Chinatown produce

After work last evening I headed down Christy Street to Chinatown to see what was there. I sensed another incipient lurgy and wanted to hit it on the head with some ginger and garlic.

Of everything I see in all those boxes and barrels, I can identify about one third. But even identified, I would be hard-pressed to know how to use most of the ingredients. Fresh produce is easy, but it's all the dried nuts, seeds and fungi that just stump me.

Above right, dried bracket fungi? Or pods?

Good looking daikon and ridged gourds on Elizabeth Street.

Beautiful garlic chive flowers. I ate the buds in a salad (of chunked iceberg, that maligned lettuce!) with a dressing of fish sauce, lime, chile, sugar, ginger and lemon grass.

The lovely back-to-front of celery and eggplant. These colours make me want to paint again.

Fresh mushrooms this time.

And fish. No idea what these long ones are.

Dried fish: big and little.

And clams the side of my hand.

I didn't find tamarind, and will return to look for it.

I found a lady on the sidewalk selling giant, larger-than- football-sized papayas for $3.50. A steal. And they tasted good, with a squeeze of lime.

I bought sweet mango's, two for $1. And a huge green one, more expensive at a per pound price of $1.29. And three red chiles were thrown in free.

The lurgy got one whiff of the garlic chives and fled, sobbing.