This Week at the Smart Markets Oakton Farmers' Market

This Week at our Oakton Market
Saturday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Hosted by Unity of Fairfax Church
2854 Hunter Mill Rd.
Oakton, VA 22124
Map

Our demo chef Annie Sidley wanted me to let you know how much fun she had cooking at the market last week and seeing so many familiar faces. Here is her Hollandaise sauce recipe as promised. She will visit again in May and hopefully monthly throughout the summer.

Ignacio’s Produce will not be with us this week. They are celebrating his daughter’s quinceañera. Once he returns, he will be here every week with more and more of those lovely veggies and some berries from the Northern Neck of Virginia. In the meantime, Heritage Farm has added new lettuces and baby bok choy to their shelves, and they will bring more of that great lamb Merguez sausage that Annie cooked. Tyson Farms will have lots more asparagus, and we will have lots more asparagus recipes, too.

We are hoping to have Whim Pops back this week — we’ll let you know on Facebook if we can.

With our Taste of Local food truck and Fat and Happy BBQ, we now have two high-quality and creative prepared-food vendors for your dining pleasure and take-home entertaining. Owl Run Nursery had a good day last week too; they look forward to helping you brighten up your lawns and gardens throughout the planting season.

Celeste will be back with us this week with her own little country store: fabulous Fabbioli Vineyards wines, home-made soaps, llama wool, and maybe some of her great jellies.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

It should come as no surprise that writer Michael Pollan, who often writes about food, is also a good and serious cook — serious because he cannot help but connect his own adventures in the kitchen to the important issues he writes about most of the time. His new book, Cooked, is on the shelves this week and apparently flying off of them (yea!). In it, Pollan tells us about his own mastering-the-art journey at the feet of some of this country’s best chefs and cooks.

The following is an excerpt, and though I have tried many times over the last five years to say this, nobody says it better:

At a certain point in the late middle of my life I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same.

Cook.

Some of these questions were personal. For example, what was the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being? And what would be a good way to better connect with my teenage son? … Other questions were slightly more political in nature. For years I had been trying to determine (because I am often asked) what is the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food system, to make it healthier and more sustainable? Another related question is, how can people living in a highly specialized consumer economy reduce their sense of dependence and achieve a greater degree of self-sufficiency? And there there were the more philosophical questions, the ones I’ve been chewing on since I first started writing books. How, in our everyday lives, can we acquire a deeper understanding of the natural world and our species’ peculiar role in it? You can always go to the woods to confront such questions, but I discovered that even more interesting answers could simply be had by going to the kitchen.

Amen! I can’t wait to read this book. I am sure I will be quoting it and elaborating on it for the next few weeks.