I knew it was really spring when fresh vegetables appeared in the shops and a small market was set up near my flat one weekend.
Getting fresh food in Astana was really a challenge. I’d been prepared for the food situation to be difficult after spending a week in Astana in winter 2010, when I found the only green vegetables at one city centre supermarket was a mouldy head of broccoli and an enormous mound of cabbages.
In September I spent a couple of days over a hot stove. I bought kilos and kilos of tomatoes and made Jane Grigson’s tomato sauce to freeze. went back for courgettes, aubergines and peppers to make ratatouille, again for the freezer. These lasted until January.
£6 for a lettuce
By 2013, you could buy some fresh food in Astana, like tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers in the better supermarkets, but they were insanely expensive.
During winter lettuces became a luxury item, sold at the Golomt supermarket, in the heart of the left bank, for £6 each. I started making chopped salads with lots of lemon juice and onion to hide the fact that the vegetables in the winter didn’t taste of much.
Most of the snow had gone by the time the outside market opened, with just a few patches in shady areas, and the weather was sunny even though there was the ever-present stiff breeze.
I had been so starved of green leafy things during the long winter, I found myself buying things I didn’t usually like such as celery (thin and leafy with the bulb still attached), and eating beetroot and radish leaves.
“Are those tomatoes local?” asked one woman, looking suspiciously at a heap of tomatoes.
“Yes, they’re from Tashkent,” said the vendor, naming the capital of neighbouring Uzbekistan, over a thousand kilometres away.
“Well, we were all Soviet people,” he added. “They’re not Chinese tomatoes.”
Kazakhs hated Chinese tomatoes, which often looked delicious and glossy but tasted bland. Often they had a hard white rind just under the skin which would turn black after a few days in the fridge.
Scavenger hunt
Trying to follow a recipe turned into a scavenger hunt across the city, often leading me to the food hall at the Eurasia Center, an indoor shopping centre that was part way between a bazaar and a mall.
The little local shops near my flat had a small selection of vegetables — mostly potatoes, carrots, beetroot and cabbage — and so did my local supermarket.
I bought them even though they didn’t look very appetising. There were sparrows flying about in the rafters of the supermarket so I always checked my food for bird poo. One day I picked up a beetroot from the tray and saw a long grey tail move among the dark red orbs. I screamed and dropped it, but it was just a beetroot root, not a rat.
On the other hand, I loved the black rye brad with pungent coriander or cumin seeds on top, chewy lipyoshka breads and pirochkee stuffed with fried cabbage or potatoes. I developed a taste for the Kazakhstan chocolate in its distinctive blue and gold wrapper, and the flavoursome local beers like Shymkentskoye.
More posts about daily life in Astana
Astana, Kazakhstan’s glittering capital on the steppe
Hanging out at the malls in Astana
How to survive winter in Astana
The temperature in Astana suddenly dropped to -28°C
Steppe in Style 
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