chillies, rose buds for making rose water for sweets, bay leavesThe spices are in large sacks. Older Emirati women clothed in black abayas with bronzed face masks or black veils, accompanied by their teenaged grandsons, scoop up handfuls, running the spices through their fingers, judging the texture, bringing the handfuls to their nose, chatting a blue streak in Arabic to the shop keepers...and now I'm guessing...driving a shrewd bargain.
dried lemons for lemon chicken says the vendor, whole chillies, cinnamon sticks...blue and yellow chalk?? No, its skin bleaching powder!I can guess at half of the contents of the sacks...the other half is a mystery.
Myrrh in front left sack with saffron behind, more chilliesThe shop keepers don't always know the English name for one thing or another and we certainly don't know the Arabic or Indian name...more's the pity.
this looks like its of animal orgin but I'm pretty sure its from a plant...the other sack contains dried krill or some other tiny fishThe wonder of it is that people all around us are buying generous quantities.
Looks like pasta but it has a stem!Believe it or not, spices are sold in the very same manner in the stainless steel, glass and tile grocery stores in the slicker parts of town; large sacks of spices and dried herbs from which people scoop up large amounts to be weighed. No teeny tiny bottles here. Just lots and lots of free flowing spices and herbs. At the grocery store (called a hypermarket), I put what I thought to be a generous scoop of spices and dried herbs into several plastic bags. The bags were the size I would use for oranges or apples back home, because that's all that was available, handed them to the clerk behind the weigh station and got a chuckle from him for my paltry amounts!
