Market madness

It time for the weekly brain teaser of trying to add up what I bought at Bailey Clinton and how much I spent. Today I went with my friend Lizzie so the totals may well be even higher than usual.

Lizzie and I operate in tandem and cannot resist a deal. Once we went in on a whole bushel of scratch and dent, use it or lose it winter squash. I think it was a bushel. It might have been two bushels. All I remember is that both of us went to our respective homes and crammed our ovens with this squash, that very day.

It all had to be roasted at once!

That was the year that Lizzie learned what we all learn sooner or later, that you can make pumpkin pie with butternut squash and it is just as good and nobody knows the difference. Perhaps it is even better! Because butternut squash is richer than pumpkin. In any event all Lizzie's Thanksgiving pumpkin pies were squash pies that year.

So, today's account.

Squash: $3.50. We actually found a half bushel for $7, down from the $10 most folks were charging.
It is acorn and butternut.

Zucchini: $3. We split a big quantity marked down because they were non-traditional vegetables, as they say at the Erie County Fair. Here is a picture I took at the fair of a non-traditional potato. My friend Ryan pointed out the non-traditional vegetables and I had to take a picture.

Back to my shopping. Apples: $5 for a half bushel. We split a bushel of drop apples, meaning kids pick them up from the ground. These were from Elaine the honey lady. She has her grandkids picking them to make money for Legos. The apples were two varieties whose names I love. They are Crispin and Ida Red.

Cauliflower: $5 for two. I could write an entire post on cauli because I bought the same amount last week and had tremendous fun with it.

Cabbage: A red cabbage ($2) will go great braised with those apples.

What am I up to? What did I miss?

Oh, $3 for nine beautiful big red and green peppers. Those are Bailey Clinton peppers at the top of this post! They were so beautiful I had to take a picture.

Two big eggplant for $1 each.

Corn, $2. Howard loves corn.

I think that is it. It adds up to $24.50. That is not too bad considering it will get me through the week and I am good to go now with squash and apples.

A river runs through it

Today, a mildly sticky river on the kitchen floor, from the fridge to the stove.

It can mean only two things, both good:

One, good thing I didn't wash the kitchen floor last week as I had hoped! Procrastination pays off.

Two, the river can mean only one thing:

The cider in the fridge is ready!

I bought this gallon of cider at the Clinton-Bailey Market a few weeks ago. You can get the unpasteurized kind there, the kind that ferments. The cider was leaking through the bottom of the plastic jug, hence the river. But the cider that remained in the jug is perfect, like champagne.

The peppy cider will sustain me as I work to tie up my project. I took a sip at 7 a.m. just to taste it and it felt delicious and illicit, like listening to Leonard Pennario playing a Nocturne first thing in the morning.

No Pennario nocturne on YouTube, alas. But there is this touching performance of a haunting Chopin waltz. I love how simply and perfectly Pennario plays it.



 Goes perfect with buzzy cider.

Taste and see!

A bag of bargains

Son of a sea cook, I fell behind posting! We just had Talk Like a Pirate Day, hence the expression.

The cat was the problem. I could not get to the computer where I usually checked in because it is in a room where the cat is not allowed. There is too much trouble for the cat to get into including scratching my Pennario records and eating my tapes.

Ergo, no Weblog. We remedy that today with a trip to the Clinton-Bailey Market.

I went with my friend Jacquetta. As I told her myself, she kind of cramped my style but that is a good thing. Un-cramped, I buy way too much stuff. As it was, I did manage to fill the larder to overflowing. I bought ...

$5 worth of tomatoes, actually a generous basket.

$3 for beets with greens attached. That is a treat I love.

$3 for cauliflower.

$2 for a big Savoy cabbage.

$2 for a green cabbage. I am always eating cabbage for I am a kraut.

$2.50 worth of apples. Meaning, I split a half bushel ($5) with Jacquetta. They are an apple I do not know if I have mentioned yet. They are Honeycrisp!

And they are delicious. I picked one out of the sack and then Jacquetta did and we were munching these Honeycrisps for the next hour or something. One apple is a meal!

I packed a lot of this haul into a red Savers bag and brought it home and as soon as I unpacked, the cat crawled in. He is our bargain cat and so he crawled into the bargain bag! That is our orange Tom at the top of the post. I caught him yawning.

The cat then lay down in the depths of the Savers bag and let it close over his head. And he went to sleep. And I worked on my book. Peace!

And catch-up time.

Finally.

Gone in 60 seconds

It is a challenge to use up everything I bought at Clinton-Bailey but I have made some progress. The cherries and strawberries kind of disappear on their own so, no problem there. And one thing I did was bake an apple cake for church. Above is a photo Howard took of me working on it.

I know, apple cake sounds so autumnal! But these apples are so crisp and iridescent green. Is there any pleasure in life like perfect, crisp green apples?

Anyway I wanted to do something with them.

And Sunday morning I woke up too early so I used that time to bake this apple cake out of All Recipes.

Save it for yourself because it is a great recipe. The folks at St. Anthony's are nice to me, always complimenting me on stuff, and probably they want to encourage further baking. But the fact remained, this cake was gone in record time. Gone in 60 seconds as I joked to Howard.

And it was easy to make! It felt good because I am reorganizing my Pennario project and I was really in the weeds with it that day and now here was a little project I could complete.

Being up early in the kitchen making this cake made me remember that Thanksgiving when I was up early baking and listening to that guy talking about porn. Wow, that was in 2009. How time flies.

 The things I have cooked and baked between then and now!

Suspense in the back yard

There is suspense because our apple tree is growing apples for the first time in forever.

There was one year it had apples and that was years ago! This year the apples are there and they are getting bigger and we are holding our breaths.

It is like a difficult birth. You do not want to smoke or drink or do anything that could possibly jeopardize these apples. The garage is falling down but the work is being put off so the apple tree will not be disturbed. I am thinking I should go outside with a boom box and play the apples Leonard Pennario playing Mozart. I want to give them the best of everything.

These are Goldman Delicious apples. Did I say Goldman Delicious? I meant Golden Delicious. Those are not the apples up above! That is a picture I took off the Internet. I do not want to take pictures of our baby apples. What if it was bad for them?

A prayer for our apple tree.