Common Greens

It's Cinco de Mayo and today I ate my first tomato since last October.

I can hardly believe I ate a tomato.

It was delicious.

It came from Eva Bruins' place in Winters.  I never get a chance to shop at the Napa market, so today I went up to St Helena.  It was their opening day and Yolanda Tierrafria of Mi Fiesta Catering was doing the chef's table demo.  I also had an appointment to be on Paul Franson's radio show at 9:30am, so I just did the interview from the farmers market. 

Since I was up there I actually shopped!  I bought a few tomatoes from Eva's farm.  Eva herself doesn't sell at that market, but they were her tomatoes.  I didn't catch the name of the gal she has working there, but she's VERY nice.  I must tell you, they are hothouse tomatoes, but they don't TASTE like hothouse tomatoes.  They taste GREAT.  I came home and had a tomato sandwich for lunch and it was like summer really IS here.  Sliced sourdough bread, some mayonnaise, tomato and a little fresh ground sea salt.  There's NOTHING better.

I also bought some delicious strawberries from Rachel at Mehl's Berry Farm.  Also fantastic.  Rachel was lamenting the continual March/April rains.  She was carefully checking through the baskets because of the damp conditions still at their farm and didn't want to send me home with any that were aging too quickly.  So far they've all been perfect and I'm through one full basket.

And some wonderful head lettuce from Grandpa Jack's rounded out my meager purchases.  I said I shopped.  I didn't say how much TIME I had to shop.  Still, dinner was a salad of Grandpa Jack's greens, sliced strawberries and a little creamy caesar dressing.  Disgusting, you say?  Hardly,  It really hit the spot.  I don't know where I picked up this thing about the sliced strawberries in the salad, but it's a habit I plan on keeping.  A lemony vinaigrette might have been a better dressing choice, but I was feeling particularly lazy and went with what was in the fridge.

Our Tuesday morning market began three days ago on May 2nd and it was a beautiful day and it turned out really well on just about every level.  We received fantastic front-page coverage in the Napa Register the following day--terrific photos, above the fold, and quotes from customers, vendors and possibly the dumbest comment by me, but still, there's no such thing as bad press and this was FAR from bad press.

We only had 10 farmers for opening day, but those who were able to make it did really well. 

Brad and Cynthia Morgan from Grandpa Jack's

Don Baldridge of Bald-Ridge farms who does lillies

Phil Rhodes from Visalia managed a couple of boxes of squash, some tomatoes and MELONS!  I couldn't believe he had a few melons.  I didn't get to find out what variety they were.

Stan DeVoto of DeVoto Gardens with some wonderful flowers.  The rain has been really tough on the flowers, but Stan managed to make a beautiful showing of it.

Chris came with mushrooms from Solano Mushroom Farm.  From Shiitakes to Portobellos, she had the usual wonderfully exotic display of mushrooms.

Rose Loveall-Sale of Morningsun Herb Farm was on hand with every kind of plant, it seemed.  Michele Bera of Bera Ranch helps her out early in the season, so even though we don't have Michele's organic stone fruits yet, we had Michele.

Eva Bruins, of the above-mentioned tomatoes, was at the Napa Market.  She's having staffing problems.  We had hoped she'd be with us on Saturday at Vacaville, but she's still looking for a worker.

Fruit Factory sent one of their guys with oranges, tangerines, and I think those little guys are called clementines.  I'm not that familiar with the citrus once you get past navel oranges, but the quality looked good.  And for those who like grapefruit, there was grapefruit available.  It's just not on my to eat list.

Our newest vendor, besides Don Baldridge, is Mr John Xiong of Fresno.  He sent me home with some of the most delicious lemon basil from his table.  John also has pickling cucumbers, squash, I think I saw some lemongrass on his table, some lettuces.  Mmmm.  It looked great.

And of course, my neighbors from Vine Village were there.  Tucker brought out Calla Lillies and some plants ready to put in the ground.  He had a few other items on the table as well.

So, we're off to a good start in spite of the rain.  On an average year we would have had 20 farmers yesterday, but this is no average year.

We had a full complement of specialty foods and crafters.

Joining us this year is Yara Oliveira with her Brazillian Cheesebread.  I'd not met Yara in person until Tuesday.  I don't know what I expected, but she's a knock out and has the most fantastic accent.  I felt like she should have been doing a tango through the market.  And her bread is amazing.  We managed enough electricity for her to cook up her samples.  I hope the bread was flying out of the freezer because it's just amazingly good.

In the returning favorites column, from left to right, Chambier Bechtel from Tres Classique was splashing up a storm with their Lemon Sauvignon Splash.  Yolanda Tierrafria from Mi Fiesta, like Yara, was doing hot samples.  What a treat to get a taste of Yolanda's cooking hot off the stove.  Jan Pruitt and husband Jim from Granny Jan's Fudge were on hand.  Jeff from Cap'n Mike's Holy Smoke Salmon had every conceivable fish on hand.  And of course Billal from East/West Gourmet was over there charming all the ladies with more than just the Bolani and the spreads.

The crafters were also out in force.  We were missing David Bosch, our knife sharpener, who will be on hand May 9th.  He had to bow out for opening day.  And the kettle korn will be back as well, but I have made them promise that they must sweep up all the spilled kettle korn before they leave the parking lot because I'm tired of doing it.

Sam McClellin of Got Jewelry made it for opening day, but now he's off to Oregon for a while on a fishing trip.  And then he's having a hip replaced.  I guess he's deciding to do some inner remodeling this year.  I hadn't noticed the limp before, but he seems pretty happy about the new hip.

Jerry Rothfeld brought his wife Marilyn's handbags and felted hats to the market.  Oh that Jerry.  He won't be at the market on 5/6 because it's his birthday weekend and Marilyn is taking him off somewhere.

Anna Wingfield brought her new sales associate, son Miles, to the market.  He's 5 months old now and I think he's going to make a stellar salesman, although he had a little trouble popping up the new EZ UP.  Anna does Napa Valley au Naturel potions and lotions.

There quite a few more and I'm running out of the energy to talk about all of them. Suffice to say it was a great day.  Next entry I'll talk more about our volunteers and the job(s) they are doing around the market.  For now I really have to get some sleep before tomorrow morning's market.  Dean wants to start at 5:00am with Setup.  Oy.  Good thing I bought the new spotlight thing from Costco.  15million candlewatts or something like that, so we can see what we're doing at 5:00am.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this