At the Market

I get almost 100% of my produce from the local farmers’ markets here in San Francisco these days. I’ve been doing so for about a year now; a couple of friends of mine have asked me about the great results at low prices I get with this style of food shopping so I figured I’d CC the Internet.

–

Getting great meals out of the farmers’ markets takes a little practice. The key combination is one of imagination, thrift, and an eye for the fresh vs. the stuff that’s been riding around in their trucks for a couple of weeks. One good way to start sourcing your food from local vendors is to think of your favorites — things you make all the time and love — and reimagine them in terms of what’s in season.

For example, a few ideas from this morning:

Key limes: key lime hollandaise on eggs benedict. Substitute key limes, or meyer lemons for recipes calling for lemon. Key lime & avocado tuna ceviche with cumin. Fish n’ chips with key lime juice in place of malt vinegar.

Blood oranges: blood orange salads, gastriques, mignonettes. Substitute blood orange juice for whatever fruit you like in salad — taste a few and get a feel for the flavor. They’re usually a little more tart than the mandarins that were in season a few weeks ago, so they stand up well in sweeter salads with some nuts or paired with a mild goat cheese like Humboldt Fog. The juice takes well to reduction with a little honey or sugar so you could make a gastrique and serve it with a strongly-flavored meat like some duck breast or lamb. Alone, the tartness adds a fun twist to the sherry vinegar used in mignonettes (add chopped shallots and pepper) as a sauce for raw oysters.

Fingerling potatoes: are versatile like I said, they have extra skin area and are not very watery so they take well to long cooking times. Roasted beneath a whole chicken is one great way, toss them with some olive oil and salt and rosemary or dill and you have a great side for steak or pork.

The grapefruit I got, I think I’m just going to quarter and have for breakfast with some eggs and toast, would be good with yogurt or something else to offset the tartness.

Green veggies like green beans or bok choy or the red and rainbow chards are easy, you just cook them lightly with some garlic and drizzle with olive oil and some sprinkles of a fine sea salt and they go great with anything. The crunchy veggies like daikon radish, bell peppers, carrots, radishes, etc. are also really versatile in other preparations, like you julienne them and toss with vinegar and sugar (or vietnamese nam pla if you have it) and serve it with soy and sriracha pork chops for instant Slanted Door flavor.

I bought an insanely big batch of carrots — cooked them with some shallots, blood orange juice, meyer lemon juice, ginger, smoked paprika, and a pinch of curry powder in about a cup of water. Then I pureed them and added like 2 tbsp of heavy cream and a 1 tsp butter to make a soup. Soups are awesome because since they’re liquid you can make a quart or so (which is what this recipe yielded) and if you don’t eat it within a couple of days you can freeze it and thaw it whenever you need a little extra food or flavor. I have a couple of kinds of soup in the freezer right now, when guests are over I serve them in those little shot glasses so no one gets burned out on too much carrot curry soup.

Rich root vegetables like beets, turnips, sweet potatoes, parsnips, etc. are always good sliced thinly and roasted. If in doubt, add olive oil and salt and roast at 450 for 15 minutes. If it doesn’t taste good after that, there was something wrong with the vegetable.

They almost always have three or four kinds of hot peppers at the market, always jalapenos but also serrano and pasilla sometimes and sometimes the multicolored italian pepperoncini as well as the tiny but powerful Thai bird chili. The fresh organic peppers are usually 2-3x hotter than the crap you get at restaurants so a little goes a long way. I usually slice them really thinly and have them on the side with sandwiches or in the carrot soup thing or with any Asian-style preparation… those that I can’t finish get air-dried for a few days and then put in the freezer in case I need to make something insanely spicy.

Prices are rising slightly at the Civic Center market, probably because of more customers. Even so, I am pretty sure I spent less than $40 this morning and I got a shit ton of stuff. When I first started going, I only got a couple of things that I knew I could use, but eventually I got into the habit of just buying random stuff and looking up recipes on epicurious.com and adapting to what I had on hand. If you keep it up you will look forward to the variety, surprise, and seasonality of cooking and eating locally sourced stuff.