There's nothing quite like a Farmer's Market to get me inspired to cook dinner. Iowa is blessed by numerous farmer's markets---in fact, it has more per capita than just about any other state. This is a reflection of the rich agricultural climate and heritage of the state, as well as the growing movement of "Buy Local". But perhaps the abundance is also due to our desire to Stick It To the Old Man Winter. Nothing says spring has arrived and summer is imminent like a farmer's market.
Des Moines holds the largest market in the state every week from the beginning of May through mid-October. It is like a street fair, with entertainment and craft booths meshing with the vegetable and fruit stalls. It is busy and vibrant---and also 30 minutes away by car from my house. So I am fortunate that my small suburb also boasts a weekly market for the same period of time. It is a microcosm of the large downtown market---a few craft booths, a BBQ stand, Kettle Korn popcorn, cinnamon crusted nuts, baked goods, plus the vegetable and fruit stands.
The vegetable stands inspire me. Whatever they offer will be on the table sometime in the next few days. A typical late spring "take" might yield sauteed vegetables (broccoli, green onions, early zucchini, yellow squash, snow peas) and fresh strawberries, served with Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, and fresh bread from the market. Those same veggies the next night might morph into a vegetable-pesto pasta topped with goat cheese and served with the fresh bread and a tossed green salad.
One vegetable farmer warned his customers recently that this was the last of the lettuce. Buying and eating locally produced food means you are at the mercy of the seasonality of a crop. Lettuces and tender greens are cool-weather crops and as the days get hotter, become bitter and tough. Rhubarb and asparagus bear their bizarre stalks perenially in the spring, but then gradually fade away. Sweet sugar snap and snow peas disappear in the late spring and may reappear in the early fall. But the tender spring vegetables give way to the kings of summer produce: sweet corn, green beans, zucchini, squash, onions, melons, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. With their arrival, new dishes appear on the table which make you forget the loss of the peas and lettuce. As the weather cools, and you know you can't think of another thing to make with corn and tomatoes, the pumpkins and potatoes and apples appear, along with a short resurgence of carrots, peas, and greens.
Luckily for me, my family appreciates fresh vegetables. They humor my announcing where the veggies came from, as if I were an antiques dealer recounting an object's provenance. I want them to know that not only are they enjoying my delicious cooking, they are appreciating the hard work and dedication of a local farmer who got up early that morning and picked those peas and broccoli and lettuce. It tastes better knowing those veggies soaked up the same sunshine and rain we did just a few days before.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Graduation Open House
The rules for food for the open house were simple: No Forks, No Dips, No Handfuls, and as much do-able ahead of time as possible. Other than that, the menu options were wide open.
In the suburban Midwest, the High School Graduation Open House is a big deal. It follows a fairly standard formula: invite family, friends and neighbors to a come-and-go party where the honored Graduate greets you at the front door, you sign her memory book, you shuffle past displays and scrapbooks noting her development and achievements over the past 18 years, and you end at the food table.
You are never sure how to gauge your appetite at these events: if you show up hungry for real food, there might just be cookies and cake and nuts and punch. If you eat lunch first, there might be pork sandwiches and bean dip. If you go to several in a row, you feel you should regulate your eating so you can have a little something at each event. But at the end of the day, you might have had the same pulled pork sandwich 5 times, or 5 pieces of cake and nothing else.
For our daughter's graduation party, I would like to say that we did something different. But it was as expected on many fronts: people came and went, greeted her at the front door, signed her book, looked at her displays (which were impressive if I do say so) and ended at the food table. The food table is what I hoped would be more of a novelty, though I can't expect to compete with the best food table I ever saw at a graduation party a couple of years ago: Lebanese specialties hand-made by the Lebanese grandma and aunties who arranged it on a gorgeous table like a Bacchanalian feast.
Never mind, I was not to be deterred or intimidated by what other people did or expected. We would do it our way, the way it worked for us. We chose a mid-morning to early afternoon time frame, so as to beat the rush of parties held later in the day, and so we could serve a brunch style menu (no expectation of pulled pork at this party). I began baking and freezing several weeks ahead of the date. By the time the big weekend rolled around, I had loaves of banana bread, poppy seed bread, batches of mini-quiches, and pans of maple bars, pecan pie bars, and lemon bars in the freezer. On the day before, I whipped up a double batch of cappuccino mini-muffins and a pan of brownies, which could not be squeezed into the overloaded freezer. My mom helped slice summer sausage and three kinds of cheese, and peeled 3 dozen boiled eggs for deviled eggs. We both cut up fruit (cantaloupe, strawberries) and put a piece of each, plus a fat blueberry, on cute plastic picks. The morning of the party, I mixed the deviled egg mixture and filled the dozens of eggs. I wrapped little smoked sausages in refrigerated crescent roll dough to bake as piggies in a blanket. My daughter had mixed and frozen the base for a fruit punch, which we placed in a decorative self-serve spigoted urn, poured lemon-lime soda over it, and floated pineapples and cherries in it. I brewed several pots of coffee for the Air Pots, made a pitcher of iced tea and floated lemons in iced water in a pretty pitcher.
