You need five servings of vegetables every day. And I know for a fact that we never manage to get them all – which is why I have a stealth bottle of V8 in the fridge, so I am not tempted to have a handful of something fatty and snacky when I get noshy mid-morning, and am too damn lazy to peel a carrot. What I need to do is get organized, and bring a list with me to the farmers’ market each week, so I can visualize the nearby field where the delicious strawberries I am going to devour were grown. I need a dose of healthy reality. I need to eat like a local.
When we go on vacation we often like to mill around farmers’ markets, wandering through tents, admiring the local produce and crafts, smiling at babies and gobbling up small smackerals of proffered samples. An outing to the farmers’ market and a pilgrimage to the local bookstore are our holiday diagnostic tools. If we are lucky enough to visit a place on market day it invites us to hang out with the community. We love to see farmers interacting with other folks from the area, and it tells us so much more about the place we have traveled to see than dropping in on the chain grocery store, which is probably a clone of the one in our town. It is better than Yelp and Urbanspoon – these are real people, in real time.
We like to see the locally grown fruits and potted plants and golden jars of honey. Are there a lot of organic foods? Are there some fresh flowers? Does anyone make great kettle corn? Last year I thanked goodness my daughter stopped me before I bought a GF brownie – I didn’t know then what “GF” meant – and it would have been a very sad gluten-free brownie experience; something that should not exist in the perfect vacation world! Important to note: are dogs welcome at this market? It always seems friendlier when you see dogs.
I was sidling through a bottleneck of people at a green market in West Palm Beach this spring, and I had to wait to pass a taut-faced woman who brayed to an acquaintance that she had just finished her “hot yoga class”. Plastic surgery, perfect hair, designer duds and boastful hot yoga all on a Saturday morning! Not my world, obviously. Although there were some beautiful flowering quince branches that I quite lusted after…
Last year we went out to Washington State for our family vacation and were completely wrung out by our overwhelming Pike Place Market experience. The public market is a rambling permanent structure, with air conditioning, bathrooms and restaurants as well as the heaping piles of silvery fish and just-caught crab, and acres of beautifully tended fresh-cut flowers.
Yes, Pike Place Market is a tourist destination, but it was also worth the time we spent trailing each other down stairways and through halls gazing with gobsmacked wonder at the abundance of fruits and vegetables, meats and fish, cupcakes and coffees, crafts and second hand books. We were lucky on our first, early morning visit, when the fish were still being tossed through the air only to be carefully wedged on the giant bergs of chipped ice, and when all the ladies were still fussing with the best way to arrange containers of peonies and tulips and roses and iris. The paths and stairways were not yet crowded.
The tourist-y aspects didn’t become evident until our second visit, when we arrived later in the day. There were buskers, and tour guides, and lots of people posing for photos and selfies. Luckily, there are also many spots in Seattle that serve great beer, so we repaired to a cool spot to enjoy a local brew, and to continue to observe and catalogue the anthropological antics of the folks in Seattle.
There is a more realistically sized farmers’ market in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island (also in Washington) that we roved through. There was just one building and a flock of colorful tents and umbrellas. There was live music, dogs, brownie samples, jams and jellies, island-grown tomatoes, colorful vegetables and fruit, beautiful hand-knit sweaters and hats, herbs, and no crowing about hot yoga. It was my kind of market: small, bustling and lively. It was our healthy eating passport to Friday Harbor.
https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/category/dishtype/salad/#Q19pkeYvJEx8trjR.97
https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/veggie-chilli/
Little Gem Salad With Lemon Cream And Hazelnuts
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/little-gem-salad-with-lemon-cream-and-hazelnuts
Vegetarian Spring Rolls – you don’t have to live on salads, you can have other tasty vegetable treats!
https://www.tastingtable.com/cook/recipes/recipe-vegetarian-spring-rolls
“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.”
― Alice Waters
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