Monday, July 21, 2008

Farmers' Market

One of my favorite things to do on Saturday mornings is to walk to the Waltham Farmers' Market. I started doing it last summer and have hardly missed a week since. It always seems like a good idea to walk--save the environment! get exercise!--until I want to buy a watermelon or a sack of potatoes. Then the mile back seems impossible. Once last year, I walked to the market, saw the watermelons, walked back to my house and got the car.

It's been meager pickings at the market for most of the season--mostly lettuces and herbs. But this week, it was a veritable cornucopia of vegetables. I may have gone a little overboard, but hey, it was still less than $20. The bags were cutting painfully into my hands on the way home, but I made it.This week, I bought green beans, cucumbers, green peppers, a zucchini, a kousa squash (I have no idea what that is, but I'm sure it will be delicious stuffed with cheese), some wonderfully mild red onions (sadly, you can only buy those by the bunch. I never know what to do with so many onions), broccoli, blueberries, and the first corn of the season. There were also chocolate chip cookies that didn't make it into the picture--they somehow jumped off the table and landed in my stomach before I could find the camera. I've managed to resist the siren call of Big Sky Bakery so far this year--seriously, $6 for a loaf of bread?!--but a small cookie stand appeared this week, and the cookies were looking so forlorn, I just had to buy some.

The challenge is always in eating all of my purchases. I tend to be overly optimistic when considering our weekly menus. Last week I pulled several packages of lettuce out of the fridge that had achieved a jelly-like consistency. This week I'm determined that we're going to eat all of this stuff. So far I've made a pasta salad and a chopped salad. I'm going to stuff the zucchini and squash and serve it with the corn at some point this week. That will leave just the blueberries and the green beans, which I'm hoping we can finish off before we leave for the Cape on Friday.

1 comment:

Mom said...

You get your "good ideas" from your mother, as once i took a walk with you in the stroller, and bought a round, plastic baby pool (the rigid kind, not he blowup kind), and walked all the way home on a hot day, pushing the stroller and carrying the pool on my head!