A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I am bringing Farmers Market Month to a premature "to be continued" as yesterday I broke three bones in my foot in a bouldering accident.



I'm now in a boot and on crutches, I can't put any weight on my foot, and both shopping and cooking (along with everything else) has become 100% more difficult. I'll rerun it later on when it's possible to walk and hold stuff in my hands at the same time.

It was an awesome experiment, up there with KonMari in terms of how much fun I had with it and how it changed things about my life in positive ways. Though I have to say that the best bit of it had nothing to do with literal farmers markets, but was learning to bake bread. I love baking bread! Last night I repurposed my rolling office chair as a wheelchair, scooted around the kitchen, and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich with my very own bread that I'd baked the day before. It was very comforting.

Tips on dealing with crutches, baking bread, exercising with one foot, and/or totally random comments welcome!

Yesterday was effectively skipped, as Sherwood and I went to a restaurant for lunch. I did feed her some homemade toast first.

Today I made kamut (Khorasan wheat), which is sort of like farro, in my rice cooker. I had intended to use it as a salad base, but 1) my remaining kale had gone bad, 2) it took approximately three times longer to cook than I expected so I ate my composed salad ingredients (carrots, salmon collar, pickled daikon, parsley, olives, eggs) separately while waiting the eternity it took for the goddamn wheat to cook.



And then the bottom burned, which is not a problem I have with rice. What was not burned was actually very nice and tasty with just some salt and butter (it's a bit buttery-flavored by itself, which adds to the effect), as I'd already eaten the intended toppings, but obviously needs to be cooked on the stovetop rather than in a rice cooker.

Bow before my perfect soft-boiled eggs though!



(I didn't eat two separate helpings of salmon - the top image is the meat still attached to the bone, the bottom is the salmon pulled off the bone and sprinkled with parsley. I also had some elderflower cordial and Melba toasts with garlic-herb goat cheese (not pictured.)

Lessons I have now learned from this experiment:

1. Salad greens are better from the local Japanese market than the farmers market. Farmers market baby kale, arugula, etc, is cheaper but very prone to going bad quickly and/or having bug issues, so it's not actually a savings as I repeatedly have had to toss part or all of it.

2. Smoked fish is better from Santa Monica seafood than any farmers market vendor I've found yet. Their prices are jaw-dropping for a reason.

3. I am never buying supermarket carrots again. The little spring farmers market carrots are crisp and delectable, like carrot-flavored ice, and can be eaten with pleasure all by themselves.

4. I am never buying supermarket yogurt again, either. The kefir lady's kefir is way better.

5. I am never buying bread again unless due to time pressure and an urgent need for sandwiches. I like my bread better than even the farmers market bread lady's, and mine keeps better, too.

6. Whole grains are a pain in the ass.

Yesterday I made this salad suggested by rushthatspeaks: One of my favorite salads of all time is dark greens (raw kale would work, and I'd suggest either shredded or de-ribbed) with pitted kalamata olives and oranges (peeled, pitted, cut in rounds not segments). Combine the ingredients, drizzle with a little olive oil, and, and this is key, sprinkle with slightly more salt and fresh-ground black pepper than you were originally intending. Best salad.



It was indeed the best salad. I used those amazing mandarin oranges and baby kale, flat leaf variety. Seriously, it was so good I will probably have a reprise tonight.

This morning I visited the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market. It's much more famous than my regular one but I like mine better, though I met some lovely friendly vendors who admired my hair and matching sweatshirt. Very few vendors took credit cards, and while there were a lot more vendors, the variety of produce was only somewhat better. (The really unusual stuff tends to get scooped up by chefs and is gone by the time I get there.) Also I like having both produce and ready-to-eat food, which the Santa Monica market does not.

I stopped at a stall which had a sign advertising miner's lettuce, but it turned out to have been bought out by chefs.

"But I have stinging nettles!" the greens lady said, in a tone the opposite of the one which people normally use to tell you stinging nettles are in the vicinity. She picked up a bunch with her bare hands.

"Are they... de-stung?" I asked, wondering if there was a way to do that other than the one I knew of, which is to cook them.

