Farmers Market Saturday - May 17, 2008

I'm starting a new feature here today.

As an experiment, I'd like to keep a record of our Farmers Market shopping each week and what we might do with our bounty. I'm hoping that by doing this, maybe some others will be similarly inspired. As it turns out, The Farmer's Marketer has already been doing something similar for quite a while, and we'll link together. Her wonderful post for this week is here. Once Tantre starts, I'll probably start posting this feature on Thursdays, since my CSA pick-up day is Wednesday. The Farmer's Marketer has wonderful interviews with local food producers, observations about food and the politics of food, and a great recent diary of time spent in Paris. I'd highly recommend going over there and checking it out!

This was an unusual week for us in several ways. One, it's our chicken pick-up week. We get three, fresh chickens once every six weeks or so from Ernst Farm. We write our orders down in Joan Ernst's ledger, and she phones us when our chickens are ready. These chickens are free range and mostly yard-fed. They aren't given antibiotics or anything else of that ilk. We get most of our meat and eggs from Joan and her husband, Alvin. Their farm is about 8 miles from my house and they raise their animals in a humane fashion and use their fields as feed for the most part.

The second reason this was an unusual week is that our CSA pick-up hasn't started yet. We are members of Tantre Farm , an organic farm in Chelsea, MI, about 20 miles away. We actually do our pick-ups on Wednesdays. They will start on May 28th.

Well, this is what we picked up this week:


chickens, eggs, stone ground cornmeal from Ernst Farm, rhubarb, zucchini


asparagus, spinach, spring greens

We also bought apple cider (pressed from last seasons apples in cold storage), but somehow I didn't get that into the pictures.


We could not find organic rhubarb or spinach today, so we went with conventional. The zucchini is organic greenhouse zucchini and was a splurge, but I'm dying to make a pasta dish that calls for it, and I felt lucky to find it.

So what are we eating this week?

Tomorrow we are having roast chicken with roasted asparagus and potatoes (the other two chickens have already gone into the freezer). The potatoes were a concession - it is not potato season yet, so they are a supplement.

I'll make the pasta-zucchini dish. It's very simple and the only other ingredients are olive oil and parmesan (I'm using a Wisconsin type here).

With the spring greens, I'll continue to have lunches like this one:



This has been my standard lunch almost daily, lately. Grab and wash spring greens, supplement with whatever pickled or other things I need to use up, and throw on a protein source - in this case hummus. These salads have gone wonderfully with the simple breads I've been making.

D has requested rhubarb cobbler. The rest of the rhubarb and asparagus will be frozen - we've been buying double batches each week since they're both in season right now, and freezing one batch and using the other.

The cornmeal will be used for fresh cornbread, and possibly some polenta-type dish with the leftover chicken. We'll also probably have cornmeal pancakes for breakfast tomorrow. The spinach will mostly be used as greens for the piggies.

We'll also have some borsch from last summer, as I continue to use up the last of my stores from the winter. It's thawing in the fridge as I write this.

Bon Appetit! What are you cooking this week?