Farmer's market

Yesterday I strolled from booth to booth at the farmer's market, admiring shining baskets of cherries, early zucchini and cucumbers, and wondering briefly if I could fit pineapple sage in my herb garden. I stopped at a table of multicolored tomatoes and bought five. I bypassed the bratworst stand and came upon a woman setting out gooseberries and raspberries. I had tasted gooseberries for the first time last year and, remembering the pie I made, bought a small basket. I picked up a large cabbage at another stall, and spent my last two dollars on a basil plant.

At Sharp Shopper I found Virginia peanuts, local honey, and a new item from the farm that produces the popcorn that Ben eats in vast quantities: white corn. I bought a bag along with a bag of popcorn. I also made a non-local purchase of black beans. Our black beans in the garden have pods of a size which I would eat green if we weren't growing them to dry.

I sliced one of the tomatoes and sprinkled them with the pinched-off top of the basil plant. We had them for supper along with leftover garbanzos and greens over rice (for Ben) and cornmeal (for me).

I've been feeling that it's time to bring our baseline phase to a close. We haven't yet decided what we should try to phase out. I'm inclined to continue eating dry beans until ours are ready to harvest, then re-evaluate depending on the size of our harvest. Cheese is often at the top of my food guilt list: non-local, refrigerated, processed, high fat, possibly from confined cows causing polluted run-off. . . but do I want to live without cheese? Or learn the complex-sounding process of making my own? Or pay $14 a pound for cheese from Charlottesville? Then there are rice, oats, sunflower seeds, vinegar, lentils. . . I can eliminate any or all of these from our diet for a week or a month, but do we really want to long-term?