A Summer at the Market
Over the last year I’ve read a lot about sustainable agriculture . While I’m not completely sold on the locavore/localvore movements in their entirety (which I’ll touch on another day), I do like the idea of supporting my regional farmers, and I especially like it in a year when their crops were anything but bumper crops do to the April frost. Although I think I know more about seasonality then the average person from my years cooking, even on my best days, I was still a step removed because even the finest restaurant produce still often comes in boxes. So this year, when I started a new job at the beginning of summer which made it more convenient for me to finally hit the Maplewood Farmers Market, I went out of my way to do so each week.
Since the market opened, I’ve been there every Wednesday except for two instances, and it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience to watch summer’s bounty roll through the market each week. I’ve gotten to be a familiar face with some of the farmers and, not to get all sappy, but it’s heart warming to receive a smile of familiarity from the actual person that picked your food that morning. I’m the product of a pretty conservative upbringing, and though Ellie and her family have shown me another side of life, it’s a spirit of community that I’d never really felt a part of until this summer.
This year, we had some crops, like peaches, that weren’t what they should have been and many farmers suffered. But with that suffering, for myself anyway, came the purchase of things I might have otherwise overlooked. So, in my quest to eat a little more locally this year, one of the bonuses of going to the market each week, has been discovery of some things I never knew how much I liked until now.
I’d never had local cherries, but there they were one week. Local bing cherries. I think Ellie and I ate the whole bag in about a day the first time I got them, and they were the sweetest cherries I’ve ever had. Cooking even one of them seemed waistful because all they needed was to be raised to your mouth. Eating these cherries, you couldn’t help but think it doesn’t get much better then this. For a few weeks we went through several pounds until one week Ellie told me to bring some cherries home, and they were gone. We were devastated. Even now, however, I get excited thinking about next years crop, and how I’ll be smart enough to freeze some the next time around for some midwinter Clafouti.
Then there were the melons from Centenial Farms . The first week I bought a melon from them, I took it home, cut it, and within minutes I found that I’d eaten the whole thing. They had so many varieties, only the galia of which I’d ever had before. The ambrosia was the sweetest most succulent melon I’ve ever tasted. I’m not sure if any of you have bought a melon recently in the store, but they’re just terrible. They pick them so far in advance, that you’ve no idea what you’re going to end up with, and by the time it does gets to you, and you cut it open, you might as well be eating wet cardboard. These melons though, they were heavenly, and I found myself buying two each Wednesday in Maplewood, and then arranging my weekend running in such a way that I could find time to scurry downtown Saturday to Tower Grove where once again I could get my fix.
And the walla walla onions from Claverach Farm”>Claverach Farm in Eureka. I’d heard of but never knowingly had these sweet onions. I wish I’d had the forethought to take pictures of them because they were beautiful tied together in little bunches with the stems still attached. Several times I’d slice them into rings and caramelize them a little before whipping them into scrambled eggs with thyme and some Goatsbeard chevre. Add to that some bacon and toast covered with strawberry rhubarb jam from Centennial and it was the start to a great day. Delicious!
Speaking of bacon, right here in Missouri we have a guy, Karlios Hinkebein , raising pigs easily on par with some of the best in the country. The strips are often so wide they’re like slices of meaty ham, and for only a few dollars you can have a pound to have friends covet in your own home. Only Momofuku , a restaurant praised nationwide for the quality of their pork products, has served me pork of possbily better quality. Make a BLT and you’ll wonder where it’s been all your life. Render it down slowly and have the greatest baked potato ever.
There were so many wonderful things like local blackberries, raspberries, eggplants, paddy pan, fennel and swiss chard that I wish I had time to go into them all. It was a great summer of eating, and as we move into the last weeks of summer, you can see people in the stores grasping onto their packages of berries and summer fruits because they believe these things are still in season (because it is summer after all). We at the markets no better, however, as we are invaded by the stock for our winter cellars. We’re seeing potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and winter squashes like butternut, pumpkin, buttercup and about half a dozen varieties from Bellews Creek . Half of those I assumed were butternut, only as we learned from Paul, they are not. We shed tears as those last tomato vines give up their last fruit of the season, and we curse the zucchini still hanging on for dear life.
But now the apples are coming, so there’s still time to get down to the markets for one last gift of the harvest before we shed a tear, knowing we’ll have to wait until next year, to do it all over again.
