The Farmers' Market

What a wet shopping day! Since I took over cooking for the household back in December, I’ve done the grocery shopping on Wednesdays. Yesterday, it happened to be raining quite hard during my excursion.

My shopping trip usually includes visits to a Mennonite grocery store, to the Lewisburg Farmers’ Market, to the nearly adjacent recycling center, and to Weis Market, the local branch of a typical grocery chain that originates in Pennsylvania. My favorite stop by far is the Lewisburg Farmers’ Market.

The Farmers’ Market is a very long building with vendor tables along the walls, and more tables marking stands along the center of the building. There are stands outside, many along the north side of the building, several more forming a courtyard in front (to the east of the building), and a couple more spilling along the south side of the building. Beyond these outdoor stands is a dirt and gravel parking lot.

The Farmers’ Market is open only on Wednesdays. It draws farmers and vendors from all over central Pennsylvania. Shop there through a year, and you can track the seasons up the east coast as produce arrives from points south months before the same items will ripen here. The best produce at the market, however, is whatever’s in season locally.

We’ve already overdosed on fresh strawberries, and have had no problem with the segue into cherry season (and the overlapping blueberry season). On the vegetable side, we’ve been chowing fresh peas and new potatoes, and we did in a quart of wax beans over the past week. Local peaches are available, though we’re early in peach season, and local sweet corn started appearing at the market a week ago.

The available options will continue to change, but our farmers grow nearly every vegetable and fruit the local climate allows; we’ll see great variety all the way into winter. And, if you think something’s in season but you don’t see it at the market, ask one of the vendors and the item might be available next Wednesday.

The Farmers’ Market is more than a great produce-shop. Inside, there is a stand dedicated to serving hundreds—perhaps thousands of sausage sandwiches each Wednesday. Get to the market early, and the whole building smells like cooking sausage. Get there around lunch time, and a crowd surrounds the stand. Folks buy sandwiches, then chat with fellow shoppers as they lean against the counter. For many, this is the Farmers’ Market experience... who needs produce when you have a sausage sandwich?

At the Farmers’ Market you can buy meat, seafood, candy, cheese, spices, kitchen gadgets, soft pretzels, deep-fried potatoes, antiques, tools, all-for-a-dollar items, soaps, clothing, vacuum cleaner parts, hand-made crafts, and baked goods. The prices are good, and the vendors are usually friendly—even during heavy rain when canopies of the outdoor vendors stream sheets of water through which customers must step to reach the tables. Sure, I got soaked, but still the Farmers’ Market was the high point of my shopping chore.

For the complete City Slipper experience, please visit my web site at http://www.cityslipper.com/.

Camp Season

Summer camp season is upon us. My oldest son has already completed a week at Susquehanna University’s Wind Ensemble Institute, a sleepover camp at which he spent as many as six hours a day practicing clarinet in preparation for a recital and a concert at week’s end. (The concert was very impressive for an ensemble of mostly high school kids.)

My daughter is away this week as a Girl Scout. She’s participating in a central Pennsylvania camp’s Cables, Carabiners, & Currents program. This involves navigating a system of ropes high above the ground, rock climbing, and white-water rafting—presumably not all at the same time. It sounds like a great week, but we won’t know until she returns; our daughter has never communicated with us from summer camp.

She’ll come home for a day and a half, and then leave to another camp—this one more of an academically focused sleepover camp based at Mansfield University about an hour and a half north of Lewisburg. Then, her brother—my middle child—will go to the Mansfield summer camp. Later, my oldest son will attend a sleepover Boy Scout camp for a week, and then both of my boys will do band camp—a day camp for the high school marching band.

There’s one overwhelming truth I’ve learned from past summer camp seasons: the more kids that are away at camp during a week, the quieter it is around the house. This isn’t a big deal because my office is in the far corner of the basement, and, when at my desk, I’d have no clue if a wild party ensued in the rest of the house. Still, dinners are quieter with two kids than with three, and even quieter with one than with two or three.

Summer camp also reduces the general commotion of shuttling kids to classes and social engagements—but Stacy handles ninety percent or more of the shuttling, so this also isn’t a huge change during the season.

For me, there are two most significant effects of summer camp that are extensions of the quiet and lessened commotion:

1. The cadence of our household changes when one or more child is away at camp; it doesn’t feel quite right. We make decisions based on the tastes of only four or three people rather than on the tastes of five. Movies, foods, board games, excursions… with fewer people, the dynamics are different—not better or worse or easier—just different. For example, with my daughter away, the boys wanted to watch a PG-13 movie every night… we don’t watch a movie every night, so that was odd. And near the end of week two, my oldest son observed that we’d watched a lot of suspense and action flicks (James Bond, The Fugitive, Frequency, so we opted for a comedy (Ferris Bueler’s Day Off).

2. Our kids do just fine at camp… and they’re approaching the age where going away becomes a more permanent condition. Seeing them succeed so handily for a week or two is gratifying; when it’s time to go for good, no doubt they’ll flourish. But each success amplifies the inevitability of their departure. I miss them a bit while they’re at camp, and I’ll miss them a bunch when they head off to college and careers.

For the complete City Slipper experience, please visit my web site at http://www.cityslipper.com/.

Wild Fruit

I track the progression of summer by the free food available in my neighborhood. When strawberries ripen in the meadow across the street—or in my yard if I don’t mow often enough—I know that summer is upon us. The berries are copious, and could provide for many shortcakes but for one problem: these are woodland strawberries, and they don’t have much flavor. In fact, they’re not even juicy.

I Googled woodland strawberry, and found many references that describe these berries as sweet and tasty… apparently, references written by someone who has never eaten Lewisburg’s woodland strawberries. I would describe them as crunchy and bland—something I’d eat as a survivalist, but never if the domesticated equivalent (or nearly any other fruit for that matter) were available.

Shortly after strawberries ripen, black raspberries darken to a deep purple. These grow along hedgerows and in fields beneath low bushes and trees. In early summer, you can tell local black raspberries are ripe when bird droppings in your area are purple rather than white.

I love the flavor of black raspberries, and I pick what I can find in the wild places near my house. I don’t care for crunchy fruit, so I juice the raspberries to make jelly and ice cream. I also mix the juice with other fruits to fill pies or make what I call fruit punch jam. Compared to cultivated, commercial raspberries at $4 per pint, wild berries are like money growing on thorny stalks.

As the black raspberries fade (the best picking lasts about two weeks), ripe blackberries emerge. These grow in nearly the same places as the black raspberries—but they seem to favor open spaces away from the tree line; in a small meadow, black raspberries grow around the edges, and blackberries grow near the middle.

While they look similar to black raspberries, blackberries are bigger and crunchier. They have a distinctive flavor, and even a little blackberry juice mixed with other fruits can overwhelm the other flavors. I like the flavor, but I’d choose black raspberry jelly over blackberry every time.

Blackberries hold on for a solid month, and as they pass their prime, elderberries come into their own. Elderberries grow on tall wooden stalks—tree-like bushes. The ends of the stalks sport white flowers in early summer. These give way to green berries that ripen near mid August into large clusters of deep purple spheres—about the size of tapioca balls. Each ball has a large seed in its center, so elderberries are at least as crunchy as blackberries. Flavor-wise, elderberries appeal to me about as much as woodland strawberries: I’d eat them to avoid starvation in a crisis—as enthusiastically as I’d eat Brussels sprouts.

Autumn fruits don’t grow wild in the neighborhood, so elderberries mark the end of the free food season. Still, it’s awesome to find so many free things to eat so close to my front door. Nature is a terrific provider.

For the complete City Slipper experience, please visit my web site at http://www.cityslipper.com/.