When you are given a gift of late season tomatoes, you have only two choices; you can eat them all right away, or make them last longer by preserving them for later enjoyment.
When summer’s end robs us of vegetables that peaked earlier in the season, we can always count on eggplant as a farmer’s market lure with its high gloss and firm form. Its meatiness holds up well to grilling and it marries well with tart or sweet condiments, marinades and sauces.
How fortuitous that the seasons for sweet corn and sugar snap peas overlap. Sweet beginning for fresh corn, and melancholy ending for the short-lived fresh sugar snap pea, which is worlds apart from the sorry, limp frozen variety available year round at your grocery store.
Ever had a baby carrot? Not the baby cut carrots wrapped in cellophane at your grocery store, but a real baby carrot, just pulled from the earth. Last weekend at the Lakeside Farmer’s Market, I noticed that Walnut Hill Farm had a feathery pile of brilliant orange baby carrots arranged on a wooden table, and the dreary, drizzly morning brightened considerably.
The fresh local strawberries from Agriberry at the South of the James Farmer’s Market presented me with a problem : eat them all up until they are gone, really gone, or make a tasty cocktail mix with cilantro and fresh lime juice? I simply had to taste one, just one, and then another, and then…there were none left to make my spring beverage. So it’s a good thing Little House Green Grocery carries Agriberry’s strawberries, because my plan would have been foiled, as the market only comes around once a week and I had to strike while the berries are at their seasonal peak.
It’s the age old question I grapple with : What will I take to work for lunch this week? I stand sulking at the fridge, peering at the jumbled contents. I try to make sense out of the possible ingredient combinations and come up with…zip. Nada.
Being a fan of all things winter, I must be dragged kicking and hollering into the freshness of spring. I got my wish for one last snow in Richmond March 24. Like most southern snowfalls, it arrived magically and left town abruptly, leaving traces here and there and front yard snowmen with collapsed torsos and lumpen, tiny heads.
This statement has been drummed into your head since childhood :” Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. And, unlike other pronouncements, such as “If you cross your eyes, they will stay that way”, this one certainly rings true.
Pity the poor rutabaga. Mislabeled, misunderstood, underused and unappreciated. Somewhat hesitant to list rutabaga as a solo agent on the menus of The Good Eats Company, I include it in, for examples, a creamy colorful root vegetable soup, and white balsamic glazed root vegetables. Folks ask me what rutabaga tastes like, and I answer, for lack of better comparison, that it tastes like a cross between carrot and turnip. But dear rutabaga is so much more than this simplistic description! Carrot haters and turnip despisers may remember childhood battles at the dinner table, bargains struck with parents offering vegetables in earnest, and rejection in the form of a tiny mouth set in a grim line and the Word : “NO”. And so my answer seems less than adequate.
One of the best attributes of soup is that unexpected and disparate ingredients join together in gastronomic harmony. Summer and fall menus for The Good Eats Company personal chef service feature ” farmer’s market vegetable soup”. List all the ingredients in this soup , call it a vegetable side and the dish may seem busy; simmer and marry together and all seems well and good. Continue reading