Hello! Welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m glad you’ve joined me today!
Mr. Stone Soup and I were traveling last week and I had only 10 minutes to shop at the farmer’s market on Saturday when we got home. I decided to make this week’s posts a farmer’s market haul challenge and see what I could make out of this haul, plus a minimal run to the grocery store to get proteins and a few staples. I ended up spending about $210.00 total on the food.
Here’s what I got at the farmer’s market for about $60.00:
3 bunches of very fresh sweet basil
6 large, ripe tomatoes
2 zucchinis and 1 yellow squash
3 bell peppers of assorted colors
1 small eggplant
1 basket of cherry tomatoes
1 bag of salad greens
4 pears
2 baskets of blackberries and 1 basket of raspberries
1 small watermelon
4 large Yukon gold potatoes
At home, I had onions (yellow and red), garlic, a small red cabbage,3 peaches, a few grapes and a kabocha squash sitting on the counter.
At the grocery store, I bought a very small chicken, about 1.5 pounds of fresh salmon, some deli-meat for sandwiches, burrata cheese and some shrimp, along with some staples like milk, butter, eggs and yogurt.
First thing I did was to make a big batch of pesto, most of which I froze for use later, but some of which I used for pasta to go along with the salmon and some seared zucchini for dinner on Sunday evening.
The next day, we had yogurt, fruit and granola for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and vegetarian shepherd’s pie for dinner, along with a green salad:
Yesterday, we had overnight oatmeal and blackberries for breakfast, leftover shepherds pie for lunch and for dinner, we had roast chicken:
And zucchini boats…well, ok–really, we had cuarzo boats. When I went to the fridge to find zucchinis, I realized that I had used up the zucchinis that I had on seared zucchini Sunday night and in the shepherd’s pie on Monday night. So, the squash I found in the fridge was from last week, and was a bit bruised up. So–it needed to be used up:
But, I washed it up and trimmed the bruised places off and it was good to go for baking. Cuarzo squash are lighter green in color than zucchinis, but have a similar flavor and texture and are a good substitute for any recipe calling for zucchini squash. And this time, I used it in place of zucchinis and made cuarzo boats:
So at this point, I still have all those tomatoes, some salad greens, some cherry tomatoes, a yellow and an orange bell pepper, the peaches, the pears, 1/2 the watermelon, some of the grapes, the kabocha squash and the cabbage left. Also, I now have some roasted chicken meat and a carcass, plus the shrimp and notably, the cornmeal crust in the freezer.
One of the pears was dead on arrival–either I didn’t pay attention to what I was picking out at the market, or it got pummeled by something else in the bag, but it was jam by the time I looked at it. The others are not yet quite ripe, so they will have to wait for their dispatch. I will make a peach crumble for dessert tonight in order to use up those peaches.
That’s it for today–tune in tomorrow to see what else I make with my $210.00 market haul!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
