Guess what I found at the Wednesday market at Dimond Center?  Mary Jane had cauliflower Romanesco!!  WOW!!  I’d never seen it in person, before!  Lime green and pointy and whorly—just gorgeous!  She’ll have more on Saturday, but I recommend getting there early!  (You’ll find Mary Jane with the French Oven Bakery goods at A&M Farms’ stand.) I couldn’t resist coming home with three heads of these gorgeous vegetables and cooking them up for lunch, with a delicious garlicky caper-mustard sauce!  I’ve included the recipe and photos for you here on the website—you’re going to love it. And here’s the great thing—you can use broccoli or cauliflower for this recipe, too, so just use whatever you can get at the market!

website
Speaking of broccoli… Were you wondering what’s new and exciting here on the website? We’re on YouTube! “Why on earth are you on YouTube?” you might be wondering. Well! Yesterday I bought two 18-pound cases of broccoli from A&M Farms at the Dimond Center and processed them to freeze. And my husband Dan made a short how-to video of me doing it! Recipes are in the cookbook and on the website, but you can just watch our little video if you want. Feel free to add comments, too! We’re just learning how to do this, so constructive criticism is welcome!

Don’t forget, too, there are just LOADS of recipes on the website for all kinds of vegetables—whatever you might find at the market, look it up on the “Find a Recipe” and you’ll be sure to find lots of delicious ideas. If you have a request for more recipes for a particular vegetable, just ask me! I’ll do my best to oblige! 

vegetables
The South Anchorage Farmers’ Market is open on Saturdays and Wednesdays, and the vegetables are really rolling in now! The summer has been a cold and rainy one, so the vegetable crops seemed a little slow to reach the market, but now the farmers are bringing a huge variety of vegetables to the market, in great abundance! Here’s a list of the vegetables I’ve seen at the market—but there are new things arriving all the time! 

arugula | basil | beans, green | beet greens | beets, red | beets, chiogghia | broccoli | cabbage, green | cabbage, napa | cabbage, Savoy | cabbage, red | carrots | cauliflower | cauliflower Romanesco | celery | chard | cilantro | collards | cress | cucumbers, pickles | cucumbers, slicers | daikon | dill | eggplant | fennel | kale, lacinato | kale, red russian | kohlrabi | lettuce, buttercrunch | lettuce, iceberg | lettuce, red | lettuce, romaine | mustard, mizuna | mustard, red | mustard, tatsoi | onions, green | onions, slicing | parsley, italian | peas, sugar snap | peppers | potatoes, butterball | potatoes, new | radishes | rhubarb | salad green mixture | shingiku | sorrel | spinach | squash, blossoms | strawberries | sugar snap peas | tomatoes, cherry | tomatoes, red | tomatoes, yellow | turnip greens | turnips (white, snow apple) | turnips (purple-topped) | zucchini blossoms | zucchini, green | zucchini, yellow recipes

In addition to the cauliflower romanesco with mustard & caper sauceI mentioned above, I’ve had a request for more eggplant recipes, because the eggplants at the market are so sweet and fresh that they don’t need to be salted first. I’ve included one of my old favorites, for an eggplant dip called “baba ghanouj.”

Another recipe that I’m really excited about this week is a chopped greek salad with garlicky croutons. Check out the photo on the website, too! It’s so beautiful on the platter—all the different quadrants of the colorful ingredients—before you mix everything together with the lemony, briny dressing.  YUM!

And the final recipe is one that I just can’t say enough great things about—it’s a zucchini & tomato gratin, in which you can use Alaskan zucchinis, tomatoes, and onions (not to mention thyme). It’s easier than a lasagna, but even yummier, I think! So fresh and wonderful, you just have to give it a try!!  I’ve taken photos of it (in progress, and completed). As soon as I made this dish for the first time last week, I emailed the farmer who grew my veggies and told him all about it, and told him to visit the web page. Next time I talked to him, he said his wife (also a farmer) had showed him the recipe on the website, and was making it for dinner! And later, he said he loved it. Make it for someone you love!

Do you ever get so excited about the fresh, beautiful produce you’re getting at the market that you feel like cooking a meal for the farmers who grew it? I do. Maybe we should have some kind of event like that. Any thoughts?

processing vegetables to freeze
I’ve already mentioned our YouTube debut, about the broccoli processing video. But I just want to encourage you a little further. Right now, when the market is overflowing with the bounty of August, is a great time to be processing some of these vegetables to freeze. You say you just got home from dipnetting and you’ve got a freezer full of salmon? Don’t have room in your freezer for broccoli or collards? Maybe it’s time to go through your freezer and get rid of the old, freezer-burned turkey you bought on sale at Thanksgiving-time in 2004, the extra hamburger buns you bought for Memorial day in 2005 that have lost all their moisture to ice crystals rattling around in the bag, and what about the salmon that you didn’t eat from your fishing expeditions in 2006? Let’s think about a little Fall Freezer-Cleaning project, so you can make room for lots of fresh, delicious, local, and fabulously healthy produce that will be fast food all winter!!

I’ve put loads of instructions for processing vegetables on the website, and my Farmers’ Market Cookbook also has all the recipes!! 

tasty technology tidbit
When you visit the website, you’ll see that underneath many of my photographs, there’s a link that says “Visit our photo gallery on Flickr!” Are you wondering what Flickr is, and why you would want to visit something that doesn’t even contain all its proper vowels? OK, I’m with you there—but I just learned how to use Flickr when I was learning to do the website, and I’m sold.

