Just a few weeks ago it seemed like the farmers markets would never open, and now here we are already two weekends into the season at the Midtown Farmers Market. And what a season we are having! May farmers market shopping in Minnesota in any normal year is an affair for the die-hards, an exercise in hopefulness and bitter disappointment as dreams of tables over-laden with bright green spring produce are dashed against the reality that stuff really doesn’t get growing in Minnesota till later in the summer. But this is no normal year! After a mild winter and weather since March that could only be described as ‘decent’, our Minnesota and Wisconsin farmers have gotten things rolling a little earlier than usual. In three years of shopping at Midtown, my opening day hauls have been the following:

• 2009: a small chicken, prepared tomatillo salsa, frozen mutton
• 2010: foraged ramps, a pint of strawberries, frozen mutton and spicy almonds
• 2011: 2 large bunches of spinach

Opening weekend was last week, and I got a pint of strawberries, three pounds of asparagus, and a pound of rhubarb. This week was even better: rhubarb, strawberries, asparagus, arugula, spinach, basil, oregano and radishes.

It’s not usual that you can make a full meal out of market shopping in early May, but I’m already practically able to make a full week of meals with what I can get at the market. A pessimist by nature, I’ve got a nagging feeling the other shoe’s about to drop on this easy winter/beautiful spring/plentiful produce situation, but that’s just all the more reason to enjoy it while it lasts.

I give great credit to Midtown’s excellent manager, Amy Behrens, for putting together a great mix of vendors this year, both seasoned regulars and some new faces. Martha and I enjoyed chatting with newcomers Blackbrook Farm, who grow a variety of vegetables near Amery, WI.

They’re dropping in at Midtown a few times in May before moving on a more permanent basis to the controversial Linden Hills Farmers Market, which will be open Sunday mornings. I was immediately drawn to Blackbrook by their attractive signage and very unexpected produce: radishes, spinach, greens, arugula, asparagus and rhubarb. Some of this early produce is made possible by a greenhouse, which will be providing Blackbrook CSA subscribers with cherry tomatoes as early as June.

If you were thinking about sitting out farmers markets this May on the basis of past disappointments, think again: things are different this year.

It may be only April, but it’s already time to pull on your mushroom hunting fashion boots. You’ll fend off ticks and look good while slinking through the woods.

Tom found this pair of morels nestled in the grass. Excited at an early find, he didn’t even wait for me to take their picture before plucking them from the ground. They were a little dry, but let’s not get picky here.

Most of of the mushrooms we found are probably inedible or at least not choice, but they weren’t all boring LBMs. I am curious if these might have been Velvet Foots (wild Enoki). Pending confirmation, I have decided to call the above fungus a Hamburger Bun Mushroom.

There were, of course, plenty of Little Brown Mushrooms. Here they are gathered together in a tiny mushroom village.

This is the sort of mushroom under which a fairy might enjoy a tiki drink.

Morel #3. They don’t call her the Minnesota State Mushroom for nothing.

A Mushroom Choir.

A woody-looking fungal friend.

Furry shelf mushrooms from below, showing off their hedgehog-like undersides.

Furry shelfies from above. Now you see their furriness, yes?

All in all, we had a good walk in the woods. Now that we know for sure that the season is on (and early), we hope to get back at it next weekend with our out-of-town guests and 4 pairs of eyes to comb the woods.

Is it still not farmers market season yet? It feels like it’s been warm enough for a month now – with the occasional frost thrown in for variety – but our market still won’t be open for weeks.

To help manage the market jones – or, I guess, to make it much worse – Martha and I headed down to the Mill City Museum tonight for the opening of ‘Growing Strong’, an exhibit highlighting Minnesota farmers markets and their impact on our community. The exhibit was put together by our friend Mr. Farmers Market David Nicholson.

The exhibit itself consists of a series of panels hanging in front of the wall of the lobby of the Mill City Museum with text and photos highlighting aspects of farmers markets in our state. Each panel fell into one of four main topic areas: Healthy People, Fresh Food for Everyone, Economic Opportunity, and Urban-Rural Connection. We were about halfway through ‘Fresh Food for Everyone’ when the program began.

First up was David, who spoke about some of the work that went into the exhibit, thanked the sponsors, and introduced Dr. Marc Manley from sponsor Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Dr. Manley opened by stating that he had hoped to open his speech with a joke about farmers markets. This drew nervous laughter, I am assuming because farmers market people generally take the markets way too seriously to be making jokes about them. Dr. Manley was forced to resort to the Internet for comic inspiration, where he found this diamond in the cow pat:

Two cows in a field…
“Daisy, have you heard?”
“Moo. Heard what Buttercup?”
“There’s going to be a Farmers Market at the town hall next week.”
“That’s good, let’s sell our farmer and see if we can get a better one.”

Unsurprisingly, this got more groans than laughs, providing a nice segue into the more serious part of his talk – about how important a role farmers markets can play in encouraging healthy eating in Minnesota. Apparently, only 15% of Minnesotan adults eat a healthy amount of fruits and vegetables. To change this, Blue Cross has been supporting programs to allow farmers markets to accept SNAP/EBT benefits and to provide extra incentives for people to shop at markets. Our own market, Midtown Farmers Market, has benefited greatly from those programs, with EBT usage (and therefore customer counts) increasingly significantly since the Market Bucks incentive program was introduced three years ago.

