Farmers Market Roundup – The Bounty of Summer
By Anthony Todd in Food on Aug 14, 2008 6:30PM
Until this morning, we hadn’t been back to the Daley Plaza Farmer’s Market since our last round-up in late June. The full range of summer produce is out now, and the variety and quality was astounding. A lot of the early-summer favorites are still there, but on this visit we focused on things we hadn’t seen before.
On our way in, we noticed that Epicurious.com had a booth. We’d never seen this before, and stopped to take a look – turns out they’re signing up new members (Ed. Note: Young Mr. Todd has been out of town most of the summer, so we'll assume he missed the note about Epicurious in last week's "Friday Buffet"). We use Epicurious almost every day and if you sign up today you get a free tote bag and a jar of pasta sauce! Next stop was Mark’s Farm Market, where we bought 2 ears of fresh, white sweet corn ($1), a pint of grape tomatoes ($3) and a pint of string beans ($2). After a quick stop at Delightful bakery for a cheese danish ($2), we headed over to Stover’s Farm for some fruit. They were giving out free samples of peaches, and they were so sweet we couldn’t stop ourselves – we bought 2 bags ($9).
Last stop of the day was Nichols Farm, our favorite place for anything that grows underground. They have an astonishing variety of roots – potatoes, onions, garlic and leeks in colors and types we hadn’t seen before. We bought a bundle of fresh Chipollini onions ($3) and some leeks ($3). On our way out, we wandered over to their orchard section and bought some State Fair apples ($4). We also saw purple sweet peppers for the first time, and bought one for fifty cents, just to try it.
Total cost? $27.50 for a huge bag of produce, including 10 peaches. That’s a good haul.