This Week at Smart Markets Springfield Farmers' Market

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We’re back! After several weeks of feeling like vagabonds, we will be back in our own spot under the trees this week, and your parking area should be newly paved also. Despite the inconvenience, we are grateful to the staff of Vornado for helping us to work out the alternative arrangements each week.

Uncle Fred’s BBQ will be with us again this week for the entire market. We are grateful to him for coming last week, even though he had a previous catering event that afternoon. He will have his full complement of meats this week and those great sides, too. He started out in Springfield years ago down on Old Keene Mill.

All of the farmers are now bringing the fruits and veggies of the season. We have an abundance of tomatoes, including heirlooms at very reasonable prices; peaches and nectarines, both yellow and white; melons, orange and red :-); and freshly picked sweet white corn, too. We also have peppers, squash, and lots of other colorful produce, and recipes to get you started or to give you some new ideas.

Tanya is bringing lots of goodies. We applaud the fact that she buys her fruits from Travis at Tyson Farms. Kylie is rolling out her latest and greatest cake pop: orange dipped in chocolate and rolled in Jaffa candy pieces. Jaffas are a candy native to Australia that Kylie says “are kind of like if orange Skittles and milk chocolate M&Ms had a baby.”

Valley View Bakery will have French baguettes, hamburger buns, delicious croissants, and giant cookies. My granddaughter and I strongly recommend the small banana tea bread too. Her opinion is that it is the best she has ever eaten, and she is a true connoisseur of banana bread.

Denise Hicks of Postmodern Foods will be back with her menu of the week; check our Facebook page for details. She sold out of her salads early at our Reston market this week. Let’s see if we can break the record at our market! She would love to have you to stop by and learn more about what she is doing, even if you do not buy. Her focus on raw foods for good health is very au courant with the promise of a long-lasting impact on healthy living.

Our demo chef at another one of our markets used Queen Victoria’s Island Punch as part of a melon dessert drink, and our shoppers flocked to buy it after tasting the concoction. We will have the recipe for you at the Smart Markets table so you can concoct and enjoy it at home.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

For busy people—and isn’t everyone busy these days?—cooking more at home can be a challenge. I know because I am as busy as I have ever been in my life and I am still cooking dinner almost every night. What I have learned in more than 40 years in the kitchen is that making the time often means making the most of the time I have. And that takes organization and planning but not necessarily writing out menus in advance.

It’s much more fun to balance that precision with flexibility that gives you a little more opportunity for creativity. It’s nice to be organized but more fun to be able to take what you have on hand and do something interesting with it.

This week I started with eight ears of corn and, though I have not used all of it yet, I am going to share with you some of the meals that will feature the corn. The first night we hosted my granddaughter and enjoyed corn-on-the-cob with melted butter and lots of pepper as part of our all-local meal of burgers and homemade slaw. I had five ears of cooked corn left over.

The next night I got creative with a hearty side to our local pork chops, which were small and grilled to perfection by our in-house grillmeister. Looking in the fridge for inspiration, I sautéed chopped onion and green pepper with cubed yellow squash and the corn from two of the ears that I had cooked ahead. I also added brown Jasmati rice (grown in the U.S. and sold under the brand Rice Select).

Tomorrow night we will have quesadillas with a filling based on local ground beef, sautéed until brown with the remains of the previous mélange and the rice mixed in.

Later this week, I will make my very favorite Green Grocer Potato Salad and use the rest of the corn in it. I will probably serve this with grilled lemon chicken—the two recipes are so good together. It must be the lemon in both that carries the theme on the tongue.

I did not plan any of this in advance; I just knew that I would find some great ways to use the cooked corn. Cooking it all at once meant that it was ready to use and also that I had to boil a big pot of water only once for all those meals.

Being organized in the kitchen does takes time and experience to master, but thinking ahead is a little easier and over time will help you to relax and experiment in the kitchen. Then you can get organized and make better use of the time you have.

Photo by Sarah Sertic