The Kids’ Shopping Trip

Laura Avery
Mirror contributing writer

   For those of you who enjoy highly competitive, strategically complex and emotionally conflicted activity of “after season” shopping, I have just discovered that your weekly trip to the farmers market can be just as rewarding an experience. My daughter is home visiting — after two and a half years away at college and cooking for herself with limited access to in-season produce. As with many young college people who are eating on their own for the first time, food and nutrition have become subjects of intense interest fraught with personal growth potential, and it is something of a sociological phenomenon to observe their shopping and eating habits while they are visiting back home. I remember a paper that my college roommate wrote that both documented and tried to explain why so many of our classmates had suddenly become “macrobiotic.” Due to a complete lack of any “commonality factor” among us, her research subjects, her paper concluded that people become suddenly macrobiotic as a form of self expression. And what better way to exert your independence than by selecting and preparing your own food?
   So we manage to avoid the malls and outlet stores after Christmas and head straight for the Wednesday farmers market. My daughter has her friend with her, who has lived her entire life in upstate New York, and who has recently become a vegan. We are both conspiratorially eager to turn her loose on the fresh fruit and vegetable extravaganza that is the largest farmers market in Southern California. Shopping with a neophyte is an excellent way to open your eyes to overlooked treasures, as we soon discovered.
   My daughter’s friend, Iveta, comes from a close-knit family in a small town and is no slouch at making friendly small talk to strangers. Being both polite and inquisitive as well as hailing from the snowy northeast, Iveta was a ready and willing consumer. She was immediately struck by the very availability of fresh strawberries despite the many caveats uttered by farmers that the berries would be better next month. “Not bad for early berries,” they would tell her, but compared to no berries, these were pretty spectacular. While it is true that California’s official strawberry season runs from February through June, our endless summers make strawberries available all year round. Crop science has deemed that strawberry plants need to sleep in July to bloom in February – so what is winter, anyway?
   Our college shoppers had to taste as they shopped, beginning with the rosemary focaccia bread at one end of the market, stopping for garlic and greens and pausing while trying to decide between pesto and hummus for toppings. I hadn’t recently tried all the new pesto flavors that Basiltops had been working on but was glad for an update. The girls bought two flavors of hummus from Foodology as well as some pea greens. Proceeding on to Kennedy dried fruit, they were invited to sample all sorts of unsulphured heirloom peaches, plums, apricots – even dried whole strawberries and persimmons. The Kennedys have the only black walnuts in the market, which they harvest and sell in minute quantities. It is no wonder that black walnuts are so rare, since the trees must be very old and as a result very big before the nuts can be harvested, but there they are if you want them.
   We tried all sorts of carrots before we settled on our favorites – each one different, of course. Then there was kale, scallions and onions to get for the miso soup – the de rigeur first course of any respectable vegan meal. Iveta shopped assiduously for lettuce, cabbage and other greens until she came across the several different pre-washed and bagged salad mixes. Is it possible to have too much lettuce? Not if you think that anything with balsamic vinegar on it can be eaten in double servings, which we did over the next several days, consuming every lettuce leaf in the house.
   Then there was the episode of the steamed daikon. Radishes have been quite spectacular looking lately, and the double vision at Luis Jaime’s stand of the two-foot-long red radishes and white daikons is particularly eye-catching. Never having purchased a daikon in her life, Iveta thought now would be a good time to try shredding one into a salad, but Luis persuaded her to try steaming instead. As it turned out this could not have been a simpler side dish – the huge radish was cut into three-inch sections and steamed till tender, about fifteen minutes in all. The result was an incredibly mild, complex, cabbage-like taste, tender yet firm and totally satisfying. We savored that daikon. It was delicious.
   With all the citrus fruit, grapes, kiwi and sweet fuji apples we made some outstanding salads, especially when topped with Kosmo’s fresh walnuts that we shelled ourselves and some of Elmer Lehman’s stem-in red flame raisins. When we told Fred Kosmo how much we enjoyed his walnuts, he explained to us that most commercial walnuts are bleached to imbue them with a uniform pale color – “just like washing your socks,” Fred enjoined. We were liking your in-shell walnuts just fine, Fred, but thanks anyway. Learning while you shop -- college kids just soak this stuff up.