal.

Anyway, you have your fair share of characters at the Farmers' Markets. One bird, who was English (and whom Di thought was from New Zealand) started to talk to us, thinking we were English - error. We were after some of aersol-freshener for the car, to douse the stale taste of cigarette smoke which the previous owner so lovingly left for us, and at no extra charge! Does PT stand for 'Pulmonary Terminator'. Now that would be a film I would pay and see. Well, that's a lie - everything is on the internet these days.

So anyway, this bird was selling all manner of deoderants, and after the first two, Robin Goodfellow and Portia, I spotted the subtle Shakespearian reference. Di said that were after something which wasn't 'too girly', and I grunted my approval in the deepest basso profundo imaginable. The bird recommended the Portia - to which I said, 'If this is the same Portia as in the Merchant of Venice then it shouldn't be too girly, at least, not in the second half'. I got nothing. Di stood, waiting for the punchline, and the bird stood, waiting for cold hard cash.

But we connected, in a Stanford Super Series fashion, with a bloke and his wife from Guyana. They make some of the best hot sauce I've tasted in a while

http://www.firenbrimstone.com/info.htm

since it has things in it that add to the taste (mangoes, cucumbers and the like) rather than a concentration of 10 litres of Peruvian Psychopathic Chillies in one tablespoon of mayhem. We talked about West Indian cricket for a while, before he made the schoolboy error of saying 'you probably wouldn't know about the great batsmen we used to have, like Worell, Weekes, Sobers.' That is where he made his first mistake. Good times were had, though, discussing CLR James' 'Beyond a Boundary' and the demise of the pace quartet.

Oh yes, and you can buy a proper fraction's worth of cow or hog. With our new chest freezer (to double as a heater during the winter) we are thinking 1/4 of the finest Albertan cattle will put us in good stead for a while.

Time for that DLF Maximum chilli.