I was under the Zaklan Heritage Farm tent and my $40 budget was fast dwindling. I had $6 allotted to spend on fingerling potatoes. The German butter potatoes of the week before were so melt-in-your-mouth good, we wanted to see how the fingerlings would compare. I didn’t want to go over budget, and I didn’t want to go under. I wanted $6 exactly.

I grabbed a handful of the potatoes and put them on the scale. I was under budget. For two to three minutes more, I kept running back and forth adding one potato at a time. When I surpassed $5, I methodically searched the pile and removed the smallest ones to bring the cost back down. Courtney, the woman behind the Zaklan cash table, couldn’t help but laugh and tease me every time I changed the amount on the scale. She didn’t roll her eyes, she didn’t get exasperated, she thought it was pretty silly, but she was willing to appease me, especially given there were no others behind me.

This is a regular occurrence for me. I’ve done it with English snap peas, green beans, pickling cucumbers, broccoli, and more at various tents.

I would never do this at the grocery store, or even the local mom and pop vegetable stand.

What’s different?

The farmers.

The market is not a quick in-and-out shop for me, and I don’t want it to be. I enjoy the relationships that I have built with our farmers. I enjoy the casual chit chat, and education they give me nearly every week. These farmers are so invested in their vision, it’s not put on the backburner for a quick sale.

They want you to be happy. They want you to be more than satisfied with their products. They go the extra mile. They give you $1.50 worth of green beans when all you’ve got to spare is 60 cents. They round down, not up. They tell you, in depth, about what they’re growing, how they’re growing it, and why they’re growing it in a specific way. They work with you.

They even put up with your odd idiosyncrasies (see above).

It’s not just me they’re doing this for. I’ve seen it done countlessly for others as well. Just last week, a shopper was standing before all the fresh Okanagan fruits at the Harvest Direct stand. She didn’t want a basket of just one fruit, she wanted a little bit of everything. So, she asked. Ask and you shall receive: Param made her up a $10 basket that included apples, peaches, plums, and apricots. He didn’t look put out at all. In fact, he asked if there was one fruit in particular that she’d like more of than the others.

Beyond local, it is service like that that makes me keep wanting to come back for more.

It makes a difference.

This week’s loot:

Zaklan Heritage Farm

• 1 bunch pizzo mustard greens $3
• 1 bunch mizuna mustard greens $3
• 1 bunch radishes $2.50
• 1 bunch rainbow carrots $3.50
• 1 garlic $2.85
• 2.04 lbs fingerling potatoes $6

Ripple Creek Organic Farm

• 1 cucumber $1
• 1 GIANT head red-leaf lettuce $3.50

Harvest Direct Farms

• 1 basket plums $5
• 1 basket sunrise apples $5

Fresh Quality Produce

• 2 zucchinis $1.5
  1 bag of green beans $3

Total spent: $39.85

The mustard greens made their way into 5 dinner salads and 4 lunch salads with leftovers for the week ahead. The red leaf lettuce was so huge, as of Wednesday afternoon, its leaves were still filling the salad spinner. There were six carrots that were used in both salads and snacks. The bunch of light pink radishes, which had a mighty kick, were allotted mostly for side dishes and salads, and were still abundant as of writing this post. The small dark purple plums were a burst of tartness that we ate on their own, in salads, or mixed in berry fruit bowls. The sunrise apples were a combination of sweet and tart, and were the perfect snack-sized apple. We grilled the green beans, zucchini and fingerling potatoes.

When I asked about the fingerling potatoes, I was told they were somewhat similar to the German butter potatoes. And when I heard that, I translated it as being exactly the same.
They were not.

When grilled, the German butter potatoes were a rich, melt-in-your mouth smoothness on the inside, yet crispy with a touch of sweetness on the outside. The fingerlings were not. I felt they were more starchy in taste, and the inside was more of a mealy texture, the kind you get from regular old potatoes.

I guess once you’ve had German butter, no other compares.

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Originally published on local blog Tenth to the Fraser, The Farmers Market Challenge, written by Katie Bartel (and the odd guest star) seeks to challenge the notice that you can’t get hardly anything for $40 at the farmers market. Each market, Katie explores what’s the best deal, and discovers food she’s never heard of. 

We eat a lot of chicken.

In fact, our grocery shopping is often dictated by the store that has the best price on boneless and skinless chicken breasts that week.

Until last week we had shunned Rockweld Farm chicken truck at the market. Too expensive we thought.

We are of no illusion about the chicken we consume. Sure, the food chains may promote their chicken as “grain-fed,” or “free-range,” but anyone who’s ever watched 60 Minutes or W5 knows those terms are often interpreted very loosely.

At Rockweld Farm we’re assured it’s the real deal.

But is it worth the premium price?