Flickr is a free internet-based photo-sharing application. So if you want to be able to show your photos easily to a friend, or a relative (sending all those kid photos to grandma will get a lot easier), you can upload your photos to your free account, and then there are all kinds of things you can do with them—organize them into sets, decide if they are private or public, do some photo editing with the internal program…

Then you can send an email very easily to anyone you want that says something like “Want to see my photos? Check them out at http://www.flickr....” and then they can easily go visit the site and look at the pix. You don’t have to figure out how to shrink your photos down to fit into an email that will go to their tiny dial-up modem-connected email-box or whatever—the email recipient is in charge of going to the Flickr site to look at your pictures. Pretty cool! I use this to send photos of the farmers’ market and the vegetables and other products to Kim Sollien, who writes the AK Root Cellar blog about local produce (http://community.adn.com/adn/node/127843). Also, when I load photos onto Flickr, my genius website designer (Taughnee Stone, of EndeavorCreative) has written some slick little piece of code that automatically rotates the photos through the website. So whenever you reload a page, there will be a new photo! (Unless it’s a recipe page—that will just be a static photo of the recipe, or of the ingredients.).

So, how to do it? You go there: http://www.flickr.com, and first it makes you sign up for a free account through yahoo.com. You’ll have to sign up for a yahoo email, too, but that’s also free, and you never have to actually receive mail there—they give you the option of using your regular email address if you want. So! You get all registered (the instructions are fairly straightforward—just do yourself a favor and write down your login name and your password somewhere so you can remember it later), and then you can start uploading your photos. Then just follow the instructions and play around! You can even put a little photo icon of yourself if you want, like mine (just click on the arrow at the right of the icon on “your photostream” page). Let me know what you think! And go check out my photo gallery at “akfarmersmarket” on Flickr. I bought a professional version (it’s $24.95/year) because I needed to upload more than I could with a free account, but a free account still gives you a lot to play with!

bread
Rise & Shine Bakery will bake three pan loaves this week, including the RAISIN & TOASTED PECAN bread, so all you fans can stock your freezers!  We’ll also be baking the ALASKAN BARLEY bread (100% whole grain, with barley grown in our very own Delta Junction!), and the regular 100% WHOLE WHEAT SOURDOUGH levain,

Our hearth loaves this week will include the new best-seller, the savory ALASKAN ONION RYE bread, so good for sandwiches, eaten with slices of cheese or dipped in olive oil. We’re also baking the old favorite, FRESH ROSEMARY bread.

Mary Jane will also be at the market with all kinds of breads, croissants, palmiers, and macaroons from the French Oven Bakery! Not to mention cilantro and cauliflower Romanesco!

farmers’ market cookbook
The South Anchorage Farmers’ Market Cookbook is filled with 100 pages of delicious, healthy recipes that showcase our flavorful, fresh local Alaskan produce. Recipes provide inspiration for ways to use Alaskan vegetables, fish, fruits, bread, and other products that can be found at our farmers’ markets. The cookbook focuses on vegetable recipes that have fantastic flavor and top-notch nutritional value. And if you’re wondering about how to process our Alaskan produce to freeze for the winter, the book includes instructions!

seafood
Arctic Choice Seafoods will have all kinds of fresh, delicious, Alaskan fish! Here’s a list of what they are likely to have.

fresh king salmon | fresh sablefish | fresh rockfish | fresh halibut | fresh clams | fresh oysters | halibut cheeks | king crab | snow crab | spot shrimp | side stripe shrimp | Dungeness crab | scallops | smoked salmon bellies

Saturday South Anchorage Farmers’ Market
Dates: May 10-October 4
Hours: 9am-2pm
Location: Subway/Cellular One Sports Centre at the corner of Old Seward and O’Malley

Wednesday South Anchorage Farmers’ Market
Dates: July 2- October 1
Hours: 10am-4pm
Location: behind the Dimond Center, in front of the Dimond Center Hotel

Please pass this email along to anyone you think might be interested in receiving the weekly market news—they can email me, Alison Arians, at if they’d like to be added to our newsletter list.

For more information about the market, contact Arthur Keyes, South Anchorage Farmers’ Market Manager, at 907-354-5833, or at .

Please respond to this email if you’d like to be removed from the newsletter list.

Cheers! And see you at the market!
Alison Arians
Farmers’ Market Reporter

rise & shine bakery
Long Term Baking Schedule, Summer 2008
9 August
• pan loaves: 100% whole wheat sourdough levain, Alaskan barley, raisin & pecan
• hearth loaves: fresh rosemary, Alaskan onion rye
16 August
• pan loaves: 100% whole wheat sourdough levain, Alaskan baked potato
• hearth loaves: toasted walnut, Alaskan cheese & roasted garlic, dark chocolate & cherry
23 August
• pan loaves: 100% whole wheat sourdough levain, golden maize
• hearth loaves: kalamata olive, Alaskan onion rye, Alaskan carrot & raisin
30 August
• pan loaves: 100% whole wheat sourdough levain, Alaskan barley
• hearth loaves: toasted seed, Alaskan potato & chive, fruited almond

related recipes

cauliflower romanesco with mustard & caper sauce
olive oil infused with roasted garlic
baba ghanouj
chopped greek salad with garlicky croutons
zucchini & tomato gratin