Here's what I bought today ~
It cost $5 for all of that - nectarines, pears, lemons, carrots, red peppers, zucchini, eggplant, and eggs.
There are some things here that are not so cheap (gas is more than $6 a gallon), but fresh fruits and vegetables we can enjoy in plenty. A woman in the village Bible study sold me some you-pick apricots from her trees for about 25 cents a pound. They weren't beautiful, but they made pretty good jam. Luke and I also picked cherries several weeks ago to help another woman in the Bible study. She sold them for 50 cents a pound to someone who would take them to the outdoor market in Korce.
(The downside to cheap produce is, of course, that the farmers aren't getting a decent price for their produce. It's a big problem, part of a larger cycle of poverty. If someone works as a waiter or a housekeeper for $5-10 a day, how can they afford to pay more for food? But if the going price stays this low, how can the farmer afford to keep growing it? The village we work in used to have a farmers' market nearby to help sell the food more locally, reducing the cost of transport and cutting out the middleman... but corruption eventually closed up the market. It's not easy for the farmers in Albania.)
Ok, back to happy food things. I found out where to buy whole wheat flour this week and set about making bread today. It's pretty much delicious. I can buy whole wheat bread at a bakery nearby, but I don't really like the way they make it.
It's yummy with homemade hummus too. Tahini was the exciting find at a little shop nearby that made that hummus possible. We call that shop "the Greek store" because it's pretty obvious that they go to Greece (to the same store we do sometimes) to buy the stuff they sell.
We also found some local milk to buy - a few months ago we met a Mennonite couple from the midwest who were in Albania to set up a milk processing plant in Korce. Some of the other milk processors here are a little bit sketchy, so we usually get imported UHT milk (processed for a long shelf life) or bring it from Greece ourselves. The new milk plant is up and running now and so we tried it - yay! No more weird UHT taste and we know that they are testing the milk properly. I can taste more "cow" in the milk now, but Luke is happy. :-)
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