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!

Saturday Shopping Day

One of the things I hear a lot when I talk to people about shopping locally is the comment, “I just don’t have enough time to do all that shopping.”  Well, over time with this blog, I hope to disprove that thought process!  It is possible to shop locally on one (or two) days a week, and get plenty of good local food to add to the weekly menus.

I primarily do all our shopping on Saturday mornings, and sometimes on Wednesday as well.  I typically go to the Farmer’s Market in La Reine (center island), and then the farm stands on the corner in Southgate.  About once a month I also visit Sejah Farm and/or Annaly Farms (for meat), and also sometimes ARTfarm on South Shore Road.  In addition, I will often stop at Quality Food VI for organic produce (and sometimes meats) that can’t be bought locally.  However, I generally do NOT go to all these on one day, that would be crazy!  It’s more about…what do we have at home, and what would we like to eat that week?  And then I decide on where to stop.  My shopping is generally 2 hours or so, and it gets most everything we need for our menus.

This week, I went to the La Reine Farmers’ Market, and then on to ARTfarm and the Southgate farm stands.  Here’s the picture of what all I brought home:

This includes hydroponically grown butter lettuce, carambola, tomatoes, chocolate fruit, pomelo, sopadilla, soursop, pumpkin, dried peas, cucumbers, eggplants, limes, green bell pepper, bananas, avocado, honey, hot scotch bonnet peppers, tamarind candies, and a black cake – a local holiday treat!

So what am I going to do with all this?  Well, that’s the next upcoming post!  Stay tuned for the first of my, “What I Did With It” posts – dinner…tonight!