After eight years and one eponymous website, we’ve decided to make it official. At the end of June, Tom proposed with a beautiful German tandem and a surprise ring. Having already had something of a long engagement, we’re planning for a wedding this fall in our hometown of Midland, Michigan.

Many thanks to Kate NG Sommers of KNG Sommers Photography and author of Fork, Knife & Spoon for spending an afternoon with us and sharing her unique perspective on what a portrait session can be.

The Midtown Farmers Market has so many great prepared food vendors this year: some old stalwarts, some newcomers, but always enough to offer a lively and interesting blend of ready to eat food for at market consumption. Local media have taken notice too; it seems every week there’s a new story on a vendor who sells at Midtown: The Magic Bus Cafe in Minnesota Monthly, Dandelion Kitchen in the City Pages, or the Heavy Table’s roundup of five flavors of Midtown.

While the latter piece was interesting in its own right, what really got my attention was the comments; particularly, those by Brian Ames of Ames Farm questioning how big a role non-producer vendors should play in a market. Or rather answering, “a heavy ratio of immediately consumable foods (ICF’s) to growers/producers at farmers markets is detrimental to farmers and growers in my view.” He goes on to argue that sales made to ICFs take dollars that could be going to farmers/producers.

Two years ago, when I started shopping at Midtown — the first farmers market I’ve regularly shopped at — I would have been on the same page with Mr. Ames when it comes to non-grower vendors; let the yuppies get their coffee and tamales, I was there to buy produce. Over the course of the past couple of years, though, I’ve come to appreciate — and befriend — sellers of ICFs. As some of the comments in response to Ames point out, they are part of a symbiotic relationship with the growers that helps to produce a farmers market experience that is unique — not just another grocery store.

In spite of the important role played by the food trucks, tents and taxis, I agree with Ames in as much as whatever other amenities they offer, a farmers market should be primarily about the farmers. Last year I made a serious effort to highlight the farmers — or at least their fruits — on this blog with weekly posts featuring the farmers market haul. I’ve cut back on those this year since it got a little boring for me (and perhaps for you?). But don’t take my silence to mean the farmers of Midtown aren’t weekly providing delicious produce; they continue to keep my basket and eventually my belly full of locally grown vegetables.

One producer I’ve been especially happy with is new this year: Gardens of Eagan. My love affair started when, on the first market day when all I was expecting was opening festivities and canned goods, they had a table full of strawberries. Not just any strawberries, either, but strawberries that were the sweetest I had ever tasted: ideal strawberries. I rode that wave for the month or so it lasted, and have also enjoyed various interesting lettuces and kale from the Gardens. Then last week, as I was in line to buy tomatoes (some of the first of the year), Gardens of Eagan’s Jennifer Nelson insisted I try a sample of their watermelon. Here again, the same experience as with the strawberries; I was tasting a fruit like no other I had tasted before, but that tasted like the fruit should taste. I hadn’t planned to buy a watermelon this week, and didn’t really have a solid plan for carrying it home on my bike, but after that one bite of perfect watermelon I didn’t have much choice but to buy one.

Midtown vendors have also been quick to supply the season’s first sweet corn: I bought half a dozen ears from Pflaum Farms two weeks ago, and last week tried the corn grown by Carmen of Peter’s Pumpkins and Carmen’s Corn. It’s still a little early for sweet corn — the flavor is not quite at its peak – but after enduring a whole winter with nothing but the frozen stuff, all these ears were welcome relief.

And of course beyond the sexy fruit, tomatoes and corn there is the regular mid-summer stuff like potatoes, summer squash, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, lettuces, greens, onions; basically any vegetable that grows in this climate is growing now. This is the best time to shop at the farmers market: no mania or cult-like commitment required — the vegetables sell themselves. And, what’s more, you can also get a great breakfast from one of the many sellers of immediately consumable foods!

Maybe it’s because of the name — chanterelle — that I always assumed these wild mushrooms were exclusively a California thing. Surely such a frou frou term couldn’t describe anything growing in the meat-and-potatoes midwest, where you might more expect something hardier, say a beefsteak (which, incidentally, doesn’t seem to grow in the Midwest. But I digress). My brother Mike, who lives in California, basically assumed the same, until a week ago when, while wandering the family land in northern lower Michigan, he happened upon a handful of the unmistakable orange fungi. As soon as Martha and I got wind of his discovery, the three of us headed back out into the woods and the hunt was on.

While not a party to the fungiphobia that so infects most of our country (and about half of my family), my wild mushroom gathering experience is limited to the mighty morel, a mushroom which — even when plentiful — does a good job of disguising itself on the forest floor. I am convinced that it is in fact invisible to the direct line of sight, appearing only in one’s peripheral vision. What a relief to hunt the chanterelle, then, which is not nearly so cagey; its bright orange yellow stands in strong contrast to the forest around it. Provided there actually are chanterelles where one is looking, there’s little risk of not seeing them.

And chanterelles there were. We must have hit their seasonal peak (our mushroom guide unhelpfully identified the season for chanterelles as “summer and fall”) because it seemed like every 15 feet or so we would walk on the hill crest, someone would spot a new group of the golden mushrooms poking through the ferns and grass. Mike — the experienced mycologist in the group — soon developed a theory that the chanterelles were somehow connected to maple trees. I remained a little dubious, largely due to my inability to consistently identify said trees (yes, I have trouble identifying maple trees).

Whether or not we cracked the code of chanterelle growth, we sure found a bunch of them. There was no scale available, but the bag I was carrying felt like it contained two, maybe even three, pounds of mushrooms.

Dumping that bag on to the kitchen table, the most impressive thing beyond the sheer quantity of fungus was the aroma: it was as if someone had cut open an apricot right under our noses. Mike said this aroma is not as strong in the California chanterelles he has found; this being my first chanterelle experience, I couldn’t make comparisons, but I did find the aroma striking for its pleasantness — none of the mustiness I usually associate with wild mushrooms.

Given my inexperience, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with our chanterelle bonanza in the kitchen. We decided on two approaches: the larger chanterelles would be sliced and grilled, while the smaller ones would be quartered or kept whole and sauteed with olive oil, garlic, and chicken broth to make a kind of mushroom sauce/side dish.

But before any of that could be attempted, the chanterelles would need to be cleaned. The fluted gills running up the sides of these mushrooms are adept at catching dirt, and the bases of their stems won’t ever shed it no matter how much you wash. Mike showed us a technique for getting the bases of the stems clean, using a paring knife to shave off the layers of dirt.

The chanterelles were fun to cook with; their meaty, solid stems were firm under my knife, not delicate in the way of hollow-stemmed morels (note: if your morel doesn’t have a hollow stem, you might just have a verpa. Don’t eat it.) In spite of  the vast quantities of liquid the mushrooms gave up as they cooked — liquid which frustrated my plans to brown the mushrooms and deglaze with chicken broth — they remained substantial in the finished dishes, only a little diminished in size. Their flavor was like their smell, hinting of apricots but with a unique woodland taste. Both the grilled and sauteed chanterelles made perfect accompaniments for venison harvested from the same land by my other brother, Kevin.

I’m sure the presence of wild chanterelles in the forests of the upper midwest is old news to the seasoned foragers out there, but for a greenhorn like myself the discovery was pretty exciting: a new bounty to harvest from the woods! Now I just need to find some good mushrooming land in Minnesota.