Farmers Market Day and How They Regulate My Hamburger

(Bolting cilantro pictured above)

Our 1^st Farmers Market Day This Season

Last Saturday was our first time this year to set up and offer our wonderfully fresh home-grown produce to the patrons of the Minnetrista Farmers Market over in Muncie, Indiana. There’s so much work getting ready for the event, starting early Friday thru Saturday at noon, it’s like your hair is on fire and you are trying to put it out with a fly swatter. After it is over, though, we always look back and say how much fun it was.

I loved seeing and visiting with customers that we had the good fortune to make friends with last year, and to make some new friends, one of which was Daniel and his lovely family. Food friends are wonderful.

Wondering what we took to market? We offered, for the customer’s consideration, Quail eggs, three types of green beans, baby pattypan squash, Swiss chard, Thai basil, cilantro in two styles; mature with roots and young leafy bunches, tomatoes (cherry and standard red), and some beautiful cut flowers. The cilantro sales always surprise me. I’m taken by how much of it we sell. I think we are the only farmers that sell it at the market! Thankfully, the quantity we grow allows us to pick over an extended period of time.

Cilantro is a bit of a rascally herb to grow. Oh, it starts out simple enough. Just till the earth, throw in some seed and wait impatiently for growth. Normally, growth is a good in the garden, but in cilantro’s case, it’s a bit too precocious about it. It matures, flowers and sets seed way too quickly—in other words, it bolts. Most of the time if a leafy green bolts, like a lettuce, it’s finished, done for, kaput, and cilantro in our part of the world is no exception. You can try to stop it from reaching this stage by pinching it back, but like pimples on a pubescent teen, that thick stalk is returning in no time. This is not a problem in Pan Asian cooking because they often time prefer to use a more mature plant, including the stem, root and all, referring to the herb as coriander. (See, you learn something in our blog!)

If the soil around cilantro’s roots gets to 70 degrees and stays awhile, the plant is going to bolt. If you read this and are not familiar with Indiana summers, let me just clarify that they’re hot, hotter than 70 degrees. Short of air conditioning the soil, I don’t have a clue as how to keep cilantro from bolting, so you have to plant in succession to have young growth all the time.

Anyway, we had a great time at the Farmers Market, and our good friend and CSA helper, Tracy, got to tag along and see exactly how inept we are. It's always a joy to share your fallibility's with others. Thankfully for us, she likes cilantro.

I Just Want a Nice Burger

After the Farmers market on Saturday, we head out for lunch to sit and rest awhile. This time we chose to eat at Scotty's Brewhouse, a restaurant not too far from the market. In general, I have enjoyed all the meals I have had there and this one was no exception. Scotty’s is not a five-star restaurant; you can kind of know that just by their name. Brewhouse, to me, conjures up pub food, not a French Michelin-starred restaurant. The restaurant is clean and the wait staff this day was excellent. I ordered the make-your-own-burger entrée, choosing to partner the half-pound of ground chuck with Jalapinos, onion, BBQ sauce, and mozzarella cheese. I also wanted and could not get a fried egg added on top. (Yes, I said a fried egg. Don't knock it till you've tried it--it's a bit of sunshine on top of your burger!)

Now this is where I could easily start to rant royally, but I shall not. I will spare you in today's blog. But I cannot understand the reasoning behind the answer I was given upon asking my waiter who was so gracious in trying to accommodate my special request. To fry an egg on the same grill as the other food, I was told, is a matter of health regulation, some blather about the transference of salmonella to the food that would follow behind the 1000-degree scorching that this hen egg would have endured. Please correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t this heat kill any trace of Sal’s Manilla anyway? And isn’t raw ground beef one the biggest carriers of this and about ten other deadly or at least make-you-wish-you-were-dead bacteria? It must be because I was also told of some other health regulation that I wasn’t allowed to order my fried cow carcass any less done than medium.

So let me get this straight. You can join the military service and let bad guys shoot at you and through you, you can run into burning buildings as a career as everone else is running out, you can make a traffic stop all by yourself out in the middle of nowhere in the silence of the night, but it would be way too foolhardy to let you eat a piece of meat cooked to your preference of medium rare on the same grill after having, horror upon horror, a egg fried at the same temperature as that of a Dwarf Star?

In all fairness, I don’t know whose regulations these are, but I really did enjoy my burger and our server was great and a good sport. But these regulations to protect us from ourselves have got to stop! Enough already. Some folks are going to get sick, some are even going to die, but that’s the thing about life--no one gets out alive. Can the bureaucrats just get out of our way so we can get on with living the way we see fit for ourselves? To say one is “living” but is afraid to put this or that food cooked this or that way in their mouth, well, to me that ain’t living. 

And while we're at it, stop hindering the small farmer with bizarre regulations that are insurmountable for a small scale operation and favor the big corporate operations that produce 100 percent of the food-bourne problems that in turn cause the implementation of all these crazy regulations to begin with! Okay, maybe I did rant a little bit again.

Well I’m done talk’n. Remember, play with your food. --Matt