"Oh, no," she said cheerfully. "I like getting stung! It's very healthy! Good for arthritis!"

I am definitely coming to an understanding of where all the stereotypes about California come from. But hey. We have great produce.

I bought apricot and strawberry kefir (thick, eat with a spoon style) and cultured butter from the same kefir lady as at the Mar Vista market, as I'd polished off her apple kefir. Also carrots, flowering Chinese broccoli, orange blossom honey, bacon, eggs, and macadamia nuts (grown in California! they had photos).

Today I am baking bread again, from the same recipe I used last time. I have a feeling that will be the best thing I get from this whole experiment. Home-baked bread is the greatest.

Bow before my beautiful composed salad!



I'll have the scallops tonight. If I feel sufficiently ambitious I'll duck into the Japanese market for some ginger and try saute them with Chinese sausage and greens. I may have to buy some greens from the market as well, as the kale is too tough for what I'm thinking of. But hey, I'd rather break my self-imposed rules than have an inferior dinner, and I do need to eat those scallops tonight.

I made bread from this recipe: My Mother's Peasant Bread. It was so easy, not a hassle as I wasn't planning to go anywhere anyway, and quite fascinating to do. I used a single two-quart bowl as I didn't have a one-quart. (The recipe says that's fine.)



After the second rising, it felt resilient, elastic, almost velvety, and somehow alive when I poked it, like some sea creature. Only dry rather than slimy.

It was a little doughy when I first sliced it, so I popped it back in the oven for five minutes and then it came out perfect:



The inside is light and fluffy, the crust is chewy, and the flavor is a pleasant, non-tangy bread-flavor. And that is exactly how I like my bread. I had some with butter, and some with browned butter/brown sugar.



It was so good that I had another slice with black sesame spread, and that was AMAZING.



I may never buy bread again.

Just posting for the record as I wasn't having a good day and that tends to affect my appetite/level of interest in food. 2 slices of cider bread toast with butter and honey (also brought one to a neighbor who's moving and who I'm helping to pack up/dispose of 60 years worth of accumulated stuff), some snack tempeh, some Coolhaus ube ice cream from fridge.

Last slice of cider bread for breakfast today. I'll try actual baking with yeast next.

ETA: Today's breakfast: cider bread toast with butter and black sesame spread. A+

I just finished gobbling a slice of just-out-of-the-oven cider bread spread with maple butter, as per this recipe. It was definitely gobble-worthy. Grade A, would bake again.

ETA: Just finished gobbling second slice.



For lunch (and forthcoming dinner) I had a slight variation on yesterday's lunch/dinner, fried "rice" with acini de Pepe, the rest of the Chinese broccoli, the rest of the kimchi including its brine, Chinese sausage (pre-steamed), and hoisin sauce. It was just as good as Take 1.



Tomorrow I am getting up early to hit the Santa Monica farmers market and be back in time for the plumber.

I had blueberries and acini de Pepe, heated with butter and maple syrup and a little milk, for breakfast. It was fine but I prefer rice for that sort of thing.

For lunch, I stir-fried more acini de Pepe with green garlic/garlic sprouts (green shoots and immature heads), Chinese broccoli, kimchi, steamed Chinese sausage, pickled garlic (sue me, I like garlic), and soy sauce, with flowers from the broccoli sprinkled on top. That was delicious, and I will have the leftovers for dinner.



After all that, I still had about eight cups (dear God!) of acini de Pepe left, so I individually bagged and froze the rest. You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck with that stuff.

I also had some juicy, sweet Mandarin oranges, so bright and glistening that I have immortalized them.

I just got home from an absolutely wonderful Tucson trip this afternoon and my first farmers market is tomorrow, so I'm only partially counting this as a day (hence Day 0.)

For those who missed my earlier post, I'm experimentally spending a month eating only what I buy at farmers' markets, certain cooking-necessary staples not found there like flour and milk, and anything already in my pantry. Also, I am trying to bake bread for the first time in my life, so I attempted that tonight via this beer bread recipe.

