Food & Home 14 Nov 2006 10:34 am
Floods and the farmers market; losing 3500 pounds
Josh and I biked down to the University District farmers market on Saturday, thinking we’d buy half a dozen bunches of greens and make a big batch of Gumbo Zeb. There had been lots of gorgeous bunches of greens the week before; I had happy thoughts of coming back with a trailer full of local collard greens. I wasn’t thinking straight.
The farmers market was missing maybe a third of its farmers because of the floods, and many more had been affected. There were no dahlia farmers at all. Willie Green’s is said to be entirely under water. So is Growing Things. Full Circle has root crops but its lettuce is a total loss. “They’re free. Just come back,” said the Full Circle guy when we asked for the bunch of rootless beet greens that he’d just offered to the previous customer. I couldn’t let him just give us beet greens and then walk away, so we bought carrots, too. He sounded worried and exhausted.
I came home thinking that this was the year for me to learn to enjoy borscht, if only so I can support local farmers through a hard winter. (Well, that, and it sounds tasty.)
I wound up buying some greens I’d never heard of before. “Perpetual spinach” is a sort of spinach-like chard. It tastes to me like a mature spinach crossed with a little sorrel. The market was fairly picked over when we got there, but there were still lots of beautiful bunches of this mysterious stuff that nobody was buying, presumably because they’d never heard of it either. I also got some kale from Whistling Train which is notable mostly in being so delicious that I’d eat it raw. Seriously fantastic. And it’s kale, as in “I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.”
The gumbo is killer. It’s worth buying this book just for the gumbo recipe. I make it over three days: day 1, make the roux; day 2, prep the vegetables; day 3, assemble the soup base and make the first batch of soup.
The car is gone at last. I’m a little sad to see it go. It was a good car for a while there. (And then, not so much, and eventually not at all.) Even if it were easy to make it run again, it wouldn’t make sense to pay to keep a car that’s driven less than ten miles a week most weeks. And reading The Weather Makers is doing wonders for any lingering regret I might have.
on 14 Nov 2006 at 8:38 pm 1.cissa said …
Heh. We eat kale all year ’round. J is very partial to recipes that combine it with pasta, while I tend to prefer a more Southern approach (despite not having a Southern bone in my body) with black-eyed peas and cider vinegar.
Borsht is lovely. I adore it. Hot in the winter, cold in the summer, and with an amazing magenta color if you stir in sour cream.
on 14 Nov 2006 at 11:39 pm 2.Wim said …
Mmm, I used to get borscht at the piroshky place on Broadway when I worked over there. Also, it’s fun to say. Borscht borscht borscht.
on 24 Nov 2006 at 8:24 am 3.Loudon said …
I visit Whistling Train Farm frequently when I go south to visit a friend. The drive into that part of the fertile Kent Valley is inspiring.