Two decent-sized frozen breasts cost us almost $19. Each was individually wrapped and they were placed in a zip-top plastic freezer bag.

When they thawed, the difference from grocery store chicken was immediately apparent; there was no pool of gross, slimy pink liquid pooled in the plate.

For comparison, we also decided to grill a chicken breast from the grocery store.

Each was prepared identically for our peasant’s dinner of chicken and grilled vegetables — a little olive oil, sea salt, garlic powder, sesame seeds and fresh rosemary.

On the plate, the difference between the Rockweld breasts and grocery store breast was still apparent; the Rockweld breasts looked just a little tighter. Cutting into the meat, the grocery store breast flopped around while the Rockweld chicken retained its shape.

But it’s when the chicken hit the mouth it would really count.

The Rockweld chicken had a bit more flavour, but the meat was also drier.

The latter could probably be remedied by adjusting the time on the grill. But, in our opinion, the former wasn’t significant enough to justify the bigger expense, especially considering how much chicken we eat.

I guess it comes down to what you value the most; if you want to know the farmer and have a level of assurance that the chicken you’re eating lived decent lives before they ended up on your plate, the premium price for Rockweld’s chicken is worth it. But in our household at least, we’re going to keep checking those grocery store flyers for the best deals.

Market Loot

Rockweld Farm

• 2 large chicken breasts $18.35

Zaklan Heritage Farm

• 1 head specialty bred salanova green spiky lettuce $2.50
• 1 head purple coloured lettuce $2.50

Ripple Creek Organic Farm

• 2+ pounds German butter potatoes $5
• 1 cucumber $1

Ossome Acres

• 1 bunch of collard greens $3

A Bread Affair

• 1 butter croissant $3.50

Fresh Quality Produce

• 4 yellow zucchinis $3

My mom and my sister accompanied me to the last market. When my sister picked up a few green zucchinis and told me she was going to bake no-noodle lasagna with them, I decided to give it a go too.

But instead of green, I got yellow.

Jeff at Harvest Direct told me yellow was believed to be sweeter than green, but looked somewhat skeptical at the theory. After tasting the cooked zucchinis, I, too, fell on the skeptical side. To me, they seemed more bitter than the green zucchinis I’d had of late.

The lasagna was a mess.

I had tracked down a recipe that had advised me to either grill or sweat the lasagna ahead of time due to its water content. I tried grilling a few batches of the thin slices, but they kept sticking to the pan or falling apart. So then I opted to sprinkle the remainder with salt and laid them flat over a colander for 20-30 minutes to try and suck as much of the water out as I could.

It didn’t work.

The lasagna was more a mish-mashed soup than a put-together, clean-looking meal. Albeit, a super tasty, mish-mashed soup though 🙂

My regrets with this meal was the timing. It’s not exactly soup season, nor is it a time to be turning the oven on – did you see the forecasted temperature for the week??? This was a meal suited more to winter than summer. But the problem is, we have all this super fresh zucchini, right. Well, why not slice it up, freeze it (according to this website, squash freezes well up to 10-12 months) and then a couple months down the road, throw it all together, and voila, a belly-warming soupish dish!

The delight of the shop, hands down, was the cucumber and the German butter potatoes. While the chicken, in my opinion, didn’t serve up enough flavour for the price point, the cucumbers and potatoes most certainly did.

The potatoes grilled were like butter in your mouth! They were caramelized crisp on the outside, and soft, flaky, warm on the inside. It was like eating French fries the way French fries were meant to be!

And the cucumber, my first bite was taken absentmindedly. I had been chopping up various vegetables for the dinner salad, and as is habit, I tasted each of them. When I took that first cucumber bite, the burst of flavour that filled my mouth, was incredible.

It didn’t taste like water, it had a firm texture along the skin, and every subsequent bite was super crisp.

The Ripple Creek cucumber cost $1. A long English cucumber at the local vegetable stand is $1.49, and I can tell you it does not have those same beautiful attributes.

Savings in price. Earnings in flavour. Win. Win.

In total, I spent $38.85 giving me a $1.15 extra to spend this week. The greens lasted 5 days (we eat a LOT of salads). We got two meals out of the potatoes. The collards gave us six individual wraps, that were used for both lunches and dinners. The chicken was one meal between the three of us. The cucumber lasted two days – it was that good! And the zucchinis gave our family about three meals, plus a couple of side dishes. There would have been more zucchini, but the grill catastrophe ate up one of them.

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Originally published on local blog Tenth to the Fraser, The Farmers Market Challenge, written by Katie Bartel (and the odd guest star) seeks to challenge the notice that you can’t get hardly anything for $40 at the farmers market. Each market, Katie explores what’s the best deal, and discovers food she’s never heard of.