I love farmers markets. I have a strange fondness for wandering down aisles of fresh produce. I really can’t explain it, but I’ve always had an appetite, if not an aptitude for gardening and growing things. When I was younger, my mom and I planted a vegetable garden with everything from corn and tomatoes to squash and strawberries. Unfortunately, both my mother and I are prone to a disposition that affords for neither much patience nor much planning and the garden was very quickly defunct. Imagine my ecstasy, then, at moving to a new house with an acre of hillside behind it on which the former owners had planted dozens of fruit trees. We had plums, peaches, apricots, apples, pears, oranges, lemons, figs, blackberries and raspberries. I would spend hours up on the hill strolling through the fruit trees, checking on their progress and growing increasingly impatient. It was that hillside that really convinced me of the undeniable superiority of homegrown fruits and vegetables. I barely recognized the taste of apple in the apples from our tree - they were that much better than the ones we always brought home from the supermarket. And the same went for the blackberries and raspberries; homegrown berries are a horse of a completely different color.
Which brings me back to farmers markets. Yesterday my friend Amanda and I decided to make an elaborate home-cooked meal based on what we found at the farmers market near her apartment. It was a small market so we weren’t expecting a lot, but we found some real treasures. We walked away with carrots, turnips, green garlic (one of my absolute favorite flavors!), crispy lettuce, sugar snap peas, mint, parsley, chives, apricots, and cherries. We decided to roast a chicken and the turnips and carrots (I know, I know...again) in herb butter, make a mint-pea salad, and have apricot-cherry crisp for desert. The apricots and cherries were out-of-this world delicious, and although we weren’t planning on making desert, we knew we had to the moment we put them in our mouths…they were too good to leave abandoned at the fruit stall.
Once we got back to her apartment and spread everything out and began to make our preparations, everything was so beautiful we started taking pictures of the things we were making. Yes, in this, our facebook-picture-obsessed age, we took pictures of the food rather than of ourselves – it was that beautiful. And hopefully I’ll have those pictures up on the site soon enough to prove it to you. Any ways, we made a simple herb butter with the green garlic, which is really just young garlic that has a more mellow and softer flavor, but is nice and bright, chopped chives, and parsley. It was really simple and the smell of it all together was good enough for a home-candle scent. The salad was really sweet and refreshing – the lettuce we got was really crispy and slightly bitter, which stood up nicely against the sweetness of the peas and of the mint vinaigrette we made and the parsley we chopped up and sprinkled on top gave a nice citrusy bite. It was the perfect summer salad. Lastly, the crisps with the apricots and cherries were delicious. We didn’t sprinkle any sugar on the fruit, and, instead, added extra brown sugar to the topping so the filling was tart and the topping was crunchy and had the necessary sweet component. We made one crisp with just apricots and one with half cherries and half apricots. The apricot-only version was extra-tart, but the flavor of the apricots was just explosive. I loved it, but it was a little to tart for Amanda, who preferred the one with cherries; they were sweet enough to cut through the apricot’s tartness and baked beautifully.
Perfect Summer Salad
Your choice of greens, but I recommend something slightly bitter
½ cup fresh or frozen peas
A handful of parsley, chopped
2 tablespoons finely chopped chives
Mint vinaigrette (recipe below)
Boil the peas for about five-six minutes while you chop the lettuce and the herbs. Strain the peas and let them cool before mixing them in with the rest of the salad. Pour mint vinaigrette over the salad and serve.
For mint vinaigrette:
*We grabbed some white balsamic vinegar at the market on a whim and it turned out to be the most delicious, delicate, and perfectly sweet vinegar for this dressing…find it if you can!
2 cups mint, finely chopped
¾ cup olive oil
White balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
In one recipe, they tell you to put the mint and olive oil in a food processor or a blender and blend into a pesto-like consistency. I say, why dirty another dish? Just chop the mint as finely as you can and pour the oil in – it will still get you fantastic results. Promise. Mix the oil into the chopped mint and pour into a saucepan. Simmer on very low heat for 45 seconds. Strain the oil through a fine mesh strainer (or in my case, because there was no strainer on hand, a French press), pressing down on the mint to extract more oil. You will end up with much less oil than you put in. Set aside and let cool. When the oil is cool and the greens have been prepared, whisk in the white balsamic vinegar. Use about 1 part vinegar to 2 parts mint oil to start and add more if necessary (I think Amanda used about 1 ½ parts vinegar to every 2 parts mint oil). Whisk in salt and pepper and emulsify. Pour over salad greens and serve.
As for the crumbles…
Just replace the blackberries and nectarines of my earlier crisp recipe with the apricots and cherries or just apricots in whatever proportion you like (we used about a 2-1 ratio for the apricot-cherry crisp). Also, emit the cinnamon in the crisp topping and substitute a tablespoon of vanilla. I also suggest chopping about ½ a cup of walnuts and adding them to the topping…it was Amanda’s idea for these crisps and it really added a nice crunch and flavor.
And the chicken…
Same recipe as the last one, except use about ¼ cup of finely chopped green garlic (you peel the dry brown wrappings off the stems and chop the green parts like you would a scallion), a small handful of finely chopped parsley, and a handful of finely chopped chives. I, then, stuffed the cavity with three of the green garlic bulbs and a nice bunch of parsley.
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