Our Saturday morning trips to the farmer’s market have recently fallen out of favor. As the kids have gotten older they enjoy it less. Neither of them can get excited about buying food that we’ll cook later, and Patrick doesn’t even like most of the treats available to eat right away. (He’s so averse to trying new food that I couldn’t even convince him to try a macaroon.) The school soccer season dealt the death blow, as the Saturday games made it impossible to plan a leisurely Saturday trip to the market.
So it was a bit of a surprise that we wound up at the farmer’s market this past weekend. The stars lined up: No big weekend plans and weather nice enough for bike riding.
The only drawback to biking to the farmer’s market is the 150 foot climb between our house and the upper University District. Riding solo it’s enough uphill to make me think about it. With kids, it means riding an extra 2 miles to make the incline easier to manage. But when we bike we don’t have to worry about parking, and there’s plenty of room on the Xtracycle to bring food home.
I enjoy the winter farmer’s market. It’s less crowded. And honestly I don’t like vegetables that much. The winter market has less of the leafy greens and thus a greater concentration of the stuff I do enjoy: Meat, honey, pasta, and the food stalls. And did I mention that there’s now local beer and wine for sale at the market?
It seems there’s always something interesting to see at the market, too. This week it was a didgeridoo, which Alex loved:
And then the most hipster thing ever. A gentleman armed with a small table and a typewriter writes poems on demand: “Your topic, your price.” The boys couldn’t resist, and they each commissioned a poem. Alex’s poem about raccoons wasn’t too bad, but Patrick’s “red fox” poem was drivel. (It turns out it’s hard to write a poem when you know nothing about the topic, and Patrick couldn’t provide any red fox facts to help the author out.) Literary merit aside, the boys really liked having something written just for them.
The bike ride home was shorter, faster, and downhill. We brought home a small bag of things I like to eat: Pasta, carrots (which we turned into soup… yum!), and the like. Not a single leafy green. I don’t know if we’ll be restarting regular trips to the farmer’s market, but it was good getting back.