New Recipes for a New Year of Eating Local

This Week at Our Prince William Market
Sunday 10:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Bristow Commons
Bristow Montessori School Parking Lot
9050 Devlin Rd.
Bristow, VA 20136
Map

Welcome to our new location this week! We are going all out to encourage you to visit us at the site of the future Bristow Commons center. The Walgreens on the corner should be opening soon, and the Montessori School, which is already operating, will be providing its parking lot for our market while the rest of the center is built this year.

The Montessori School will also hold an Open House this Sunday to introduce the school to the community during the market hours, so please take advantage of the opportunity to learn more about this wonderful resource in your community.

Our vendors (a full list is here) will be out in full force this Sunday, and we have a couple of surprises for you too. Free coffee and hot cocoa will be provided, and our balloon lady will be on hand to keep the kids happy.

And next week, January 15th, our demo diva, Annie Sidley, who was the star of the market last year at Reston, Oakton and Fairfax Corner, will bring her talent for teaching to Bristow. Bring the whole family for the free demonstration of cooking local even in winter from 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.

Heritage Kettle Korn will be with us as will Blue Dog BBQ, so if you miss Sunday dinner to combine a visit to the market with a visit to the school, you can take lunch home with you — and a great low-fat, high-fiber snack too!

We may not be a supermarket in the winter months, but we are still a super market! See you there!

From the Market Master

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone, and I must say that I hope at least one of your resolutions pertained to buying more local food this year and cooking more of it yourself.

One of my Christmas gifts was the new book by farmer and activist Joel Salatin titled Folks, This Ain’t Normal. In this book, he describes in sometimes frightening detail how far removed from natural, normal farming our present food system has strayed with the blessing of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the support of our tax dollars. I was particularly amazed by the data in a small chart which compared the nutrient content of eggs from his own pastured chickens at Polyface Farm to the USDA standard for supermarket eggs. This comparison would hold for just about any free-range egg you would buy at a farmers’ market this year.

The numbers for vitamin E, vitamin A, beta-carotene and Foliate were many times higher for his eggs, and the measured amounts of cholesterol and saturated fat were much less. In fact, it was a little hard to believe that the measurements were for the same food, especially since the USDA would like us to believe that all eggs are pretty much the same. What this means is that in this country 98 percent of us are now buying and consuming thin-skinned, elliptical replicas of real eggs that seem to be good only for overdosing us on cholesterol.

This is also similar to the differences between industrial milk, which has been pasteurized to kill all of the good bacteria we need and homogenized in a way that breaks down its cell structure, and the less-processed milk you can legally buy at a farmers’ market in this state. Which reminds me — you may have read already that I now call commercial or industrially produced milk “milk product.” It is simply no longer the good-for-you fresh milk by the time it reaches the grocery store.

Salatin’s book inspired me to do even more to encourage all of you to buy more local produce and meats throughout the year, if for no other reason than to make up for the nutrients we are losing when we are forced to buy some items from the grocery store in the winter. Most of the dairy, vegetables and meats in the store are not really food anymore, and even the baked goods and prepared foods are so “stabilized” by chemical additives that they too have lost their wholesomeness on the way to the supermarket shelf.

From now on with each weekly post, I plan to pass on to you a new recipe to try. These recipes — some of which will be from my other new books — can all be made with mostly local ingredients and can provide a perfectly delicious, truly healthful and reasonably priced evening meal. If you can promise to serve at least one more home-cooked meal a week this year, that will be a great first step to a healthier lifestyle and maybe lead you to the second step — we’ll get to that one and more as the year unfolds.

This week’s recipe is for a New Year’s skillet saute. Next week I am going to talk about chicken — one of those things you can buy all year long at a market somewhere fairly near you in the winter months. And if you have any ideas of your own or recipes to share, please join the fun! Leave a comment here or email me at jean@smartmarkets.org.