The night before the party, I stayed up after the home-stay guests had gone to bed and laid out all the serving ware with sticky notes to tell what was to be placed on each. When my sister-in-law arrived to help, it was easy to direct her to the pans of bars or bread and ask her to arrange them on plates. We all scurried to get the rest of the food arranged on the platters, which all fit on the gold-clothed kitchen table, a simple potted yellow mum serving as the centerpiece. The drinks fit handily onto the side bar in the kitchen. The only paper goods we needed were beverage size napkins and small plates, plus paper hot-cold cups. No big buckets of ice full of slippery pop cans, no messy dips that people could stick food into, no bowls of munchies or nuts or candy that allowed hands to reach into, no gloppy pieces of cake that required forks and separate plates, no punch bowls with drippy servers: everything was finger-food, self-serve and tidy. Guests could also have a little bite or make a meal of it, depending on the status of their appetite---it was a well-rounded meal if you ate a little bit of everything.
By the end of the party, there were crumbs on the floor, trash cans full of paper plates and cups, and partially to completely empty platters. There remained no piggies in blankets, few deviled eggs, and just small amounts of bread and bars. There was a bit of sausage and cheese left, and about 1/4 a batch of quiches, plus some leftover fruit skewers. We ran out of fizzy soda to pour over the punch and had to improvise with club soda and fruit juice. There had been no complaints and many compliments about the food.
What made my hostess heart happy, though, was to see that people hung around to visit with my daughter, to admire her displays, then to go on and enjoy the food while visiting with other guests. No one seemed in a hurry to leave, except other graduates who were on the party circuit and had serious schedules to follow in order to meet all their social obligations. That's when the highly grabbable and portable cappuccino mini-muffin was a hot commodity---as in "Oooh, cappuccino muffins! Thanks, see you later!"
In the suburban Midwest, the High School Graduation Open House is a big deal. It follows a fairly standard formula: invite family, friends and neighbors to a come-and-go party where the honored Graduate greets you at the front door, you sign her memory book, you shuffle past displays and scrapbooks noting her development and achievements over the past 18 years, and you end at the food table.
You are never sure how to gauge your appetite at these events: if you show up hungry for real food, there might just be cookies and cake and nuts and punch. If you eat lunch first, there might be pork sandwiches and bean dip. If you go to several in a row, you feel you should regulate your eating so you can have a little something at each event. But at the end of the day, you might have had the same pulled pork sandwich 5 times, or 5 pieces of cake and nothing else.
For our daughter's graduation party, I would like to say that we did something different. But it was as expected on many fronts: people came and went, greeted her at the front door, signed her book, looked at her displays (which were impressive if I do say so) and ended at the food table. The food table is what I hoped would be more of a novelty, though I can't expect to compete with the best food table I ever saw at a graduation party a couple of years ago: Lebanese specialties hand-made by the Lebanese grandma and aunties who arranged it on a gorgeous table like a Bacchanalian feast.
Never mind, I was not to be deterred or intimidated by what other people did or expected. We would do it our way, the way it worked for us. We chose a mid-morning to early afternoon time frame, so as to beat the rush of parties held later in the day, and so we could serve a brunch style menu (no expectation of pulled pork at this party). I began baking and freezing several weeks ahead of the date. By the time the big weekend rolled around, I had loaves of banana bread, poppy seed bread, batches of mini-quiches, and pans of maple bars, pecan pie bars, and lemon bars in the freezer. On the day before, I whipped up a double batch of cappuccino mini-muffins and a pan of brownies, which could not be squeezed into the overloaded freezer. My mom helped slice summer sausage and three kinds of cheese, and peeled 3 dozen boiled eggs for deviled eggs. We both cut up fruit (cantaloupe, strawberries) and put a piece of each, plus a fat blueberry, on cute plastic picks. The morning of the party, I mixed the deviled egg mixture and filled the dozens of eggs. I wrapped little smoked sausages in refrigerated crescent roll dough to bake as piggies in a blanket. My daughter had mixed and frozen the base for a fruit punch, which we placed in a decorative self-serve spigoted urn, poured lemon-lime soda over it, and floated pineapples and cherries in it. I brewed several pots of coffee for the Air Pots, made a pitcher of iced tea and floated lemons in iced water in a pretty pitcher.
The night before the party, I stayed up after the home-stay guests had gone to bed and laid out all the serving ware with sticky notes to tell what was to be placed on each. When my sister-in-law arrived to help, it was easy to direct her to the pans of bars or bread and ask her to arrange them on plates. We all scurried to get the rest of the food arranged on the platters, which all fit on the gold-clothed kitchen table, a simple potted yellow mum serving as the centerpiece. The drinks fit handily onto the side bar in the kitchen. The only paper goods we needed were beverage size napkins and small plates, plus paper hot-cold cups. No big buckets of ice full of slippery pop cans, no messy dips that people could stick food into, no bowls of munchies or nuts or candy that allowed hands to reach into, no gloppy pieces of cake that required forks and separate plates, no punch bowls with drippy servers: everything was finger-food, self-serve and tidy. Guests could also have a little bite or make a meal of it, depending on the status of their appetite---it was a well-rounded meal if you ate a little bit of everything.
By the end of the party, there were crumbs on the floor, trash cans full of paper plates and cups, and partially to completely empty platters. There remained no piggies in blankets, few deviled eggs, and just small amounts of bread and bars. There was a bit of sausage and cheese left, and about 1/4 a batch of quiches, plus some leftover fruit skewers. We ran out of fizzy soda to pour over the punch and had to improvise with club soda and fruit juice. There had been no complaints and many compliments about the food.
What made my hostess heart happy, though, was to see that people hung around to visit with my daughter, to admire her displays, then to go on and enjoy the food while visiting with other guests. No one seemed in a hurry to leave, except other graduates who were on the party circuit and had serious schedules to follow in order to meet all their social obligations. That's when the highly grabbable and portable cappuccino mini-muffin was a hot commodity---as in "Oooh, cappuccino muffins! Thanks, see you later!"
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