Beer bread was very disappointing: nice cakey texture, and a flavor which combined extreme blandness with a slight weird/unpleasant tang. I didn't care for it even fresh out of the oven and with butter, and had rice with garlic and Chinese sausage for dinner. Maybe I should not have used Budweiser? That was the only beer I could buy as a single can at the corner store.

ETA: Oh wait. I just checked my flour, and it says it's best by April 2018. That may have had something to do with it. I will buy yeast, better beer, better and also new flour, and try again.

ETA II: Also failed to add the salt - I misread the recipe regarding to do and not do if you are using self-rising flour, which I was not.

Considering the multiple things I did wrong (old flour, no salt, possibly inferior beer) I have hopes that I could do better if I just use better ingredients. And also remember to put all of them in.

I was recently very inspired by a post Layla made on creating new habits. Rather than making New Year's Resolutions, each month she picks a new thing she wants to do and gives it a try for a month. If it sticks, you continue with it but add a new habit the next month; if it doesn't, you gave it enough of a try that you know whether or not it's something likely to work for you.

This struck me as both fun and more likely to make new habits stick, so I gave it a try. My January choice was "tidy up a little every day." As you have seen, this was incredibly fun and very likely to stick, and I am still at it.

February's habit was "wear something I like that is either a piece of jewelry, or an item of clothing I don't normally wear." I stuck to this one less, largely because of the weather: it was not only quite cold, but I actually got snowed in for a while! (Most of my wardrobe is for warm-to-hot weather, and jewelry gets unpleasantly cold against my skin in cold weather.) But when I did do it, it was a lot of fun, so that's something I'll keep trying.

My upcoming March habit is something I'm very excited about. It's not something I plan to continue in its original form permanently, but rather a month-long challenge that I'd ideally like to continue in a modified form. It's to eat only food that's either already in my pantry, or food I buy at the farmer's market.

I will make exceptions for milk, which is highly perishable and not sold at the market, and food people offer me, like if someone invites me over for dinner or to a restaurant. I'm also going to buy some essentials in advance and replace them if necessary, but only ingredients for cooking, not snacks. (i.e., whole wheat flour.)

I got this idea from a book which I found in a backpack stashed in a closet while tidying up, Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon. They're journalists living in Vancouver who were disturbed by an article they read about the length most food they eat travels, which causes a lot of pollution. So they decided to spend a year only only what they already had in their pantry and food which came from no more than 100 miles away from where they lived. MacKinnon was a very skilled amateur chef and they owned a cabin in the woods, so they had a lot of resources many people don't. But it was a fun read, and it got me thinking.

I've already been trying to buy most of the animal products I cook at home from the farmer's market, as I can afford it, for ethical and taste reasons and to support locally owned small businesses - I'd rather eat less of them but have them be of higher quality. I've also already been trying to buy more produce there, ditto though in that case I'm trying to eat more rather than less. I'd also like to eat down the stuff I already have rather than letting it sit forever, degrading in quality. So this will be more of a ramping up rather than a sudden change.

My long-term intent is not to keep this going forever - I love restaurants and am certainly not taking them out of my life for good - but to eat more locally, cook more, and get better at cooking. So I am basing it on "farmer's market" rather than "transported no more than 100 miles" in the interest of not going insane or driving the vendors insane. Also, it's "any farmer's market," not just the two I normally go to, because I think it will be fun to check out some new ones.

I'd also like to try baking my own bread, which I have never done. I will start with commercial yeast, but also attempt making my own sourdough starter. The bread was inspired by a Michael Pollan book I read while snowed in, which I will review separately later as it was both inspiring and accidentally hilarious. (Sneak preview: cooking techniques which Pollan particularly enjoyed learning are ineluctably masculine, and ones which he liked but not to that degree are feminine. Bread baking is a very very manly pursuit, no doubt perfected by manly manly cavemen.)

I shall pretend that I am snowed in, with my only snowplowed path leading to the farmer's market.

I am going to try to chronicle this daily, ideally with photos.

Have any of you ever done anything similar? Any advice or simple bread recipes? I don't at all mind spending lots of time kneading - I used to do pottery and very much enjoyed that part, plus I had great grip strength - but the fewer separate steps, the better.