On Saturday a few of the other teachers and I went to Vladimir's central market, a venue for buying all sorts of food, cheap clothes, and a strange assortment of housewares and other trinkets. My native Cleveland has the West Side Market, a 100-year-old public market with an interesting mix of old-school, ethnic, iconic sellers (such as Polish butchers who have been selling meat to blue-collar Clevelanders for generations) and upstart, organic cooperatives selling trendy, locally-grown vegetables (heirloom tomatoes and tubers with odd names); it's a melting pot where the industrial, immigrant Cleveland of yesteryear meets the scrappy, educated, rust-belt-chic, urban-gardening Cleveland that is arising amid the hulks of factories and the skeletons of neglected frame houses.
I could go on and on about Cleveland, but this is a blog about Vladimir, so I'll just say that Vladimir's central market is a grittier, realer version of the West Side Market. It's a place where people who can't really afford to shop at supermarkets go to buy their sustenance. It's a place where local producers of meats and fruits and vegetables join up with sellers from Central Asia and the Caucuses to sell a mix of goods sourced from around Vladimir Oblast and from around the whole former USSR. There's no trendy coffee roaster, and there's most definitely no cutesy cupcake baker (too bad, really). Instead of bearded hipsters, the market is packed with plodding babushki and burly guys. Ya, it's the real deal.
I bought a big shoulder of fresh lamb (at least a pound and a half), carrots, onions, and a bunch of spices, which I used to make plov, an Uzbek rice pilaf. The bill for all that was under 500 rubles ($15). I also bought a jar of local honey, which is some of the best honey I've ever had. It's a dark honey from buckwheat nectar, and it has a very strong, distinct taste. The lady who sold it to me expounded on its incredible medicinal powers. The only thing I got that wasn't so good were some peaches: They were kind of pasty, but maybe I'm in the wrong country to be expecting something that compares to a fresh Ohio peach on a hot August day.
I could go on and on about Cleveland, but this is a blog about Vladimir, so I'll just say that Vladimir's central market is a grittier, realer version of the West Side Market. It's a place where people who can't really afford to shop at supermarkets go to buy their sustenance. It's a place where local producers of meats and fruits and vegetables join up with sellers from Central Asia and the Caucuses to sell a mix of goods sourced from around Vladimir Oblast and from around the whole former USSR. There's no trendy coffee roaster, and there's most definitely no cutesy cupcake baker (too bad, really). Instead of bearded hipsters, the market is packed with plodding babushki and burly guys. Ya, it's the real deal.
I bought a big shoulder of fresh lamb (at least a pound and a half), carrots, onions, and a bunch of spices, which I used to make plov, an Uzbek rice pilaf. The bill for all that was under 500 rubles ($15). I also bought a jar of local honey, which is some of the best honey I've ever had. It's a dark honey from buckwheat nectar, and it has a very strong, distinct taste. The lady who sold it to me expounded on its incredible medicinal powers. The only thing I got that wasn't so good were some peaches: They were kind of pasty, but maybe I'm in the wrong country to be expecting something that compares to a fresh Ohio peach on a hot August day.
Making plov
Jar of buckwheat honey
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