Hello, All!

It’s Week Two for the South Anchorage Farmers’ Market, and there will be all kinds of great things there on Saturday! Of course there will be loads of plants—vegetable starts, flower starts, and beautiful perennials that will make your yard gorgeous year after year—with hardly any work! A little investment now and you’ll be reaping the benefits for years and years, as they grow and multiply in your garden.

Vanderweele Farms has beautiful tomato baskets and strawberry baskets that will produce delicious fruits for you this summer, and they are also bringing their delicious potatoes.  They have both the Butterball potatoes, which are the waxy potatoes that work SO well for roasting and boiling, as well as russet potatoes, which are great for baking and for one of my favorite potato dishes: hash browns!!  I have included my recipe for hash browns at the end of the newsletter—they are great for dinner, not just breakfast—I serve them with a big salad and call it a meal! Please make sure you use the russet potatoes for the hash browns, though, instead of the Butterballs. Because of their higher sugar content, the Butterballs burn before they cook into delicious, brown, crispy hash browns (trust me, I’ve tried—twice). Check out the recipe at the end! The secret is in wringing a lot of the moisture out of the potatoes, using a dish towel!

Would you believe, Vanderweele Farms also has storage onions from last year!?! These Alaskan onions and potatoes are inspiring us (Rise & Shine Bakery) to develop two new bread flavors—look for us June 7th at the market when we show up to sell the bread! We’re working on an Alaskan onion rye bread and an Alaskan potato and chive bread—not to mention a new Alaskan barley bread, with barley grown in Delta Junction! We’re still in the testing stages, but we’ll have the new flavors for you soon! You’ll be able to buy French Oven Bakery bread at the market on Saturday, though.

You’ll also be able to find the new South Anchorage Farmers’ Market COOKBOOK at the market this Saturday! The cookbook is a compilation of all the recipes from last summer’s farmers’ market newsletters, as well as from my wintertime Rise & Shine Bakery Bulletin emails, plus some additional recipes that I just had to include. I’m selling the cookbooks for $15, and this price includes a really cool cookbook holder—more about the holder after I describe the cookbook! There are over 100 recipes, on full-sized, spiral-bound pages. I’ve written a thorough index and table of contents, organized the vegetable section of the book alphabetically, and cross-referenced the recipes exhaustively, so you can easily find just the right recipe. Now you don’t have to search through your emails for recipes you vaguely remember, print out the pages of the newsletters, or try and figure out how to organize them once you have a pile of printouts on your counter. I hope this cookbook is the answer to getting the recipes out of your computer and into your kitchen! And I hope you’ll be even more inspired to cook up loads of fresh vegetables, fruits, seafood, and bread.

And now I want to tell you about the COOLEST folding wire cookbook holder that I’m including with each of the cookbooks! It’s called the Pageboy Adjustable Bookholder. I just love these book holders! I have two that I’ve used for years for holding my recipe books while I cook, and I’m so excited to share them with you! It folds up to almost nothing to fit in a kitchen drawer, it holds your place in two recipes at once so you can easily flip back and forth between recipes, and holds ANY size cookbook in the perfect position to read it while you’re cooking. Two more reasons I love it: it saves space on your counter because the cookbook is up on its edge, and your cookbook isn’t lying flat in a puddle of balsamic vinegar or maple syrup while you cook! The cookbook holders, sold separately, are $6.

Wouldn’t these cookbook-book holder combinations make great gifts for your friends who love to cook? I’ve bought book holders to go with the first printing of cookbooks, so get them while they last!

And what about SEAFOOD? Arctic Choice will be there with loads of fresh fish! Here’s a list of what they’ll have, along with lots of free seafood recipes for you to take along with you.
• fresh king salmon from the Stikine River
• fresh sablefish from Prince William Sound
• fresh rockfish from the Barren Islands
• fresh halibut from the Gulf of Alaska
• fresh clams from Prince of Wales Island (Southeast Alaska)
• fresh oysters from Prince of Wales Island (Southeast Alaska)
• fresh side stripe shrimp from Prince William Sound
• halibut cheeks from the Gulf of Alaska
• king crab from the Bering Sea
• Dungeness crab from Sitka
• scallops from Kodiak
• 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

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

related recipes

hash browns