Hunting and Gathering

I have been making a few notes about interesting things in the grocery stores.

My first all time favorite was the tea, which I thought would be just like the sleepy time tea in the U.S. which I love to have a cup of when I had trouble going to sleep. I used to carry some with me on my trips. I bought a box of the Sleep Nerve Tea and was a bit puzzled when I read the side of the box. “An effective herbal tea to relief nervousness and sleep disorders. It is recommended to be taken three times daily.”

The first night I tried it – I literally fell asleep in front of the television and snored. The next morning I read the ingredients and it not only contains chamomile flowers but VALERIAN Root! It is a natural aid product from Riyadh and I had to chuckle when thinking about all of the supposedly housebound Saudi women who drink three cups of this a day to stay calm.

Under directions for Iced Tea – “Put five bags in hot water and brew for five minutes. Remove the tea bags and add cold water (500 ml). Refrigerate. Enjoy it with your family members!” For all of those mothers who used a dose of Benadryl occasionally when the children were very small – serve this as “sweet tea” at meals and they will never know what happened!!

Do you remember Monosodium Glutamate - MSG? Remember when most of the Chinese restaurants stopped using it, when it was no longer used as a normal ingredient unless loudly noted on the package, when everyone would say they could tell when there was msg in something they ate as their hearts would race and the government spokesman said it was really really bad for us all. I hadn’t even thought about it again – assuming that everyone in the world agreed with the US government that msg was really bad for us - until last year in Singapore, I was learning to make sushi from my favorite Japanese friend and she made reference to a ‘special salt’. She said that she would bring me some the next time we got together as it was inexpensive, very nice and added a lot of flavor. She showed up with a 300-gram plastic bag of monosodium glutamate! Very inexpensive - yes and added a lot of flavor – yes but healthy – not so much.

Some of the large corporations that no longer market products with msg in the states sell soups, etc. here that are loaded with it. Name brands that I felt I could buy without reading the label operate under an entirely different set of rules here – no pork ingredients trumps no msg. No alcohol trumps trans fats. The only vanilla available is an artificial type with no alcohol and the only bacon bits are the plastic baco’s. Those are usually on the bottom shelf in the supermarket turned backwards so the word Baco’s is not facing the consumer who might very well be offended.

The international sections are incredible in every single store. They cater to a wide variety of people and aim to please as many as possible. In Singapore I developed a serious taste for Korean seaweed with Japanese rice and both are easy to find here – even in the snack sizes that were sometimes not on the shelves in Asia. Tex-Mex is huge, the Indian spice section takes up both sides of an entire aisle and the Asian foods are not lumped together – every region is represented – Philippine, Thai, and Malay but there is not nearly the number of Chinese foods that I am used to seeing! The British ‘biscuit’ section is always stocking – Walker’s digestives must have huge fans here as every flavor is here one day and gone the next!

The dairy section is vast. The crèmes that people use every day in France fly off of the shelves. There are at least ten different brands of yogurt and then one moves into the labneh, crème fraiche and even Philadelphia cream cheese occasionally. Kraft cheeses are usually easy to find and the sliced singles that we know are processed but still love in a grilled cheese sandwich occasionally are randomly here – there are probably four other types of sliced singles and of the ones with ingredients in English – there are not too many I would even try. They look scary and I have been told this is because Americans love ‘colorful’ cheese and so it is always dyed yellow and maybe this is true but there is something off putting about white single wrapped slices that I haven’t been able to get past.

Yogurt in the Middle East is extraordinary. The yogurt here is so rich and so creamy – I now understand a bit better why my friend Gowri always made her own yogurt instead of buying it in the grocery store – amazing difference in taste and texture. Kroger’s plain yogurt doesn’t look very appetizing when compared to Almaria’s delicious full cream yogurt but then the Almaria probably ranks right up there with the full flavored msg.

Americans may be the last holdouts for iceberg lettuce. In Singapore and here in Doha, it is referred to as ‘American’ lettuce. In Paris last summer, the salads that used it listed it as American lettuce salads! It is also very expensive here – QAR12.75 looks like a lot when I remember it being $1.00! It is the same price as all of the other lettuce choices.

The food here is amazing and I have picked up a few new recipes that I will be using forever! Eating local is easy – and delicious!