Food adventures

As you guys may know, I am a "foodie". Here in London, there is so much diversity of food and so much quality that I have been eating exceedingly well here. Not in the sense of eating a lot, but in the sense of eating quality again and again. Part of that is due to the markets here in London. I'm not sure why this is but London has a ton of huge open-air markets all over the city. Many sell fresh, authentic food from all over the world and random arts and craftsy sort of stuff. The food part is what interests me which is what this blog post is about.

I'll take you through my experience at 2 of the best-known ones in the city plus some other food stuff:

Camden Market
This is like Queen Street in Toronto on crack. The main Camden Street has tons of crazy stores that sell all sorts of things from weird t-shirts to hookah pipes. Off the actual street is the market. Here are a bunch of stalls selling food from every possible country you could think of- turkish, peruvian, italian, chinese, israeli, etc. Almost every stall gives out free samples so you can get tons of free (and delicious) food which is awesome. Also awesome is that the food you actually can buy is pretty cheap (you can get a fresh pizza for about $5.50!) and also delicious.

At this market is also this shop called "chin chin labs" where they make icecream using liquid nitrogen! The place has a giant liquid nitrogen tank and vats of the liquid component of icecream. What they do is put the liquid icecream component into an icecream mixer followed by some liquid nitrogen pumped out of the liquid nitrogen tank. The ice cream mixer then mixes the 2 together. Because the liquid nitrogen is almost like a gas though, the resulting icecream doesn't have the same texture of normal icecream. It is much smoother, pure and tasty.

Borough Market
My favourite of the 2 markets. Like Camden, there are stalls selling food from everywhere you could imagine. However the stalls look a lot less commercial (and less tacky). They are more open-aired too so you can see more of the authentic food being prepared. For example, at one of the cheese stands, I saw a woman preparing fresh mozzarella balls, right there on the spot! Camden's food stalls sell more meal-type food. Like, you can buy a pad thai dish, a serving of paella, etc. Borough has more of the typical stuff you'd expect in a market. That is, you can buy veggies, olive oils, breads, etc to bring home and use in preparing your own dishes.

That's not to say though, that Borough doesn't have food you can eat on the spot. It is mostly things involving bread and some sort of meat, i.e. a chorizo sandwich, frankfurters, etc. (or you could always buy a block of cheese and eat it on the spot too...) The prices for such stuff run around $6 which is kind of a bummer but whatever, this is not the main purpose of this market anyways!

Top 100 Dishes
Time Out London recently issued its top 100 dishes in the city. (you can find the list here) Some of these dishes are quite expensive. So I am planning to try as many as I can of those that are $6 or less. The list has been an amazing guide. So far my eating experiences have been fantastic. In fact, the chorizo sandwich I at in Borough Market is on the list and did not disappoint (even if it wasn't very filling).

Delicious times in London!