Health
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10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
Farmers Market Update: Summer In San Francisco
Summer Beans
Summertime in San Francisco is characterized by amazing food and horrible weather. By that definition, today was certainly summer: cold, gloomy and delicious!
The best tasting foods at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market now are things I associate with summertime. Lettuce greens and herbs are absolutely spectacular. Stone fruits are to die for. Tomatoes are sweet and flavorful in every color, size and shape you could imagine. Potatoes are sweet, creamy and firm. Life is good.
Santa Rosa Plums
Summer in San Francisco
Produce I associate with later in the season is also beginning to appear. Peppers become more interesting, diverse and fragrant by the week, as do the melons. Figs of all varietals are sweet and sticky. Some of the blackberries I saw today were the size of ping pong balls!
Summer Potatoes
Chilies and Peppers
One of the most interesting items I purchased this week was a bunch of chocolate mint from Marin Roots Farm. It actually smells like an After Eight, and I can’t wait to figure out what to do with it. I imagine it would pair nicely with berries. Any other suggestions?
In case you are curious about how I am handling the new bag policy at the market, I’m pretty happy with the way it is working out. I bought a bunch of bags from the CUESA booth the first day for $5 and I still haven’t gone through the whole thing. Many of the vendors provide bags for free, either paper or biodegradable plastic. Others charge $0.25 for a bioderadable bag–that’s when I bust out my secret stash.
BYOB
Peaches
For me the biggest bag annoyance I’m facing right now is getting all my beautiful stone fruits and tomatoes home in one piece, since they tend to get mangled in my bag with all the other veggies in there. I am experimenting with different solutions and will let you know when I get it worked out.
Check out my video if you want to see everything I brought home (except the figs, I ate those right away). I also spill the beans on my absolute favorite summer squash. It takes about 2.5 minutes.
Today’s Purchases:
- Summer tomatoes (Balakian Farms)
- Pluots (Bella Viva Orchards)
- Organic corn (Paradez Farms)
- Figs (Knoll Farms)
- Green shallots (Dirty Girl Produce)
- Yellow wax beans (Dirty Girl Produce)
- Cilantro (Dirty Girl Produce)
- Basil (Dirty Girl Produce)
- Purslane (Marin Roots Farm)
- Lettuces (Marin Roots Farm)
- Chocolate mint (Marin Roots Farm)
- Pullet eggs (Eatwell Farm)
- Zephyr and crooked neck squash (Lucero Organic Farms)
- Mediterranean cucumbers (Madison Growers)
- Swiss chard (Green Gulch Farm)
- Bell pepper (Happy Quail Farms)
- Garlic (Short Night Farms)
- Blue Bottle Coffee
What did you find at your farmers market this week?
What great looking choices! We finally had our first cucumber at home this week. We’ve had numerous home-grown ones already this season, but they were my wife’s grandmothers. The tomatoes are really coming in strong now too. Peppers are coming along, as is the squash. Lots of yummy stuff!
Wow, you are so lucky! This time of year is so full of life, I just love it!
I get so darn jealous of you at my favorite market. We have much more limited choices here in Tennessee. I am posting tomorrow (maybe today) a nice pesto pasta with green beans and young potatoes. You might like it. You could use the wax beans. I always enjoy your posts very much. We think a lot alike. Although I couldn’t stick to the detox of no pasta. 🙂
Ha ha, it’s just a week and I have a trick up my sleeve 😉 Looking forward to the recipe!
Lots of good food on this list! I’m actually really excited about corn arriving, I bought two of them last Wednesday and can’t wait to have them BBQ style with olive oil. It was neat to see some local raw honey at our market, but I was already loaded up back home…
I also nabbed delicious local organic blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Couldn’t find any spinach (we went to our small local farmers market, not the downtown one)…but I’m really looking forward to going back on Wednesday. Also we’re going to check out the Milwaukie Farmers Market (just outside Portland) next weekend…hope to find lots of goodies there too.
The video reports are fun…never heard of zephyr squash, but I love all kinds of summer squash. Pluots are funky but tasty…never heard them called stone fruits.
BBQ corn is amazing! Wish I had a grill. Sounds like a project for my next OC trip.
Went to the market in San Antonio, TX with my parents this weekend. I was so sad. The drought has caused most of the produce to go bitter and it was really sparse. There was a bright spot- fresh black and pink-eyed peas. They were great.
That’s really sad. Allie (next comment) said the same thing about Pennsylvania. I wish I had an answer for people who live in these places where produce is scarce. Government action is probably what is necessary to solve it.
I went home to Scranton, PA this weekend and I decided to check out all the farmer’s markets. Turns out that it’s been really rainy and cool all summer here and I couldn’t find a single local vegetable! I picked my own strawberries at one farm but the rain had made the majority of the crop moldy and you could smell the fermenting fruit while in the field. At another farm, I bought a dozen fresh, pastured eggs (only $3.75!) but they had no fruits or vegetables available yet either. And my favorite farm stand, John’s Sweet Corn, opened this weekend but when I asked about their produce, it turns out everything they were selling was from Lancaster, which is about 2 hours south of here, since their crops aren’t doing well (I guess this could be called local, but not quite what I was looking for). The Scranton farmer’s market opens next weekend so maybe there would be more available there but it seems like the selection will still be pretty slim.
Overall, it was a really eye-opening weekend, and it makes me very thankful for the amazing, year-round markets we have in San Francisco!
That’s really sad! I find it pretty ironic though that the midwest is devoid of fresh foods and New York and San Francisco are booming with them. To me this means there is something wrong with our nation’s food policy. My recommendation for people to write to their congressmen.