Saturday, April 11, 2009

First Farmer's Sighting!

I must confess that we aren't responsible for discovering the first farmers this year - I knew there were farmers showing up because of Twitter. (Yep, I'm a twitter-head. You can follow me here if you are into that sort of thing.) With the winter markets still going strong, and with my Saturday morning writing group, we just haven't been haunting the market in search of early produce.

But we got up early today and headed to the North Market, and were not disappointed. There were two farmers outside: Toad Hill and Somerset Herbs. We put off buying herb plants (my pot of herbs seems to be dead, but I want to give it another few weeks before writing it off and buying new ones) but picked up a lettuce mix, eggs, and dried tomatoes from Toad Hill.

Inside the market we found some duck legs from North Market poultry (a back-up Easter dinner, since my mom has laryngitis and may not feel like company tomorrow), bacon and pork chops from Blue's Creek, the obligatory cinnamon roll from Omega (along with some day-old cross buns, since they hadn't baked the fresh ones yet), Honey Vanilla ice cream from Jeni's, and a few local products at the Greener Grocer: ramps (yay!), milk from Snowville Creamery, and shitake and cremini mushrooms (we also picked up some spinach, but I can't remember where it was grown.)

Market day means market lunch, so we had a Greek omelet with the eggs, spinach, and dried tomatoes, as well as some feta cheese from an earlier winter market. I am slowly but surely learning to like egg yolks, and this was my second omelet in two days. It was pretty darn good!