After Dr. Manley concluded, we were treated to some quick, off-the-cuff remarks from none other than Minneapolis mayor RT Rybak, who got things off to a good start when he deadpanned “Hi, my name is RT, and I’m a market-a-holic.” He then explained he and his wife Megan’s weekend schedule, which involves visiting just about every market in the city.

The mayor’s priorities for Minneapolis markets? Use markets as places of education, let markets define a sense of place for our city and region, and make sure markets are structured to provide good economic opportunities for farmers and producers. These priorities echoed the themes of the exhibit.

Overall the exhibit did a great job of explaining the important role farmers markets can play in improving our communities, beyond being the sort of Yuppie playgrounds they are so often caricatured as (though, don’t get me wrong, they are still very much that too). If you’re in the area of the Mill City Museum, stop in and check it out (the museum itself is also well worth a visit). The Growing Strong exhibit runs through July 22.

Meet the new vertical storage to the left of our stove. Here cutting boards, trays, sheet pans, bread pans are stored efficiently and ready for easy access. But it wasn’t always that way.

When we moved in, there was a counter to the left of the stove shoddily propped on top of two pieces of wood. I’ve always wondered if there might be a cheap, easy way to turn the wasted space under the counter into something we could use.

An easy answer didn’t show up until I found the remains of an IKEA Eneryda coffee table on the sidewalk near our apartment. Eneryda was sold with casters for its base and a sheet of glass supported on fours legs for its tabletop. When I found this one, it had one leg, no casters and the glass was long gone. Added was a not-so-clever slogan advocating illegal activity scrawled on the back in pink marker, a lot of sand, and water damage.

After giving Eneryda a good cleaning to remove the accumulated street grit, I ripped apart the existing framing in the kitchen and slid our freshly trash-picked “cabinet” into place. While a perfect fit width-wise, Eneryda was about 4 inches too tall. As you can see in the above drawing, there’s a center board that divides the piece in half and creates four openings, two on each side. This meant the openings weren’t really deep enough for a sheet pan. Eneryda would have to adapt. My plan was to get the job done in three cuts – one for each of the side panels and one for the center board midway down. Two of the openings would stay as-is and the other two would become one, double-wide.

Did you know Ace Hardware will cut wood – any wood – for $1/cut? If you’re an apartment-dweller with limited access to power tools, this is essential information. After a quick couple of phone calls to confirm the table saw at the Ace in our neighborhood was indeed operable, I disassembled the entire unit and gave it an additional cleaning of its discrete parts. I then measured and marked each of the cuts before heading off to the hardware store, where the cutting itself was quick and easy.

With the new lengths ready to go, all I had to do was re-drill IKEA’s pre-made holes into the new “ends” of the panels. I started with the holes that went clean-through and then moved onto the shallow holes, taping the bit at the desired depth for each.

After drilling, I reassembled the unit, put it in place and let it sit there for a week before I got around to painting it. During this time, I realized our kitchen floor isn’t really level, and so consequently a counter-top resting atop a cabinet sitting on that un-level floor would not be level either. I was going to need a shim. Shimming directly under the countertop would have been an option, but Tom suggested that I shim it on the floor. But there was a problem – how would I cover a triangular gap along the side of the new cabinet?

Molding! I bought a length of quarter-round molding as well as some caulk to make up for any imprecision in the assembly. I also picked up a sheet of balsa wood to serve as facing for that space you can see in the above left image between the wall and the shelf. Balsa is probably not the ideal material in terms of durability, but it did meet the criteria I had in mind of “things that can be easily cut with an Exacto knife,” which was to be my tool of choice for trimming the facing so that it would hug the existing baseboard.

Materials in hand, I set about painting, adding a cardboard backing, and installing the cabinet. The molding and balsa wood worked well to finish everything off and perfectly concealed the wood shims underneath. I loaded staples into my staple gun to attach the backing and replaced them with brads to attach the balsa. Lastly, at the base of each shelf I laid pliant cork contact paper. We left the shelf to dry overnight and introduced the sheet pans to their new home the following day.

Total Material Cost:

• Eneryda Coffee Table, $0 – scavenged found
• Cardboard backing, $0 – trash picked found
• 1 — 36″ sheet of Balsa Wood, $2.49
• 1 tube of white window/door caulk, $3.49
• 1 length of shoe/quarter-round molding, $4.49
• White paint, $0 – left over from another project
• Spackling, $0 – left over from another project
• Wood glue, $0 – left over from another project
• Scrap wood, $0 – donated by Julia
• Cork shelf liner, $0 – left over from another project
• Fasteners (1 screw, staples, brads, etc.), $0 – had on hand

Tools Involved:

I didn’t set out to veganize Cook’s Illustrated’s ‘Sichuan Stir-Fried Pork in Garlic Sauce’ – it just sort of happened. It’s not that I have anything against vegans, and if you are vegan and ever come to our house for dinner I would enjoy the challenge of preparing a strictly plant-based meal. Personally though, I’ve never found the arguments behind veganism convincing–so absent a guest with a vegan diet at the table, I don’t bother limiting my ingredient list based on any prescribed set of rules. Sometimes, though, such limits arise outside of my meal plan.

