Midtown Farmers Market continues to provide. Carrots were a welcome new addition this week, bringing fresh color and sweet, early season flavor to the table. I’m looking forward to how this crop will inspire Tom’s cooking in the coming days.

Look at all them vegetables! Only a couple of weeks ago that I was whining about the slow pace of the season; now the dreamed for abundance is upon us: radishes, fingerling potatoes, frisée, beets, strawberries, rhubarb, spinach, a rainbow of chard, sugar snap peas, broccoli, mint, basil and a jar of the salsa Mayor RT Rybak just can’t get enough of (I take market vendors at their word). An imposing haul, but I refuse to be intimidated! I am invigorated! Sure, my crisper drawer may be stuffed up to the glass now, but I will not let any of these veggies languish past the next weekend. The key is to attack your produce head on — don’t sit on it trying to make it last through the end of the week: this much produce lasts forever.

Within an hour of returning from the market Saturday morning, I had the oven fired up roasting beets — a roasted beet can be used without any forethought in salads, sandwiches and side dishes — a raw beet, not so much. As it happened, I layered beet slices with basil and chevre in a terrine that we ate that very night. If you don’t have the patience for careful stacking and weighting, this trio works just as well in a salad. The radishes were also gone by Saturday evening, roasted to make these crostini from the New York Times.

With the knowledge that the strawberries wouldn’t last overnight on our warm counters and lose much of their flavor in the refrigerator, after enjoying a few berries fresh I cooked the remainder into a strawberry sauce with just a little sugar. We’ll be eating this sauce all week; it was perfect for Sunday morning waffles enjoyed with the World Cup on in the background.

Even after separating all the stems from the spinach leaves, the bag of spinach I was left with (which I paid $2 for, by the way) was still taking up half of the crisper drawer. Obviously, it would have to go. I like spinach salads as much as the next guy, but quantities like this demand to be cooked. You know those recipes that, if you go to the grocery store, force you to invest a small fortune in spinach only to have you cook it down to a small fistful? Those are the recipes you want to make with farmers market spinach. Case in point: spinach lasagna.

One and a half days after the market, I’m feeling reasonably good about my progress: beets eaten, radishes roasted, spinach dispatched, strawberries sauced. I even made headway through half the head of frisée in a salad to accompany the lasagna. I have plans for some of the rest: the chard is bound for a north African soup, the rhubarb will likely become jam. If I remain vigilant, the fridge should be empty again just in time for next week’s market.

I’m fully aware of how empty my early farmers market boosterism sounds: “Really, even though you’ll only be able to buy a pint of strawberries and a head of lettuce, it’s totally worth making the trip to the market! Just think what you might find!” Okay, Tom. Whatever.

Well I’m happy to say those weeks are definitively over! As of last weekend, the first Saturday market in June, the market has finally hit its full stride. I could barely contain myself as I went from stall to stall, seizing on the fresh — and small in a cute way — vegetables: Chard! Snap peas! Garlic! New potatoes! Kale! Friseé! Basil! Leeks! Rhubarb! Strawberries! Finally, the makings of a feast.

Markets like these — rife with fresh and tender vegetables — allow me to make my favorite post-farmers market lunch: produce, steamed or blanched, with homemade mayonnaise, hummus, or any other sauce you like to dip them in. I did cheat and supplement the Midtown new potatoes and snap peas with asparagus from The Wedge (but hey, they’re my year round farmers market).

All that and I barely made a dent in the week’s haul. There will be plenty more meals this week derived almost entirely from market produce. The fun is just beginning.

We braved cold temperatures and persistent drizzle this Saturday for the Midtown Farmers’ Market and a wide selection of vegetables was our reward. I bought chard, cabbage, beets, three kinds of squash (delicata, kuri, and butternut — all part of this fall’s quest to embrace squash), Haralson apples (the ultimate pie apple?), red peppers, leeks, tiny eggplants (destined for brine), small onions, parsnips, and lemongrass — which is as close as I am going to get to local lemons.

With the season almost over, it’s interesting to compare prices now to the beginning of the year. Chard was $4 in June. In October, with everybody charded-out, a bunch can be had for $1, as can a bunch of beets.

Or, take the roma tomatoes we bought (not pictured). At the beginning of tomato season farmers put out crates for those with ambitious and foresightful canning plans, charging $15-20. This weekend, we were able to get a milk-crate’s worth of romas for an unbelievable $5. The tomatoes are so heavy that I can’t weigh them on my scale, but I think it’s safe to say this was a deal. The tomatoes have probably seen better days; they’re ripe almost to the point of rotting and some of them were moldy (our farmer was kind enough to sort those out for us). But that makes them all the better for making sauce with.

The last time I went to the Midtown Farmers’ Market, summer was in full swing with a great variety of vegetables, but most of the vegetables were still pretty small: baby beets, tiny zucchini and summer squash with the flowers still on, new potatoes, spring onions, young greens, etc. After three weeks, the same vegetables have gotten bigger: red potatoes the size of two golf balls, baseball-sized onions, large squash and beets, and full-sized, adult lettuces.

There were a few new vegetables available, signalling the arrival of mid-summer: carrots, green and yellow beans and cucumbers. Cucumbers are one of my favorite things about summer—it is amazing how much sweeter and full-flavored they taste in season versus their year-round counterparts, which are just watery.

I also picked up some still young vegetables—radishes and green onions—which must be cultivated and replanted throughout the summer.

This is one of the most exciting times of the year around the market: there is a large enough variety to keep the kitchen well-stocked and interesting for the week and the most exciting vegetables of the year are just around the corner. I heard talk of sweet corn if we can get a little warm weather and the first cherry tomatoes were already in evidence. This time of year can’t be beat for prices either. What might have been $3 at the beginning of the summer, like the beets, can now be had for one. There’s no better time to be at the market!