Hello!

Fresh greens at last!!
Finally, after what seems like the coldest spring ever, our farmers are bringing fresh greens to the market!!  Arthur Keyes, of A&M Farms, will be bringing huge heads of red and green leaf lettuce for $5 each. The leaves are so tender and succulent that you won’t be able to stop eating it!! And Mark Rempel, of Rempel Family Farms, is sending new spinach, arugula, and salad mix to the market with Alex Davis (A.D. Farms). All of these fresh, new, lovely leaves have inspired one of the recipes for the week—it’s a spring greens salad with a lemon-thyme vinaigrette and garlicky croutons. Check it out at the end of the newsletter!
cucumbers!

Did you just read cucumbers? Absolutely! Along with his leaf lettuce, Arthur has been growing cucumbers in his greenhouse and they are ready to go! Crisp, crunchy, and refreshing—and local! How cool is that? As cool as a cucumber! I have a cucumber salad recipe for you at the end of the newsletter that’s going to knock your socks off: cold sesame noodles with cucumber. It makes a terrific dish for a picnic or a buffet table, since you don’t have to keep it warm. Green and lovely, crunchy from the cucumbers and creamy from the sesame sauce… give it a try!

bread
Rise & Shine Bakery will be baking our Alaskan onion rye this week! We’re using Alaskan storage onions from the Farmers’ Market—grown, cured, and stored over the winter in Palmer! The only other time I baked this bread (our first time baking it was at the end of May, for our winter market) I bought a huge bag of onions from Vanderweele Farms and spent most of an afternoon peeling 30 pounds of lovely little onions. Then I found out I can order larger onions! So that’s what I did for this week—and I think it’s going to make baking this flavor a lot more sustainable!

In perfecting the recipe for this bread, we tried all different proportions of rye flour, whole wheat, and bread flour (all organic) before we settled on this one. We love it because it’s got a really high rye flour component (45%), which creates a lovely cakey texture and really lets the subtle grassy sweetness of the rye shine through. If you think you don’t like rye bread, taste this loaf when you come to the market—it’s different than a typical rye bread. It might be the caraway seeds you don’t like, or the sour flavor of many American rye breads—and our bread has neither of these. We roast the onions just enough to soften them, so the sweet and savory onion pieces dissolve almost completely into the dough, adding moistness and keeping quality to the bread. The bread doesn’t have a really strong onion flavor—it’s more of a savory, delicious complexity that becomes a bit stronger over time. It’s divine topped with a simple slice of cheese, and wonderful for savory sandwiches of any kind.

We’ll also be baking the dark chocolate & cherry bread, especially for those of you who have been waiting patiently! It’s made with top quality chocolate and rich dark cocoa, and when you toast the bread, the chocolate chunks melt and the dried cherries soften… what a great snack or dessert this bread makes! The other three flavors we’ll be making are the regular 100% whole wheat sourdough (levain) pan loaf, our toasted seed hearth loaf, and the breakfasting and sandwich loaf, the golden maize bread. One of this week’s recipes is inspired by the golden maize bread, and its great affinity for southwestern flavors—check it out at the end of the newsletter! See the long-term bread schedule and list of ingredients toward the end of the newsletter for more information about the bread.

You can also get loaves of all kinds from Mary Jane, selling bread from the French Oven Bakery. She will also have those yummy macaroons , ham and cheese croissants, and delicious, layered, buttery cookies called palmiers!

cookbook
I’d love to see you at the market and show you my Farmers’ Market cookbook! The cookbook is a compilation of all the recipes from my previous summertime farmers’ market newsletters, as well as from my wintertime Rise & Shine Bakery Bulletin emails, plus some additional recipes. The book contains over 100 recipes, on full-sized, spiral-bound pages, thoroughly indexed, organized, and cross-referenced, so you don’t have to worry about organizing or printing out anything from last year. They are $15, which includes a really cool folding wire cookbook holder while supplies last. (Holders sold separately for $6.)

seafood
Arctic Choice Seafoods will have all kinds of fresh, delicious, Alaskan fish! Here’s a list of what they are likely to have, along with lots of free seafood recipes for you to take along with you. One of my recipes this week is inspired by the fresh salmon at the market! Check out the recipes at the end of the newsletter!
• 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 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

related recipes

tender salad greens with lemon-thyme vinaigrette and garlicky croutons
cold sesame noodles with cucumbers
grilled southwestern salmon with guacamole on crisp golden maize toast
guacamole