Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 5

Because my friend M. is coming over to cook dinner tonight, this morning I had to do something I usually avoid: a Saturday farmers market. I went to the Grand Lake one, which is insanely crowded and overwhelming and, in addition to all the farmers and cooked-food stands, features many vendors of items like jewelry, t-shirts, and vibrational healing elixers.

So it's not my favorite place to be, but it was gorgeous out this morning, and I ran into my friends C. and E. (who both said they've been reading, so: Hi C. and E.!) and we gabbed about the great meals we've had lately (me: Suriya; them: the place C.'s stepmother opened recently whose name I can never remember, even though they told me three times this morning and we made plans to eat there next weekend) and it was lovely.

And I bought:

• brussels sprouts
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• a head of garlic
• three onions
• two apples (one pink lady and one fuji)
• three mandarins
• one navel orange
• two white-fleshed sweet potatoes
• a blueberry bran muffin from the best vegan bakery I have ever encountered

The veggies I bought specifically for tonight (except the onions and garlic, which I just needed on general principles), and the fruit because I was enticed by samples.The muffin was breakfast.

In addition to the muffin, I ate a lot of samples, bite-sized tidbits of:

• Brazilian cheese bread (wheat free but clearly refined; it was pleasantly chewy, not particularly cheesy, and a nice bit of thing but not worth buying even if it had fit the rules)
• dried peach
• tomato (decent but watery; clearly, doesn't matter how warm your greenhouse is, out-of-season tomatoes are never going to be worth it)
• navel orange (at two different stands)
• maple-sweetened pecan granola
• lentils from the vegan soul food stand—next time I go to that market I am going to try to be ready for lunch so I can get a whole plate from them
• Argentinian-style beef empanada, with cumin, raisins, and hard-boiled egg, among other things (this was actually not a sample but a bite of what C. bought); yes, I have been quite meat-tastic lately, and in fact I will be writing a whole post about this soon, as I have been craving meat a lot
• a walnut
• a piece of fuji apple and a piece of pink lady apple

Lunch was leftover Thai food over brown rice still warm in the rice cooker form yesterday, and the fuji apple I just bought. There may be some afternoon snacking involving fruit; I'll update tomorrow if necessary.

For dinner M. and I are roasting vegetables and making tempeh from a very simple recipe given to me my my friend D., who was so influential in getting me started on my whole whole-foods thang: Toss cubed tempeh with soy sauce, onion powder, garlic powder, and nutritional yeast; fry in a generous amount of peanut oil until browned and crispy. I have a general distate for garlic and onion powder, but for this recipe their fresh or real forms wouldn't really work, so I go with it. You can also use other spices like cumin instead, but I like it this way.

Soundtrack to this post: my friend Kate Isenberg's CD that I bought at her CD release party last night. It's frackin' fantastic.

UPDATE: I ate a kiwi as an afternoon snack after the original post. Dinner was exactly as expected, but with a glass of red wine out of the fridge (open bottle from a party a couple weeks ago) and some unbelievably good homemade apricot hamantaschen that M. brought with her. I'm pretty sure they had butter in them, and I know they had white flour and sugar. Mmmmmmmm.