Food, Glorious Food...

This is the second weekend that the Farmer's Market in Santa Fe is open in the newly completed revitalized 50-acre Railyard, which celebrated its huge grand opening last weekend and, after the Fiesta celebrations, the entire city was excited and buzzing about the coming out party.

Fall decorations -- variated colored dried corn with red chiles, pumpkins and goards are beautiful and bountiful. At left are calabacitas.  This is when I start putting out my own fall decorations and it continues right to the new year, one rotation after another after the summer flowers wither away.  The first thing in the baskets?  Chamisa, in bloom in the high desert landscape.  It dries and adds color. For greenery I'll throw in pine boughs in November or so. Chamisa stinks, by the way -- smells like dirty old socks.  So don't stick your nose down in my decorations. 

The number of farmers’ markets has more than doubled since the mid-1990s. Calabacitas, a Pueblo Indian food dish, is one of the local favorites. I want to try this recipe.  Heirloom vegetables are a treat and buying in season and organic when possible is the way to go and makes cooking and eating a celebration. I ran off in a hurry last week one morning with goat milk yogurt for breakfast-on-the-fly with fresh raspberries added in.  Goat cheese with green chile?  One of my favorite discoveries since moving to Santa Fe.  Green chile can become addictive (I'm hooked).

Fall red chile ristras have been hung on the portal with care and the mums add color while my herbs linger in the pots.  This is the final weekend for some Hatch green chile shipments.  We buy ours roasted at the Market, throw them in the freezer and they are easier to peel after we thaw them.  In New York City we enjoyed roof top honey and the Union Square Market; in Atlanta we scouted out the Farmer's Markets right away.  In Houston we tried the new internet-order food delivery and although we saw these delivering groceries on Park Avenue, they didn't seem to last in Houston and were out of business by the time we moved to Georgia.  Going to Farmer's Markets is the way we have fun.

Comments

[anthony]

I read that last weekend, over 8,000 people came to the Saturday Farmers Market in Santa Fe. Interesting for a city of 70,000. Is your photo actually from the market?

[tut-tut]

Farmers markets are so compelling. We used to go to the West Brattleboro one, which had a certain Medieval Fair feeling to it. It was the first time a bought a rabbit . . . to eat.

[Hattie]

Our farmers' market in Hilo, Hawaii, is all substance and little style. Under the fraying tarps covering a gravelled lot I buy vegetables for about half what they cost here in Seattle, where I'm visiting now.(We get most of our fruit from our yards or our neighbor's yards.) Whenever I eat fresh fruits and vegetables in Seattle, they never fail to disappoint. There is a farmers' market in the Ballard District, close to our condo, and it is the typical kind of mainland market, nice but rather expensive.