These vendors most often sell from carts that they haul around and hawk from wherever. Most, if not all, are centrally located in Port Elizabeth here in Bequia, so you just walk around to see who has what. Some have bananas, avocados, and sweet potatoes - others have oranges, mangos, peppers, etc, and still others have eggplant, tomatoes and beans. It's a free market, much like Haymarket in Boston. Some vendors seem to be there regularly, while others seem just to come and go.
At first, we mostly asked, "what is that" and get a reply "Eddo" or "Christophine" or "Callaloo".... or "Dragon Fruit", "Soursop" "Breadfruit" or whatever, .
An interesting thing was that when we asked, the vendors would say -- take one, "Charity". They all did it. So, we were able to experiment or try a sample.
Ultimately, Alicia realized that Christophine was what she knew as Chayote.
After a while, we hooked up with Darkie, the lady who runs a produce stand on the main road. Darkie is a sweet woman who just wants to get you what you want. Her selection changes on a daily basis. The good news is that given that we drive a right hand car, you can actually drive right by Darkie, stop and ask from the driver seat, "Do you have XXX?" and when she answers "Yes!", you go park.
When Alicia decided to start cooking Caribbean dishes (from the Caribbean cookbook here), she first needed spices. First stop - Darkie's - where she was able to get many small bags for reasonable prices. When you buy produce, you walk away with a lot of stuff for not much money _ except if you are shopping at Doris's!
Sometimes it is eggplant and apples, if it was 2 days later, bananas and peppers. If you want something, you ask and you can get it the next day (since most of the produce comes over from St.Vincent)
It's a very nice relationship between your produce supplier and your chef (or my chef)
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