This Week at the Smart Markets Reston Farmers' Market

This Week at Our Reston Market
Wednesday 3–7 p.m.
12001 Sunrise Valley Dr.
Map

Ignacio Valencia will join us this week with a nice selection of early veggies and some lovely bedding plants for your own garden, including herbs and tomato plants that he has nurtured in his own greenhouse. This week we also welcome Fossil Rock Farm, who will have eggs, fantastic herbs, cut greens and lettuce, and more!

Tyson Farms will have enough asparagus for at least the first few hours of the market, but it does disappear fast. Shenandoah Seasonal will bring their wonderful spicy salad mix that will stand up with pride to those early beets and turnips and late carrots. I put together a great local salad with the leftovers of two amazing Angelic Beef porterhouse steaks and a variety of veggies available now, and the greens provided a lively and flavorful nest for everything.

We heard on Facebook that the BBQ and the Food Truck were big hits last week, and rest assured that they will be with us nearly every week all season long with just a few weeks off for vacation later in the summer.

It is so cool again this week that we may not see our other farmers for another week, but they may surprise us and will certainly join us next week. We do want them to wait until they can bring enough to pay for the trip. Two of our new vendors will not be with us this week because of other commitments made before they knew we would be opening so soon in April; watch for our gluten-free Yum Truck and No Bull Burgers to be with us next week.

Celtic Pasties will have Beef & Guinness, Cottage Pie Style, Colcannon, Cheese and Onion, Chicken Alfredo, and Chicken & Pineapple.

Remember to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to get the latest news — and even pictures!

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.