Farmer's Market Eats

This morning, my husband made breakfast--a fruit salad of cherries, black raspberries, and strawberries, followed by eggs, bacon, and scrapple (scrapple for him, bacon for me). The best part about the whole thing is that every single ingredient with the exception of salt & pepper came from either our farm share or the Reston Farmer's Market. It was a great morning.

For dinner tonight, we had a freezer meal (Pork Chops with good stuff) but on the side, we had a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and red spring onions, with dill. Again, all of the fresh/raw ingredients in the salad were from the farmer's market.

I absolutely love summer! This Saturday at the Reston Market, we picked up the aforementioned bacon and scrapple, and black raspberries and cherries, plus goat cheese, the red spring onions, tomatoes, garlic curls, and a whole mess of baby zucchini. We're redoing our kitchen this summer, and I am not at all worried because I can honestly live on raw foods and cheese. As long as I have a fridge, I'm good to go.


It's interesting that the newsletter that we get from our farm share encourages you to go to local farmer's markets in addition to eating what we get from the farm. Although Potomac Vegetable Farms is amazing for their veggies, we don't get a whole lot of fruit at all, until much later in the summer when blackberries and watermelons appear. I don't generally mind, though, because the Reston Farmer's Market is amazing. It's so much more than a bunch of veggie and fruit stands. There are representatives from farms that are much further south and west, so while farms that are right in the area might not yet have, say, tomatoes, some others already do. It also allows you to have a nice fruit overlap when the fruit really gets going. Some stands still had strawberries this week, while others had moved on to cherries and raspberries. Meanwhile, there's one stand that specializes in baby salad greens, while another specializes, later in the summer, in 20 varieties of tomato. There's the Wacky Herb Guy. There's the Honey people. Two or three stands have eggs. There's the two different dairies, and bakers, and the kettle corn people, and let's not, oh please don't forget, the Pork Guy. Plus, there is always some kind of musical entertainment, and just this past week, all of the restaurants from the plaza were out sampling their foods. On the Plaza is the craft market, too. This week, I bought a dress I just couldn't pass up (for Lillian), and if I had had any money left over I would have been buying t-shirts for myself. Walk through the craft fair and you'll hear even more music.

But really, the market is where everyone comes out on a Saturday morning to meet with friends and see their favorite vendors and just be out and about on a summer morning. My son loves going to the market, and loves running into friends and relations, and especially loves the music. We let him help pick out fruits, and he is in charge of our market bags and making sure I don't forget to bring one with me. I bring friends from out of town when they come visit. It's that much of a thing in our area. And it's one of the reasons I love where I live.