Saturday Market Opens This Week!

--which is good news for those of you who have been wandering around near Top Pot asking for directions, weeks in advance!

Some of our farmers and vendors will overlap between the Thursday and Saturday markets, but there will also be new faces, including Hama Hama Oysters and Skagit Valley's flower-growing Jello Mold Farm, recently featured in this Seattle Times article. And for you fans of Asian vegetables and squashes, look for Mair Farm-Taki.

Meanwhile, another great week at our Thursday market. This time I arrived before the first-of-the-season's strawberries were sold out at Tiny's Organic and managed to get at least five of them before my youngest ate them all. The trend for enormous strawberries in the grocery store mystifies me, since every market aficionado knows that the littlest ones are the real flavor bombs.

For Memorial Day one woman purchased twenty-one (!) bouquets for the graves she intended to decorate, including one of gorgeous peonies, perhaps from Pa Yang Farm. All I can say is, I feel rather sorry for the graves next to the twenty-one because they might look a little shabby in comparison...

After sampling one of Foraged and Found's "sea beans" (available through mid-July), Jonathan and I had a fascinating discussion about their new tea and medicinal offerings. F&F is known for its mushrooms and huckleberries, of course, but they also carry such things as nettle tea, rich in vitamins A, C and E and iron, and said to be a digestive aid and to improve the skin and scalp! Jonathan suggests cutting it in with loose-leaf mint tea or mint leaves. They also carry that superstar of the Vitamin-C-supplement section, rosehips. I'd never actually laid eyes on the things before, and thought you might not have either--hence the picture. As with the nettle tea, Jonathan chops up 2-3 rosehips and adds them to mint.

And having worked up a decent appetite, I checked out the chef demo by Newport High School's Culinary Class, a two-year program taught by Tracy Green. The roughly 30-student classes are serious business, being two periods long and going for the entire year. In their second year, the students become sous chefs. For the market demo they instructed the audience in making a Potato-Onion Gruyere Galette, passing the generous sample tray twice, before moving on to making pasta.

And finally, speaking of pasta, I brought home a pound of lovely, pink, beet fettucine from La Pasta and served it up with homemade Alfredo sauce and Loki salmon. Just writing about it makes me want to dig out the leftovers for breakfast!

Think good thoughts this week, and maybe this Mayvember weather will lift, but at least our seasonal market produce will be there Thursday and Saturday, rain or shine.