This Week at the Smart Markets Springfield Farmers' Market

This Week at our Springfield Market
Saturday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
American Legion Post 176
6520 Amherst Ave.
Springfield, VA 22150
Map

This Week at the Market

This is our last week for this market, and we hope you will take advantage of the local meats, produce, and baked goods that the vendors will bring for your Thanksgiving holiday. We have lots of great recipes that utilize the fruits and veggies you will see at the market, and don’t forget to stock up on beef, pork, chicken, and rose veal at Windmill Meadows and chicken and pork at Wicked Oak to carry you through at least a couple of the winter months while we are away.

We invite you to come to shop with us at our Oakton market on Saturdays or our Lorton market on Thursday afternoons; we will be open at those two locations all winter long.

And we will see you again in Springfield in the spring. If you wish to read our newsletters throughout the season, please visit our website and sign up to receive one. Otherwise you will hear from us on Patch when we have news for you about next year’s market opening.

Thanks for your support this year.

From the Market Master

Do you have your list, and are you checking it twice? No, not your Christmas list, but your Thanksgiving grocery list. Whether you are preparing the entire meal yourself for one family or more, or whether, as I do every year, you are contributing to a potluck feast, I thought you might benefit from some sage advice.

If you are planning and preparing the entire meal yourself, buy a bigger turkey than you will need for the day and plan for great leftovers to get you through the next month, when you will be busier than ever with less time than usual to cook up comfort food on the fly. If you are concerned that the extra size will add significantly to the time your oven is devoted to the turkey, remember that the turkey can be completely roasted and carved early in the day. The turkey itself does not have to be hot from the oven; the gravy will warm it up sufficiently. And if you buy a fresh, local, free-range turkey from the farmers’ market, the bird will spend considerably less time in the oven anyway.

We will have handouts this week and next with delicious recipes for kinds of leftovers, so as long as you are dicing, slicing, chopping, mashing and carving, you might as well make enough for a few more meals. Any soup or casserole that you make can be frozen too, so you can bring out that turkey again and again through the holiday season.

Speaking of all that work that goes into the Thanksgiving meal, this month’s Eating Well magazine contains a chart demonstrating that the more cooking you do, the more calories you burn. Using their own Thanksgiving meal menu and Mayo Clinic research, the magazine calculated that you can burn 700 of the slightly more than 1,000 calories that their meal contains just by creating it in your own kitchen. No fair counting as your own workout what your helpers do for you, but it can only help your digestion knowing that the hard work contributed something more than just gluttonous enjoyment.

A family gathering is always a great opportunity to demonstrate how your commitment to eating seasonally and buying locally can result in a delicious meal from soup to nuts. Start with squash bisque, then select from the greens and cruciferous veggies, potatoes and other gorgeous root vegetables, and then for a main course, turkey or another meat from the market. And don’t forget a locally sourced dessert, which this year could include local pears and apples or some lovely black walnuts. You really can make a meal of all-local ingredients with maybe just cranberries and some citrus thrown in for color or acidity.

Whatever else you undertake this Thanksgiving, add something new to the mix and see where it takes you. The kitchen is a wonderful place to experiment, and hardly ever does anything blow up.