Blog A Go-Go

In which I lavish praise on the farmers' market

I have been eating well lately--VERY well, thanks to the local farmers' market. I have to get up at o'dark thirty to get there by the time the market opens. (If you come late you miss all the berries and the good flowers.) We are very spoiled with our market. It carries the usual array of produce and flowers, but we also have a superb baker, honey, goats' and sheeps' milk cheeses, lamb, pork, bison, eggs, and from one transplanted Frenchwoman, Mediterranean specialities like homemade hummus and little quiches. A second market is opening in another part of our little town, and there is talk of a third. The beauty of the food that I buy from the market, aside from the obvious benefits of talking to the farmers and having a pretty good idea of what's been done to the food, is the pleasure of not cooking it. When food is that fresh and that carefully-grown, all it needs is a few minutes on the grill or to be arranged on a plate. Like this perfect lunch:

In which I am fasting

Not of my own free will, I assure you. I love food and going without is never something I do without resenting it bitterly. No, I am fasting in order to let a nice young woman with a syringe take some blood and do something medical with it. (It's the usual stuff you're supposed to have done every few years, but I'm particularly interested in the results this time. I'm dying to see if my healthier eating and new supplements have had any effect on my cholesterol. Also, a friend suggested I might possibly be anemic, and I will be glad to know one way or another. If nothing else, it would give me a very good excuse for lying around with the back of my hand draped over my pale brow while people scurry around fetching me cushions and soothing cups of tea. Or a nice, thick steak, I suppose, would be more in order if I'm anemic...)

Anyway, since I can't eat, naturally I'm obsessing about food. Yesterday I concocted the MOST delicious sandwich spread. Greek yogurt with chipotle pepper and adobo sauce. This is very much mixed to taste, but I used about two tablespoons of yogurt with a teaspoon of adobo sauce and a whole chipotle pepper, chopped. This is not a spread for the faint of heart. It has HEAT, but you can adjust accordingly. And if you want a lovely yogurt, and this is a testimonial from a girl who LOATHES yogurt, Fage is absolutely divine. It's thick and luscious and tastes very much like sour cream. And if you buy the BIG container, you will have enough left to make my faux banana split: slice up a banana, dollop on a generous measure of yogurt, drizzle on some good honey, and sprinkle with very dark unsweetened cocoa powder. YUM.

In which I am amazed

Those of you who have been hanging around the Blog A Go-Go for awhile know that my efforts at domesticity are entirely hit or miss. Lately I've been in a puttering, decorating, cleaning--okay, not cleaning; more like tidying--kind of mood. But I could seriously get on board with more cooking if I used Recipe Matcher every day. It's freaking genius, and I'm frankly amazed it exists. In a pine nutshell, it asks you for the ingredients in your pantry, and then it tells you what to make.

Now, naturally a less mature person would try to plug in a variety of incompatible ingredients just to see what comes up. Say, barbecue sauce, canned black beans, evaporated milk, and ramen noodles. Well, that person might be astonished to find that Recipe Matcher actually suggests twenty-five different recipes. Okay, they do require a few more ingredients, and no recipe used all four TOGETHER. But I suppose that would have been too much to ask.

Oh, and if you're not blessed with mad culinary skills, there is a bartending matcher on the same page. Just tell them what libations you have lying around, and they will suggest the perfect cocktail. Now THAT is a useful site.