Market Days St. Croix January 26, 2013

Today my shopping trip wasn’t quite as large as usual, due to a variety of personal conflicts preventing me from cooking at home as much this week.  So I scaled down what I purchased to buy only what we will eat over the next few days.  Here’s the photo of my “haul”:

I primarily shopped at ARTfarm, where I bought heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, green leaf lettuce, microgreens, onions (with their green tops), and heirloom cherry tomatoes.  But there were several items there that were SO hard to pass up today!  For example, check out their locally grown broccoli:

I intentionally framed the photo to show the HUGE and lovely stems of this broccoli plant – lots of broccoli goodness to cook here, yum!  And the greens are just as good!  You can see them on the lower left in this photo, which also features some lovely beets and several kinds of lettuces:

And of course, the cucumbers, and some more green leaf lettuce.  This is some of what I brought home.

From ARTfarm I headed over to Southgate to see my friend Aberra Bulbulla to check out his fruits that he has available today at his stand.  I had to buy a coconut water, of course, fresh from the coconut…

Aberra recently surprised me with a box of fruits of all sorts that he grows on his farm.  Over time on this blog I’ll feature them all!  There are some familiar ones here, in addition to some exotics:

There are mangoes, star apple, sugar apple, sapodilla, carambola, local orange and grapefruit, guava, mele apples, chocolate fruit, and pomelo all in this box.  And we’ve been eating them and enjoying them all!  Many tropical fruits are excellent to bake with, which I’ll have recipes for those coming up for you guys also.

So that’s the weekly haul!  I’ve already made a salad with quinoa, the tomatoes, and cucumbers.  And lots more going on this weekend – I’ll have some really interesting updates soon!