Temporarily out of stock

The first ingredient in the Cook’s recipe is chicken broth and although I’m sure it’s routinely passed off as such by unscrupulous restaurateurs chicken broth is definitely not vegan. I’ve got nothing against it at all–as long as it’s homemade. A few years ago I realized that by saving the bones from every piece of chicken we eat in a bag in the freezer I could make stock that was pretty good and very cheap. When enough bones and sundry chicken parts have accumulated, I cover the lot with water in the crock pot, and in eight short hours it’s ready for action. Naturally, that discovery morphed into the idea that it was immoral to ever buy store-bought stock again. I’m not without my food restrictions–they just don’t have to do with avoiding eating or enslaving animals. And so it was that while we were doing the week’s shopping I refused to buy broth-in-a-box, even though I knew the supply of carefully frozen cubes of stock in the freezer was dwindling. As it turns out I cut it too close, and Martha used up the last of our home-made stock making a delicious vegetable soup a couple of days prior. At some point in the week I was aware of the issue and intended to fire up the slow cooker at the right time to replenish the stock supply, but as of the morning I had forgotten and by the time I got home to make dinner it was already too late. So I turned to the poor man’s vegan-friendly chicken stock: good old H₂O.

Also called for in the recipe was fish sauce, which is usually made with ground up anchovies or other tiny fish. I don’t particularly like fish sauce, and I especially don’t like the way it tends to sit in the fridge unused for many months, taking up valuable shelf real-estate. And it isn’t free either. So I had consciously planned to skip the fish sauce all along, for my own special anti-fish sauce reasons.

The meaning of putrid

With water substituted for chicken broth and no fish sauce swimming in that water, my stir-fry sauce was vegan. But there remained the more obvious question of the pork. Even among those who eat meat, pork is the subject of special dietary restrictions, being notably forbidden to Jews and Muslims who observe their faiths’ dietary laws. This can be mystifying to those of us with no such restrictions, since pork is quite possibly the most delicious of all the meats, especially in its bacon and jamón forms. I say all this to make it clear that I am normally a pork enthusiast and would go to great lengths to incorporate this glorious meat into my cooking, and would never intentionally omit it.

Excited as I was for an opportunity to consume that forbidden beast, any excitement rapidly faded as I pulled the cellophane-wrapped package of pork–purchased at the co-op only days before–and noticed strong bands of discoloration running down the darkened meat. Here’s a pro-tip: if you notice the color of your pork is way off, just throw it out. Do it right now. Because I’m an idiot, I decided to give the pork a good smell, just to make sure. The word putrid gets thrown about pretty casually these days, but I believe it can really only be properly understood as referring to the special stench of rotting meat. Martha, for her part, declined a whiff.

As I was walking the meat down the stairs and directly out to the dumpster behind our building, since a stink like that would pretty quickly sneak out of our tiny trash can and make our tiny apartment unlivable, I thought wistfully of the farmers market season, when food can be bought that’s fresh enough to sit in the refrigerator for a few days without rotting. Only a couple of months to go!

Having disposed of the pork, the last obstacle between this recipe and full-fledged veganism was gone. I was saved by a half head of napa cabbage (the universally acknowledged pig of the vegetable kingdom) that was sitting in the crisper drawer in the wake of the aforementioned vegetable soup. It turned out well, and while I can’t say no animals were harmed in the making of this stir-fry, it is comforting to know that no animals had to be.

Vegan mushroom and cabbage stir-fry with garlic sauce

Sauce

• 1/2 c water
• 2 T sugar
• 2 T soy sauce
• 2 t balsamic vinegar
• 2 t sherry vinegar
• 1 T toasted sesame oil
• 1 T sherry
• 2 t ketchup
• 2 t cornstarch

Stir-Fry

• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 5 scallions, white parts minced, green parts sliced thin
• 2 T sriracha
• 4 T vegetable oil
• 6 oz mushrooms (I used white button mushrooms; shiitakes would be better)
• 4 celery ribs, cut on a bias into 1/4 inch slices
• 1/2 small head napa cabbage, sliced thin.

Whisk together sauce ingredients; set aside.

Combine garlic, scallions, and sriracha in a small bowl; set aside.

Heat 1 T oil in 12″ non-stick skillet until almost smoking. Add celery and mushrooms and cook until softened and starting to singe on the edges. Transfer cooked vegetables to large bowl.

Heat another 1 T oil in the skillet until almost smoking. Add cabbage and cook until wilted and browned in places. Add to bowl with vegetables.

Heat remaining 2 T of oil in the skillet over medium-low heat. Add garlic-scallion mixture and cook until fragrant – about 30 seconds – stirring frequently. Whisk sauce to recombine and add to skillet. Bring to a boil to thicken and add vegetables. Stir to combine. Serve hot with rice.