Basket weavers spreading outside Balmain

Today was Orange Grove Market Day. Orange Grove is in Rozelle, and Rozelle is the suburb next to Balmain. I'm not sure where Balmain ends and Rozelle begins, but it appears that Balmain is leaking at the edges.

I first went to this market about two years ago. I have not been back since. The stuff that was on offer back then was hideous - one step up from a flea market outside a rubbish dump. Something has changed radically since then - you are now looking at the David Jones of markets.

As usual, the place was overrun with organic produce stalls. I feel like running a non-organic stall one week, with the prices on my stuff half that of the others - just to annoy them. I have no problem with buying expensive stuff. I just want to get value for money, and for me, that means buying stuff that is more tasty than your typically blandish supermarket cardboard food. If organic is tasty, I'll buy it. I've tried it, in my quest for better taste, and so far organic has been a damp squib.

But enough of that. There were better things to see.



How's this for a posh bacon and egg roll vendor? "Honey and port cured bacon and egg rolls". You can't go past that. Well, ok, I went past it. I couldn't face eating a bacon and egg roll and then riding up and down the hills on the way home. A gutter somewhere would be splattered with honey and port cured bacon and egg chunder.

You've gotta love the enterprise of the people that run this stall. Talk about market differentiation. I have seen a lot of bacon and egg roll stalls at markets, but this one will always stick out from now on. It stands together with the stall at the North Sydney markets that does a bacon and egg roll with an excellent tomato and chilli jam.

Oh, and by the way, there was no chance of offending any Muslims. These markets were about as uniformly Anglo-Saxon as you can get. Even Eton is more multi-racial than these markets. I've said before that when you go to the Flemington Markets, you'd faint if you saw a blonde person. Well, at these markets, I was the only non-blonde person there. I thought I was in Norway for a while.



And here are the baskets. I don't know if they were woven in Balmain or not, but given that Balmain is just up the road, I couldn't resist snapping a photo.

I think the mist on the left of the photo is from that woman farting.