Farmers’ Market

Saturday morning we got up early and finally made it over to the Farmers’ Market in the next town over. To say I was quite pleased with what we found would be an understatement. We decided to start with just a full circle of the place to see what the farmers all had to offer. After we crossed the street the boy who was not feeling his best and being rather unresponsive to food said “oooo peaches”. I stopped and tried to figure out which fruits he wanted from that stand when we suddenly realized that the vendors were distant relatives of his. 🙂 Serendipity. We chatted for a few and they tried to put us to work, you know since we’re family and all. 😉 We bought some peaches, blackberries and nectarines. Yum! We will be getting most of our fruits for the rest of the season from their orchard. A little further down I found a place with great peppers. The “small” peppers were bigger than the ones I can normally buy in the store. Works for me! Then we circled back around to the stand that had lamb meat and bought 2 chops to make for dinner over the weekend. (We ended up making them last night with some green beans from another farmers’ market and they were scrumptious!)

In HS I was friends with a girl whose father owned a dairy farm. Whenever I went to visit her I would always have a tall glass of the fresh cow milk. Lately I have really been wanting to find some more of that type of milk. I was told if I wandered over to a Farmers’ Market I should be able to find some and low and behold I did. Snowville Creamery from Meigs county was there with whole milk that had been milked on Thursday. Yum! Of course after buying a half gallon the boy reminded me that we had a full gallon at home that needed to not go to waste. As soon as we got home I set to work looking up recipes that use a good bit of milk on a new site that I rather like. We also started making the innards for Chicken Pot Pie so we would have an easy meal for this week. I had another friend from HS whose mother would spend Sunday mornings cooking up meals for the week for her family. Not only did her house always smell awesome on Sundays but I always got a good filling of yummy food. Basically this is how Saturday ended up for me. First was the chicken pot pie innards and cooking up the steak salad we had for lunch. Then the boy went to take a nap (he’d had a rough night of sleep the night before) and I began making all the foods I had found on the website and in my recipe index.

Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Rolls

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Pioneer Woman’s Blackberry Cobbler

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Erika’s Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bottom Cheesecake

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When the boy woke up from his nap I wouldn’t tell him what I was making but I did drag him with me to the grocery store to buy the missing ingredients. It was fun watching him try to guess what each thing was as it was being created. The cinnamon roll batch was so huge that he couldn’t figure out why I had a whole stock pot full of rising dough. (Note to Self, cut PW’s recipes in half more often! I am not feeding a ranch full of people…) We sliced up half a batch and froze 24 cinnamon rolls for later and laid out another 20 to cook up Sunday morning. We then rolled up the second half of the batch and cut it into 3 logs which we then froze. My parents have claimed one of those three logs. We will probably toss another log to his parents. In all fairness the recipe did say it would make 7 pans of cinnamon rolls…that number just didn’t really sink in with me.

The Blackberry Cobbler he suspected to be Sugar Pie. I had never heard of it but apparently it is a food from the Depression era. When one didn’t have enough money to buy fancy desserts you could use sugar to make a pie and still have dessert. The cobbler was good, his dad will be coming over to get a slice before it is all gone. 🙂

Oh and the cheesecake, well considering the ingredients that went into it, he just thought it was a heart attack. 😉 We refrigerated the cheesecake overnight and decorated it Sunday morning before my parents came over for lunch. If I were to make it again I would make some definite changes to the recipe. For starters I would remember the chocolate layer in the middle and then halve the filling. The amounts in the recipe really are too much for a standard spring form pan and I don’t have another to put the leftovers in. Oh and it is very rich. Everyone had a bit of trouble finishing their slices especially the boy who grabbed his standard size slice even after being told he wouldn’t really want that much! 😉

I can’t tell you the last time I unexpectedly spent the entire day in a kitchen cooking and baking. It was rather fun but boy was I tired round about 9pm. 🙂 Oh and we also made dinner in the middle of this. Cornish hens over rice with a pomegranate sauce. Yum!

Pictures of the foodage:

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