Grub's up

Working out what to eat in a new culture can be a tricky business. Fortunately, Moldova is well endowed with a wide variety of products that can be bought from either a traditional market or, for those of us from a western cultural background, there are a handful of western style supermarkets. One such supermarket is situated less than a minutes walk from my apartment block which is handy and hard to resist. Whilst not dissimilar to a supermarket in Romania, the products are nevertheless a bit different and it's taken me a few months to start to work out what the best things are to buy, taking into consideration value for money, health and palatability. As in Romania the undoubted winner is pasta in a tomato sauce with pieces of meat and/or vegetables. The runner up is omelet and last, but not least is rice mixed with the aforementioned pieces of meat and/or vegetables. This is not terribly different to Romania except I have discovered two interesting bonuses. Firstly, here there is a somewhat wider selection of reasonably priced fruit juices than in Romania and secondly, there is сгущенное молоко! молоко is Russian for milk and so this is basically milk with sugar and some fat mixed in. As delicious as it sounds and especially the version with cocoa powder as well makes for an interesting alternative to milk or yogurt on fruit and cereal.