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Welcome to the new and improved Carano's Cucina. I make a lot of kick ass food and go out to some amazing restaurants. Take a look around and make yourself at home :)

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Oh Farmer's Market, I Love You So

This past Saturday, Nick and I finally made a trip down to the Countryside Farmers Market at Howe Meadow. This time of year, Northeast Ohio is full of neighborhood weekly farmers markets and I love it! And this was one of the best ones I've been to. It was huge, with at least 20 stands, I'd say. If you live here and aren't going to these amazing markets with locally grown produce, what's wrong with you!? Just look at all the great stuff I got this week. First up, this crazy big garlic.



It's huge, and the guy who sold it to me couldn't have been nicer, telling me how he grows it. You should see my garlic this year... it's teeny tiny. In fact, I'll show you a comparison between his and mine. My sad little garlic is on the right, obviously.



I still have some in the ground, but I'm not expecting it to get much bigger. We planted in Spring this year, which we will never do again. In fact, I never thought you could plant garlic in the Spring, but in April as we were walking through Lowe's they had packages of garlic for planting, so we decided to give it a try. Hey if Lowe's has it, it has to work right? Well no, not necessarily. So we will, from now on, be Fall garlic planters and hopefully it will be more like this one!



To much great joy, one of the stands had Italian Zucchini. Now I like all zucchini, but I particularly love this variety. It's less seedy and has more flavor. You can tell the Italian variety by it's lighter green color and the ridges that run along it.




Picked up some lovely yellow squash too.



Some of my fave Cubanelle peppers.



And just had to get some of these purple scallions.



I'd never seen them before and damn if they aren't pretty! I also picked up some blues (deep purple potatoes that I forgot to take a picture of). So all this cost me $14, with the potatoes being the most expensive at $4. Not too shabby! Support your local farmers. You won't be sorry!

Now what am I going to make with all this great stuff? Well that will have to be another blog :)

2 comments:

SwtAprl5 said...

Do Farmers Markets have meat products too, or just produce?

Kathy said...

They do actually have meat too. But we never seem to come prepared for that (with cooler at the ready). They also have people there selling baked goods too.