Eating locally, storming the Bastille locally
On Sunday I went to the new Headhouse Farmers’ Market, where I ended up
going a bit produce-crazy: the morning’s haul included
peaches, heirloom tomatoes, a cucumber, half a dozen eggs, some really
decadent fudge, a bag of Asian salad greens, and — hard-to-find item
of the week — a bag of garlic scapes.* They’re the curly green shoots, topped with seedpods, that
the garlic plant sends up aboveground. You can cook them like regular garlic, or like green onions. Half of my bag went into some pasta on Sunday night; I’m saving the rest for a stir-fry, a risotto, or perhaps an unusually green batch of garlic bread. The extra-curly ones could also be worn as avant-garde and slightly pungent bracelets.
I liked the Headhouse market so much that I resolved to get as much of my produce as possible from farmers this summer,
and look into where to find good local produce in the winter. I don’t
think I could manage the 100-mile diet (I can’t make myself give
up coffee, chocolate, or olive oil, for a start), but I’m getting tired of going to
supposedly earth-friendly groceries and being unable to find fruit that wasn’t flown in from the West Coast or the other side of the world, even in the middle of summer.
Tomorrow night, there are going to be 4th of July fireworks by
the Art Museum, within an easy walk of my building. In two weeks, it’ll
be Bastille Day at the State Penitentiary, complete with street fair
and a mock Bastille-storming. My neighborhood rocks.
* Incidentally, I’ve heard them called both "garlic scapes" and
"garlic snapes"; the latter usage makes me wonder if that’s where J.K. Rowling got one of her character names. (I’ve finished Book 6 of the Harry Potter saga. Anyone want to
speculate on what’s going to happen in Book 7?)
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