famers' market: spring and things
Yesterday I packed away my turtlenecks and a few of my sweaters (I live in the upper midwestern U.S., where a smart woman never packs away all her sweaters), hauled out the rest of my embarrassingly large t-shirt collection (between bands, bookstores, feminist slogans, union activism, and general geekery, I have about three times as many t-shirts as even a really overprivileged person should be able to get away with having), and bought asparagus. This is one of the ways we know it's the first Saturday in June.
I'm leaving next Saturday for two weeks out of town - out of the country, actually; renenet and I are heading out to London, where we'll see lots of theatre and eat lots of Indian food and I, for one, will no doubt do a good deal of reading in sundry parks and gardens. So I tried not to overdo it with the vegetable purchases, because I need to not have any leftovers to deal with at the end of the week.
We're having the grrly girl over for dinner tomorrow, and faith_delivers on Tuesday, so I did have some specific purchases to make. Tomorrow night's dinner features cream of asparagus soup and a mushroom strudel with morel cream sauce, so I needed two pounds of asparagus, a pound of button mushrooms, half a pound of crimini mushrooms, and half a pound of oyster mushrooms.
(Dinner will also feature a salad made with three lettuces that I picked up at last Tuesday's market: lollo rosso, a beautiful reddish-purple tightly-crinkled lettuce; red butterhead, which is in fact only red at the edges and has a lovely tender leaf; and red-splash oak leaf, which has a striking freckle pattern and a distinctive leaf shape.)
And then I also picked up spinach and sunchokes, and some nice mild radishes, and a still-warm rhubarb turnover in place of my usual muffin.
Sugar snap peas aren't in yet, which frankly is heartbreaking since if I could I would be eating a handful of them right now.
I am very excited about London, of course, but I have to say that I am also sad to be missing another three Saturdays of my beloved market. I'm trying to think of it as weaning myself off slowly so that August won't be such a shock, but thus far that hasn't really helped. It's one of the difficulties of having put down roots in a particular place: the very particularity of it makes it hard to leave. I keep telling myself that I will find new things to love in my new place, and in fact I have already found some of them, and look forward to finding more. But I have lived here for nine years, my whole adult life; this place is my home, and some days the prospect of making a new one is more tiring than exciting.
But then again it's not as if the new locale won't have asparagus.
I'm leaving next Saturday for two weeks out of town - out of the country, actually; renenet and I are heading out to London, where we'll see lots of theatre and eat lots of Indian food and I, for one, will no doubt do a good deal of reading in sundry parks and gardens. So I tried not to overdo it with the vegetable purchases, because I need to not have any leftovers to deal with at the end of the week.
We're having the grrly girl over for dinner tomorrow, and faith_delivers on Tuesday, so I did have some specific purchases to make. Tomorrow night's dinner features cream of asparagus soup and a mushroom strudel with morel cream sauce, so I needed two pounds of asparagus, a pound of button mushrooms, half a pound of crimini mushrooms, and half a pound of oyster mushrooms.
(Dinner will also feature a salad made with three lettuces that I picked up at last Tuesday's market: lollo rosso, a beautiful reddish-purple tightly-crinkled lettuce; red butterhead, which is in fact only red at the edges and has a lovely tender leaf; and red-splash oak leaf, which has a striking freckle pattern and a distinctive leaf shape.)
And then I also picked up spinach and sunchokes, and some nice mild radishes, and a still-warm rhubarb turnover in place of my usual muffin.
Sugar snap peas aren't in yet, which frankly is heartbreaking since if I could I would be eating a handful of them right now.
I am very excited about London, of course, but I have to say that I am also sad to be missing another three Saturdays of my beloved market. I'm trying to think of it as weaning myself off slowly so that August won't be such a shock, but thus far that hasn't really helped. It's one of the difficulties of having put down roots in a particular place: the very particularity of it makes it hard to leave. I keep telling myself that I will find new things to love in my new place, and in fact I have already found some of them, and look forward to finding more. But I have lived here for nine years, my whole adult life; this place is my home, and some days the prospect of making a new one is more tiring than exciting.
But then again it's not as if the new locale won't have asparagus.