Posts Tagged: Farmers markets

Farmers markets — 1 Comment
22
Aug 08

The Revere Beach Farmers’ Market

Anyone familiar with the Revere Beach of yore, the Revere Beach of my childhood, circa 1980s/early 90s, would experience the same incredulity and thrill as I did yesterday, upon plucking four perfect ears of corn from a farmers’ market stand there. It was as though the fraternal twins of illusion — reality and nostalgia — had conflated and swapped identities: I was staring at a twinkly sea with a smooth shore, no longer scarred by expired syringes and every kind of Plastic Packaging Known to Man. All around me, cheery shoppers browsed aloud with a locution indicating they had not traveled far to get there (”hi honey how are yas, these peppas are beautiful but they give me agita”).

As a Revere native, as the daughter of two Revere natives, and a granddaughter of one Nana Ceccarossi who still lives today on American Legion Highway in a house with a front yard that has been completely replaced with a paved, concrete piazza kind of thing, I would like to invite you all to go visit the Thursday (12-6) farmers’ market on Revere Beach. It is indeed a wonderful thing, and not very much like the blissful and bustling middle / upper-middle class shopping affairs that we conjure when we think of farmers’ markets elsewhere. Or I conjure anyway.

Here is what you can find there:
-A stand with what appears to be fresh caught oysters and small lobster — does anyone know anything about this?
-Farmer Dave’s lush veggie display
-Another lush veggie display from a farm whose name I can’t recall
-Baked goods
-Vinny’s Italian food…not a local thing to be found at his table, but I suspect he was strategically placed to lure the non-traditional farmers’ market shopper. A nice lookin olive bar all the same
-And curiously, more advertisement for the WIC program, as it can be used at a market, than I have ever seen. In fact, yesterday, there was a table set up where you could pick up a free tote with the WIC logo on it
-Salty air, a lovely view, voracious seagulls somehow amazingly kept at bay
-Real live people who grew up and still live on the North Shore
-An excuse to ride the Blue Line nearly all the way to Wonderland — the Revere Beach T stop is across the boulevard from the market stands.

Bulk — 1 Comment
19
Aug 08

The bargain of my life: $1/lb tomatoes

Today. Government Center Farmers’ Market. I bought all of them, five glorious pounds of red ripe tomatoes for five dollars, and had to call Kristi for a ride home from the Central Square T station because I was so weighed down and my bag was ripping.

No farm is going to go out of its way advertising their seconds (aka sauce) tomatoes. They won’t be tarted up like the heirlooms or spread across the whole table like the uniform field tomatoes. There might not even be that many to begin with. But rest assured, in this epoch of $4/lb tomatoes, they are well worth looking for. From now until late September, when tomatoes are coming in fast and furious, farmers will be playing fast and loose with these ever-so-slightly damaged-but-otherwise-still-perfectly-delicious babies.

In truth, these weren’t our first cheap seconds tomatoes. Last week, we were riding bikes in Hadley and happened on a little cart of vegetables outside a house. Tomatoes: a quarter each. A quarter each! We bought all of those. Kristi made them into sauce, simmered gently and loaded with garlic and basil, light and sweet and clean. Kristi is not off the boat Italian, but close, and she brings a fantastic, genetic paesan’s touch to our humble gravy.

The Government Center tomatoes became a pretty spicy salsa today. Please hear me out. My ethnic heritage has no salsa in it whatsoever (boiled cabbage, though, and lots of it), but I make a good salsa. It’s sort of adapted from The Joy.

First, I also bought poblano and some other miscellaneous spicy peppers. We had some red onion, garlic and cilantro procured at the Central Square market today as well — and a lime.

I cut the tomatoes into halves and quarters, tossed them in olive oil, salt and pepper, and threw them in a 400 degree oven until they were lightly roasted, soft and fragrant.

Meanwhile, I put the whole peppers on the open flame on my stovetop, blistering their skins and giving them a kind of roasty, smoky flavor. You need to let them cool and peel them before you use them.

Once you’ve organized the tomatoes and peppers, throw them in a bowl with chopped onions (red or white) a ton of garlic, some raw jalapenos or some such, olive oil, the fresh lime juice, salt, pepper and big, wild fistfuls of cilantro, stems and all. We have one of those stick things that purees soup. We call it the Zhusch, but we still haven’t figured out how to spell it. Use that or a food processor.

It’s pretty delicious, but we’re freezing it to help us later, in February, when the dark lords of limp, lifeless imported South American produce rule the misty, overlit produce sections.

Bulk / Farmers markets — 7 Comments
28
Jul 08

Zucchini straight talk express

The hour of the zucchini is upon us, people.

But let us speak frankly about zucchini and summer squash here, among friends, alright? No stupid jokes about locking your car and no apocryphal crap about country-folk stuffing them in neighbors’ mailboxes.

OK. We don’t actually do a lot of different things with zukes. The reason is this: chop up a bunch of garlic (also available fresh right now), saute in oil, add zucchini slices, saute a bit more, add soy sauce or tamari, saute a bit more, eat. It’s so good. They say mice faced with cocaine or zucchini cooked with garlic and soy choose the latter every time.

Here are a couple of secrets, from someone who has ushered a lot of zucchini prepared this way down the hatch:

* Saute the garlic on medium heat initially, and only for a moment or two. It has plenty more time to cook during phases two and three.
* Slice the zuke thin. They soak up more soy that way.
* Increase the heat when the zucchini go in the pan. This will give some of the garlic a bit of a crispy, roasted feel and allow the soy to evaporate quickly when it goes in. This prevents issues of sogginess.
* When the soy hits the pan, move the zuke around quickly so no one piece sits too long and most receive an even coating.
* Less is more on the soy. It will need a bit of pepper but definately no salt.

Also, folks, zucchini bread exists for a reason. The sad reality is that it never seems to call for enough zucchini to actually put a dent in it when it stockpiles in the fridge. But even so, it’s one of those dry ingredients + wet ingredients thrown together and voila. I found a recipe on www.smittenkitchen.com that i halved successfully last week. We ate it for dessert and breakfast.

Lastly, tonight we did neither of these things, but instead made a simple supper with plainly sauteed zukes and summer squash from last week’s CSA share (oil + salt + pepper + garlic), and threw them on top of an omlette with eggs from Misty Brook farm and Cabot cheese. Oh, and today we were in Northampton (our old stomping ground) and we ate lunch at the one and only La Vera Cruzana, where I stole 3 little plastic containers of salsa. That went all over it well.