The Beginning of the End

1. Friday was the last day of the season at the Madrona Farmers' Market, the first of my markets to end. Wallingford, Queen Anne, and Phinney end this week, and Magnolia and Mercer Island will be done after next week. Lake City, as usual, will drag on until the end of the month, long after the customers are gone.
   

I'm not nearly as tired as I usually am this time of year. Maybe it's because most weeks this summer I only worked at 3 markets, rather than the 5 markets a week I did last year and the year before. It might also be because we closed the store, which was draining my energy. I'm going to something fun this Friday, my first free day when I'm used to having a market. Like...maybe I'll catch up on my bookkeeping.

The Kid and the Cookbook

At the Queen Anne Farmers' Market the other week an elderly woman wanted to buy a copy of my cookbook. She handed me a credit card and I explained that I couldn't process a credit card in the booth. She said, "Okay, run it as a debit then." I sadly told her that I couldn't do that either.

Credit and debit card transactions just take too much time, and those minutes are better spent serving and preparing food. But I was sad that I couldn't sell her the book, and she was disappointed that she couldn't buy it.

There was a boy in line behind her. I'd guess he was about 11 years old. He bought a lemonade, paid me with a twenty dollar bill, and then said, "I'll buy that book for her." I asked if he knew her and he said he didn't. I told him to go quickly and find her.

She came up to me this past Thursday and asked if I had a son, because a boy had found her and given her a copy of the cookbook the previous week. I said I had no idea who he was, but he'd made my day.

Surplus

Lately we've been bringing so much produce back from the farmers' markets that we're having trouble going through it all. We tried to put the brakes on a few weeks ago, telling the farmers' that we could only spend a certain amount, but most of them are just giving us the same volume and charging less for it. I'm guessing that the reason they've been having so much left over at the end of the day is the same reason we've been having trouble going through it all: folks just aren't buying as much as they used to. It's forced us to improve our systems for rotating and keeping track of stock. So far we've wasted very little, and I want to keep it that way. Stepping back for a moment, I realize that too much great food is truly a wonderful problem to have.

Kids' Quesadillas

There's been a lot of talk lately, not least from Slow Food USA and the first lady, about improving the quality of the food that our schools are serving to kids. Based on my own experience selling food at farmers' markets, I can't help feeling a bit skeptical. It seems to me that the reason so many places--including schools--serve crap to kids is because kids like eating crap.

My business offers a two-dollar item called the kids' quesadilla: a little white tortilla folded and grilled with melted cheese. We sell nearly 300 of them a week. We tried making them in the tomato tortillas that we use for the veggie quesadillas, but the kids wanted the white tortillas. I don't enjoy making them: they take longer than the veggie quesadillas because the veggies aren't there to help the cheese melt, and I just don't feel like I'm serving quality food when I make them. But the demand is strong so we make them anyway.

Still, I'm not convinced by the argument I keep hearing that if you offer kids better food, they'll learn to tell the difference. I offer plenty of great food, but they consistently choose the crap.

And yet I can't help thinking that school lunches may be the ideal place to start changing the way kids eat, especially for the current generation who have experienced mainstream school lunches. These meals are just so unequivocally awful that kids may even choose healthy food as an alternative.

New Fruit 5770

I've only recently grown aware of the tradition of trying a new fruit on Rosh Hashanah, but the idea deeply appeals to me. It's also fairly easy for me to find new fruits, because I don't tend to eat much fruit to start with. So this week I picked up a bag of pluots from Tiny's, and I've been enjoying one every day.

A pluot is a cross between a plum and an apricot. Apparently there are multiple varieties to choose from. I'm glad I tried them, though I doubt I'll eat them on a regular basis. But maybe that's the point: branching out a bit without doing anything terribly radical.

Tilth Harvest Fair 2009

1. Last Saturday was the Tilth Harvest Fair, my favorite event of the year. It was our 10th year vending there and I was struck--yet again--by what a perfect fit it is for my business. The customers are passionate about vegetables and delightfully down to earth (so to speak.)

Last year we set a company record for highest sales ever on a single day. We ran out of product and were working to capacity almost the entire time. This year we broke last year's record by about 2%, but we had leftover food at the end of the day, and we could have served more food during the time we had, but for some reason we couldn't seem to take orders fast enough. (We had a long line in front all day, and food ready and waiting around the side.)

It was strange to have our most successful day ever, and still feel a bit disappointed. On the bright side, it was also an indication of just how much we've learned and grown during the intervening year.

(The photo is from the Tilth website. Thanks guys!)

