Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

croatiaweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 219 posts

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#121

Post by foobarian »

imp0cat wrote: post #82
dsego wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another croatian chiming in, I get most of my vegetables from my mother's garden, I think that's true for a lot of croats who live in the cities but have parents in the countryside.

So, where in Makarska region should one go to get some? ;) Are those "local" sellers near the beach really local? Or do they just resell stuff from Kaufland/Lidl to naive tourists for inflated prices?

Ex-pat Croat here. I came for a visit recently and I can't figure out how in the world there are so many Kauflands/Lidls/Konzums everywhere. Compared to Boston Metrowest the density just seems way out of whack. Is it the lack of property taxes? Maybe it's the tourists?

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#122

Post by foobarian »

imiric wrote: post #37
trte9343r4 wrote: post #27

Croatia has horrible food, locals can not afford quality food. This country was overrun by tourists, and is now more expensive than Italy. Recent adoption of Euro was the last nail in a coffin. Go to Greece, if you want "authentic local tomato from street-market".

> Croatia has horrible food Anthony Bourdain disagreed[1]: > This is world class food, this is world class wine, this is world class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. This was in 2012, before Croatia joined the EU, but the culture of quality cuisine doesn't change in a decade. I can't speak about the prices, but I'm sure there are affordable restaurants and markets outside of touristy zones. Go to any popular pl…

There is a lot of quality perhaps. But two things I noticed about Croatia (and maybe wider Europe) food:

1) They don't know coffee. There is no equivalent of the American half&half creamer.

2) I find that there is not that much in the way of vegetables when eating out. I wonder if perhaps it's a cultural thing where you give your guest the best, i.e. most caloric/tasty food possible. The tavern/grill places are especially like this.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#123

Post by jmspring »

apavlinovic wrote: post #30

I am Croatian, and I know exactly what the article is referring to. So much that we decided to grow our own tomatoes this year. The imported junk we get from Netherlands is abysmal compared to anything grown locally, and the reality is that we want the good stuff for ourselves, not the tourists. We were very lucky to have a great harvest of cherry, monte carlo, and plum tomatoes this year, all of which serve a differ…

Spent about a week and a half in Croatia (mainly on Vis). Food was quite flavorful. We spent the prior ten days across the Adriatic in Vieste/the Gargano. Both countries have great food. Bread, for me, wasn't as good in Croatia as it was in Italy.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#124

Post by stevekemp »

jowdones wrote: post #54
rini17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost some crops myself but tomatoes still fared better than other vegetables. It's not like some enormous investment? Having homegrown tomatoes every other year is better than nothing. If you have kids, it's a good lesson about difficulty of obtaining food from nature. I had success with mycorrhizal "good" fungi (brand Symbivit), they were keeping bad fungi away with visible difference between treated and untreated…

Well it's depressing. My mother has a fairly large garden (some 1500 sqare meters) and takes quite some amount of labor to tend to it. So you work all spring and early summer only to see the crops wither away... makes you go on depression pills or just abandon the whole darn thing and buy Duch imported plastic vegetables. A bit unrelated, nowadays my mother was telling me a memory from her teenage years in the 60s. I…

This year I grew cucumbers on my balcony for the first time, and they were surprisingly low-effort. You do need to pollinate them, if you're too high for bees, or other insects. That aside I just watered them twice a day, except on days I forgot, and hoped for the best.

Tomatoes are a bit hit and miss for me, hence trying something new this year. Usually I just grow strawberries and tomatoes at home. Other stuff gets grown on a 10m x 10mx patch of land nearby.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#125

Post by NikkiA »

ein0p wrote: post #84
the_gipsy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source: anecdotal

Anecdotal is when someone else told you something and you used that data without verifying. The correct term in this case is “empirical”.

No, that would be hearsay.

