Standing at the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market, lines of people teem by with their market bags and baskets overflowing with the fall harvest. Our market is the kind of place where you comment to the stranger who’s picking over the big, fat green beans across the table from you, and say that even though they’re big, they’re tender, here, try a bite. And then you wonder out loud whether you should break them up or cook them whole, and the woman, who is wearing the most extravagant Sunday hat, with feathers flying off of it at least a foot from her head, says, in a sympathetic tone, “Oh, honey, you snap ‘em.” As in, how could you not know this basic cooking rule?
And I thought snapping beans meant just snapping the ends off, when it really means snapping them into bite-size pieces.
And then you see another neighbor who you thought would be the kind of person who would eat her green beans still crispy, and she admits that she likes them cooked to death, with bacon. The old-fashioned way.
This is how I get inspired to cook.
One stall this week has fresh black beans, with instructions on how to cook them (20 minutes, boiling). Wow, we eat a lot of canned or dried black beans, that’s something I’d like to grow. There are turnips and collards and carrots, too, bok choy and kale and onions, potatoes, four kinds of squash, pears and apples.
This is how I get inspired to garden.
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