Norman Borlaug

1. Norman Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution," died this past weekend, spurring quite a bit of discussion about the pros and cons of his life's work, which helped to dramatically increase agricultural productivity, especially in developing nations.

Critics of his work contend that the crop varieties and agricultural techniques that he helped to develop have ultimately done as much harm as good, leading to an over-reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers and an undo emphasis on feeding the world's burgeoning population rather than controlling it through effective family planning.

To me he seems brilliant, influential, and tragic. He apparently agreed with his critics about the importance of population control, but he also saw the dire necessity of feeding the hungry, and he had the knowledge and creativity to do so. Perhaps it was inevitable that the extraordinarily productive seed stocks he developed for humanitarian purposes would eventually be overused by profit-driven multinational companies with no concern for the well-being of indigenous peoples, but his goal was to avert famine, and he was extraordinarily successful in that endeavor.

Cooking Meat

I learned to cook in natural foods stores and vegetarian restaurants, so I never learned much about cooking meat, although I do eat it from time to time. I eat meat because it's a basic part of so many culinary traditions and such an important part of who we are as gastronomical animals. I say this even though I've written and published 2 vegan cookbooks, and I strongly believe that our survival as a species could very well depend on our changing our diets to include less meat.

Lately I've been growing convinced that the best way to encourage people to incorporate more plant foods into their diets isn't necessarily to lobby in favor of a strictly vegetarian diet. I've come to this conclusion after many years of operating a farmers' market booth offering vegetarian food, and interacting with countless customers who are unwilling to even give my food a chance because it doesn't happen to have any meat in it.

I've been thinking recently that I'm ready to shift my emphasis a bit, and perhaps take on some new projects that include meat in sensible, sustainable ways. So I've been experimenting and cooking lunch for my staff. I'm starting with ground beef, because it's so easy to work with, and soon I'll work my way up to pre-cut pieces like stew meat, and eventually to larger cuts. I'm finding that it's much easier to achieve fuller flavors than with the vegetarian ingredients I'm used to using. One of my employees compared my recent experience to learning ride ride a bike without training wheels.

A Very Rainy Day

My very first farmers' market was Fremont 1997, before the market outgrew the available space and the farmers' set up shop in Ballard. When I woke up on the morning I was supposed to start it was raining hard, so I called and said I couldn't make it.

I was thinking about that yesterday, as I stood outside shivering in the pouring rain on Mercer Island. These days I wouldn't dream of missing a market simply because of lousy weather (although we did miss one day in Ballard last year when we couldn't get the van in motion because of the ice and snow.)

I've come to see attendance on foul weather days as a way of expressing my commitment to the cause. In order for any market to succeed, customers need to know that they can count on it being there when it's supposed to be there, regardless of the weather, and that long term investment is more important than making a profit on any given day.

Restaurant Dreams

This is the last month of my five-year lease on my old shop in Ballard. I moved out of there 7 months ago, into a bigger kitchen which isn't open to the public, and my buddies from Green Go moved into the old spot to give a shot at their restaurant dreams.

For a variety of reasons the venture didn't work out for them, so I'm paying rent there again this month and trying to sell off my equipment. The ideal scenario would be to sell it to someone who wants to take over the space, and there seem to be no shortage of people who want it.

Yesterday at the Queen Anne market someone approached me and asked for the landlord's phone number, and there was another inquiry on my answering machine when I got back to my shop. There are three empty storefronts just down the block with "for lease" signs in the windows, and this place doesn't even have a sign and folks are clamoring for it.

It's a charming building, and it's next to impossible to find a spot that's already been set up as a restaurant, unless you buy a business and a lease from the previous owner. (A sink costs $600, but the plumbling you need to install that sink costs $6000, and you can't take it with you.) But it's a difficult spot because it's so small, it's off the beaten path, and the landlords are often reluctant to meet the minimal obligations contained in a commercial lease.

Still, I'm convinced that things could work out there for the right person. That would have to be someone with experience and realistic expectations, who knows how to keep things simple.

Wild Asparagus

This is my friend Miriam with a wild asparagus plant that was growing on the spectacular piece of land that her family owns between Leavenworth and Cashmere. I was fortunate to spend a little time up there this week.

We did a bit of exploring, and she showed me several rows of wild asparagus on the upper part of the property, where the original homestead used to be. As far as we could figure out, it's been growing there without any human assistance for at least sixty years, reseeding itself. By now it's probably developed its own special strain, perfectly adapted to its tiny, unique microclimate.