Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Mmmmm, Vegetables ......


I love the Farmer’s Market. This time of year it is an explosion of color, textures, and smells.

This weekend, Brave Sir Robin went to Houston to visit some friends. Saturday morning, we got up early and drove over to the Farmer’s Market in The Heights. It is an amazing area, almost all of the produce passing through town, and really, the entire region pass through this several block area. There are hundreds of mom and pop produce distributors and vendors in about a 5 to 6 block area. Dotted along the way are Mexican bakeries offering Pan Dulce, Bollitos, and (are you listening Anne?) Tres Leches cake.

We filled the car with crates of collards, lettuce, cucumbers, chiles, tomatoes, okra, sweet corn, melons, cherries, onions, green beans, papaya, apricots, strawberries and blueberries. The fragrance filled the entire car with the smell of an orchard, fully ripe and ready to be picked. We took our bounty back to their place and prepared an awesome dinner.

We had sliced heirloom tomatoes, drizzled with olive oil, basil, salt and pepper.


There was a cucumber and purple onion salad,



fresh collard greens,



maque choux, stewed okra, and medallions of pork tenderloin with a little Marsala reduction.


Dessert was an apricot and cherry tart with an almond crust.
(I forgot to take a picture of the tart.)


Add a pitcher (or two) of sangria and dinner is served.

9 comments:

somewaterytart said...

I forgot to take a picture of the tart

The Tart must be consistently photo-documented!

Brave Sir Robin said...

You know, as soon as I typed that, I thought of you!

:)

Anne said...

Mmm, that looks lovely! I love almond-crust tarts.

And tres leches cake! Yes! I shall have to get some of that soon...

The Red Queen said...

OMG I am sooooooooooooo hungry now. You bastard.

And cherries, I love cherries. I love cherry season. I love that I live in a state with awesome cherries.

Must go eat lunch now.

Brave Sir Robin said...

The cherries were very good.

:)

celticfeminist said...

Memo to me: Go to local farmer's market STAT.

And really, dude, are you trying to make me come to TX just to raid your kitchen?? That dinner looks (and sounds) DIVINE.

Though, while I'll admit it sounds good and probably was tasty, I'd have to skip the pork, being a vegetarian and all. ;)

Brave Sir Robin said...

Yeah, I could have went meatless that night and been fine.

Of course, the greens had a few slices of salt pork.......

:)

I will be posting more of the Farmer's Market pictures on FLICKR soon.

I have a free account and I am almost at my monthly limit.

I have been trying to upgrade to a pro account for a while now and I can't get the yahoo site to work!!!

It kicks me back to the password page over and over and over, sometimes as many as 14 or 15 times in a row, then I get an unable to complete, try again later message. This has been going on for over a week!!

I have tried from home, from work, with firefox, with Internet Explorer, etc....

Yahoo help was no help at all. I have contacted three people and all three have just passed the buck and given me a different contact. To put it mildly I pissed and frustrated!!

celticfeminist said...

Yahoo! has some of the worst customer service ever. I used to use them for my email account and always ended up with the most unhelpful responses whenever I had trouble. I'd ditch them all together if it weren't for the fact that their toolbar is vital to me because it's portable and has all my bookmarks and I love Flickr. It seriously irks me that they're in charge of it. Grumble.

Speaking of which - I went over to your Flickr profile and I have to ask ... is your last name Barnes?

If it is - spooky - that's my last name too.

Brave Sir Robin said...

Yes, that is my last name!!

Way Cool!!!!!