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.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 1

So, my friend J. requested a week's worth of diary entries to explain how I shop and cook (I added the eating part). I think she'd like to cook more, so she wants to see how it works for me, logistically. I'm rilly lucky to have a flexible work schedule (I mostly work from home), and a standing appointment that brings me two blocks from the Berkeley farmers market every Tuesday afternoon. (I also like to spend Sunday mornings squeezing fruit and ogling vegetables at the Temescal market, but usually that's more recreational than practical. Hey, you can stop laughing now.)

So I am obliging J.

Shopping for today (all at the farmers market; sometimes I stop at Berkeley Bowl afterwards if I need olive oil, toilet paper, whatever—but today I didn't):

• a couple pounds of fingerling and yukon gold potatoes (it's frackin' cold and wet today, I'm thinkin' stew or roasted veggies) from Arthur Davis, who also raises free-range chickens that lay lovely eggs
  
• a loaf of Russian sourdough from Vital Vittles, my bakery of choice (they use all whole grains)
• two tiny little blocks of firm tofu from Hodo Soy (their tofu is great and priced the same as most other organic tofu you'll find in the supermarket; their prepared foods are amazing but way spendy—I do recommend splurging on the tofu meatballs or the sesame tofu strips every once in a while, though)
• some brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and kiwis from Swanton Berry Farm, the only strawberry farm in the U.S. that's both organic and union
• some tangelos from a far whose name I don't remember, but Oh My Gawd these are some of the best citrus things I have ever eaten
• a bunch of red chard and a bundle of parsnips from Riverdog Farm
• a 20-pound bag of brown rice from Massa Organics; I first had their rice when I got some through Eatwell Farm, which was my beloved CSA before I was able to get to the farmers market regularly—it is the best rice ever, and you can scoff at that description until you taste it

So far today I have eaten:

• two unbelievably delicious eggs that my new friend D. gave me from her very own chickens (thanks, D.!), fried sunny-side up in a little California-produced olive oil I bought at my local overpriced grocery store, with two pieces of cornbread toast
  
• a bottomless cup of wild berry plum green tea (not as fruity as it sounds)
• a tangelo from the same farm I bought from today (though this was the last one from last Tuesday's run)
• a navel orange I bought Saturday at the Ferry Building in San Francisco while on a farmers-marketing date
• an old, old apple with some peanut butter smeared on it

My friend J. (a different friend J. from the one who requested the diary...maybe I'm going to have to start making up names for my friends) is coming over for dinner; my plan is for us to roast a bunch of veggies (the cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and potatoes I bought today, along with a sweet potato and some broccoli I already have) and eath them with rice and maybe some tempeh. But who knows? We might make a tofu curry, some beans n' greens, or something else—or we might go out. Stay tuned.