Weekly Local Booty 11/2-11/8/08

It was a downright cold trek to the farmer's market this morning. The market was quite a bit sparser than usual, in terms of both vendors and patrons. We were able to get most of what we needed (sadly I had to buy organic cilantro from the "regular" grocery store because the vendor who usually has it wasn't there and our cilantro plant isn't nearly ready). We found out that there will be another market next week, but there are doubts as to how many vendors will be there. Brett and I discussed it and since The Root Cellar is spilling over with produce now, and Uprise Bakery is also downtown (and they weren't at the market today either), that we will begin going there - starting next weekend.

We actually made a trip to The Root Cellar this week too, as they had some of the staples we needed that haven't been available at market. Between The Root Cellar, the farmer's market, and our gardens, we are brimming over with tasty local produce, even in cold November.

Well, let's start with garden booty for the week:















A ripe hot Hungarian wax pepper. I saved the seeds out of this pepper, and it made a killer batch of beans for our Spicy Smashed Kidney Bean and Sweet Potato Burritos. We had those last night with Green Chile Taco Sauce and found out that if you use the sauce, no avocado is needed!















This isn't necessarily something new per say. These are some of the tomatoes we picked green off our plants at the community garden before our first freeze a couple of weeks ago. As you can see, they are ripening up nicely and we have lots of tomatoes to work with. Wahoo for garden tomatoes in November!

Here is the load of produce we got from The Root Cellar. I don't remember how much this ran us.















Starting from the bottom right: 2 Herbal Oats granola bars ("Energy" and "Focus" varieties), carrots, lots of garlic, organic fair-trade Ethiopian coffee, a large pie pumpkin, and red and yellow onions.

And here is our haul from the (well at least our) last farmer's market of the season. This ran us $34.















Starting from the bottom right: spinach, Missouri-grown pecans (!!!!!!!!!!), beef patties for Brett*, a variety of bell peppers (green, red, and purple), eggs, mild and hot salsa, and lots of sweet potatoes.

* = Brett does not eat this much meat in a week. The purveyor he got this from is going to be working with Danjo Farms (our CSA farm) next year and he wanted to have a good sample of their meat to see if he wanted a small meat share next year. Since this is our last weekend of market, he wanted to make sure he got enough to really be able to assess if he likes it enough to get the share. So we stocked him up a little bit.

In some really exciting, though fairly unrelated news, our spinach seeds finally arrived!















We got 5 packets of organic spinach seeds from Park Seed. I don't generally like to buy seed from a large seed company, but the time of year I decided I wanted to buy seed wasn't the greatest. When we buy our seed in January/February, we will be getting mostly heirloom seeds from places like Seed Savers.

In fantasy football news (I know you all probably don't care, but this is a form of entertainment I really enjoy), we beat the undefeated team last week and now move to 4-3 and lead our division. This is the second time our team knocked off an undefeated team. I must admit that I am a little surprised as I didn't really do the fantasy pick thing too well. I didn't really understand how the games were scored before setting my draft choices, and I gave my highest picks to defense and other areas that don't score too many points in a fantasy football games. However, we ended up with a surprisingly good quarterback in Aaron Rodgers (from Green Bay), great receivers in Plaxico Burress (from NYG) and Greg Jennings (from Green Bay), our "third string" wide receiver, Vincent Jackson (from San Diego) hasn't been too bad either. We ended up with a surprise breakout running back in Matt Forte (from Chicago) and though injured for most of the season, the always reliable (when there) Willie Parker (from Pittsburg), we also have Chester Taylor (from Minnesota) as our "third sting", or "second" while Parker has been injured. Though Taylor backs up Adrian Peterson, he still gets points, especially in short goal line situations. Defense, obviously, isn't really a problem for us - we have both the Chicago Bears and the Carolina Panthers defense/special teams. Our tight ends are alright I guess, we have Tony Scheffler (from Denver), who, before injured, was looking to have a pretty good year, but our back up Desmond Clark (from Chicago) hasn't done too badly in his place. Our kicker David Akers (from Philadelphia) is pretty reliable. Most of our players have had their byes - which is a really nice advantage when things start to "come down to the wire", and things are shoring up pretty good this week too.

In football pick news, if I were a gambling girl, I would start betting on football games! I am now 6 games ahead of Brett, and had an 11-3 "record" for last week. Wahoo! I love football - well, except for all the violence, trash talking, and off the field stuff. Anywho, it is a nice break from reality each week. I think it helps to be able to have a balance of "fun stuff" to counter the serious stuff in life. For me it is cooking, music, reading, football, the occasional video game, gardening, and outdoor activities.

Well, I've got a lot of gardening work to do today. Things to be started, things to be transplanted, and I need to organize the "plant room" to be a little more accommodating to both plants and people (oh, and critters too!). I also plan on making some granola bars, other baked goods, and soup today. Wahoo!

Stay warm everyone and have a great weekend!

'Til next time.