Anecdotal is when an anecdote is used.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#126

Post by call-me-al »

LtWorf wrote: post #107
apavlinovic wrote: post #30

I am Croatian, and I know exactly what the article is referring to. So much that we decided to grow our own tomatoes this year. The imported junk we get from Netherlands is abysmal compared to anything grown locally, and the reality is that we want the good stuff for ourselves, not the tourists. We were very lucky to have a great harvest of cherry, monte carlo, and plum tomatoes this year, all of which serve a differ…

Italian here. I agree that anything coming from NL is complete garbage.

I live in NL and I found out that the best bonding discussion topic between expats from the Mediterranean area is the nostalgy for flavorful tomatoes.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#127

Post by imp0cat »

foobarian wrote: post #121
imp0cat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, where in Makarska region should one go to get some? ;) Are those "local" sellers near the beach really local? Or do they just resell stuff from Kaufland/Lidl to naive tourists for inflated prices?

Ex-pat Croat here. I came for a visit recently and I can't figure out how in the world there are so many Kauflands/Lidls/Konzums everywhere. Compared to Boston Metrowest the density just seems way out of whack. Is it the lack of property taxes? Maybe it's the tourists?

Well, from my experience, Lidl and Kaufland have stores pretty much everywhere in Europe. The Croatian ones are usually packed full of locals and tourists.

Quite a lot of people who travel to the Adriatic Coast use them to resupply. The local supermarkets are a lot more expensive, so if you're staying in an apartment at the beach for a week or two, it's worth it to make a few trips to a nearby Lidl to buy all the food, even if it means some extra driving.

Most stores there are probably quite empty during winter.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#128

Post by imp0cat »

foobarian wrote: post #122
imiric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Croatia has horrible food Anthony Bourdain disagreed[1]: > This is world class food, this is world class wine, this is world class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. This was in 2012, before Croatia joined the EU, but the culture of quality cuisine doesn't change in a decade. I can't speak about the prices, but I'm sure there are affordable restaurants and markets outside of touristy zones. Go to any popular pl…

There is a lot of quality perhaps. But two things I noticed about Croatia (and maybe wider Europe) food: 1) They don't know coffee. There is no equivalent of the American half&half creamer. 2) I find that there is not that much in the way of vegetables when eating out. I wonder if perhaps it's a cultural thing where you give your guest the best, i.e. most caloric/tasty food possible. The tavern/grill places are espec…

This! You can have vegetables with your steak/cevapi/pljeskavica/whatever, but they will be drenched in oil and fried. ;)

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#129

Post by moltar »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #70
moltar wrote: post #65

If anyone here is into these kinds of tomatoes, and is around the region - there’ll be a tomatoe fest and a tasting competition in the north of Portugal. https://www.facebook.com/TomateDouro

I live near Lisbon and the tasty tomatoes from my childhood are now completely gone. Anything you can buy in any supermarket is absolute garbage, so much so that I only ever use prepackaged chopped tomatoes these days (those still taste decent). One of these days I should get in my car and drive all the way to the Douro just to fetch a bunch of tomatoes, I guess.

Send me your address. I’ll ship you some. I see these tomatoes at normal fruterias quite often as well.

Re: Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

#130

Post by n4r9 »

j7ake wrote: post #86
em500 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't comment on the tomatoes, but as far as eggs are concerned, I'm skeptical that any claims about people being able to taste any diffence would hold up in a proper blind taste test. Conclusion from Serious Eats when they attempted to do that: It was pretty clear evidence that as far as eggs go, the mindset of the taster has far more bearing on the flavor of the egg than the egg itself. https://www.seriouseats.co…

Blind folded is not a proper taste test though. One uses all the senses when eating. For eggs the quality of the yolk is obvious by looking.

I guess the idea is that you're "blind" to the brand, origin etc of the egg. You don't know anything about it other than what's directly in front of you.

Although now you bring it up,it would be interesting to see whether actually blindfolded taste tests would confirm or deny your idea that the visible quality of the yolk correlates with it's (non-visible) taste.

Post reply on HN