Vendors

Mercado Kitchen: Rustic Plum Tart

Posted on by Mission Community Market in Blog, Mercado Kitchen, Recipes, Twin Girls Farm | Leave a comment

Plums

When you visit the market, it’s hard to miss the crowd of customers tasting and buying a delicious variety of plums, pluots, and other stone fruit from Twin Girls Farm. Now’s a great time to get your plum fix while they are still in season through next month. Enjoy them now, or you’ll have to wait for their return next year in late spring!

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Plums work beautifully in a rustic tart, also known en Francais as a galette. Flaky tart dough wrapped around colorful plums makes a striking dessert sure to get oohs and ahhs from your family and friends. Oh, and it’s also tasty and surprisingly simple to make! While plums are highly recommended, you can substitute almost any fruit in this recipe and customize your galette according to what’s in season.

The full recipe is after the jump. Happy baking!

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Steamed Frijoles de Vara

Posted on by Mission Community Market in Blog, Mercado Kitchen, Recipes, Terra Savia, Yerena Farms | 1 Comment

These Heirloom Beans from Yerena Farms are called “Frijoles de Vara.” This recipe was suggested by Sylvia of Yerena Farms and comes highly recommended by our Executive Director Rosi! If you like edamame, this is a fun way to steam a new kind of bean that makes for a great appetizer or snack!

If you can’t find this specific type of bean, you can substituting other varieties like cranberry beans, but be sure to check with the farmer to find out how much longer you should cook them– you’d probably want to steam for an additional 20 minutes with other varieties.

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Ingredients:

    • Frijoles de Vara from Yerena Farms
    • 1-2 Lemons
    • Salt
    • Pepper
    • Olive Oil from Terra Savia
    • Cayenne Pepper

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The instructions are very simple! Place the beans in a steamer with a few inches of water. Steam for 10-15 minutes. When finished, transfer beans to a bowl and drizzle with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, and cayenne. It’s that easy!

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You can shell the beans once steamed, but I recommend just eating them out of the shells like edamame. Enjoy the spicy, salty, lemony flavor that accents the delicious natural flavor of these heirloom beans!

A Fruit of a Different Color

Posted on by Mission Community Market in Arata Farm, Twin Girls Farm, Vendors, Winters Tree Fruit | Leave a comment

Last week we spotted some unique pomegranates at the Winter’s Fruit Tree stand. That’s right–the folks that bring you delicious varieties of nuts every week also have some delicious fruit to share!

While most of us are used to seeing the “Wonderful” variety of pomegranates (deep red in color, delicious and available from Twin Girls Farm and Arata Farm at MCM), Phil Carter of Winter’s tells us that these light-colored poms are coming off 60-year-old trees on his property–trees so old that he isn’t quite sure what variety they are. He says that these fruit (sometimes called “white pomegranates”) are a variety that most likely originated in the Middle East, as it’s much more common to see lighter pomegranates there.

The seeds are light pink in color–somewhat reminiscent of cotton candy–and the flavor is sweeter and more mild than their Wonderful counterparts, without any tartness at all.

This delicious pomegranate didn’t last very long at this taste tester’s house…and we’ll definitely be going back for more next week. And so should you!

 

Mercado Kitchen: Quince Ratafia Two Ways

Posted on by Mission Community Market in Arata Farm, Blog, Hale Apple Farm, Mercado Kitchen, Recipes | Leave a comment

Ah Quince, you perplexing fruit with a storied past. It looks like an apple or a pear, but don’t you dare take one bite of it raw! Supposedly, 17th Century cookbooks contain more recipes for quince than any other orchard fruit, so I wonder what cooks living hundreds of years ago knew that I don’t! But both Arata Farms and Hale’s Apple Farm have gorgeous quince right now at MCM so I decided to go ahead and give a new recipe a whirl.

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Tired of the usual jam and preserve recipes, I decided to try something that’s not for you teetotalers out there–an old-timey infused liqueur known as “ratafia” which is a name given to cordials made of different fruit, one varietal including quince. The recipe I adapted called for two quinces, but by the time I was finished grating the first one I had almost filled up an entire quart-sized jar. So I I decided to try two slight variations on the same recipe, using one fruit per jar. The main difference is that one recipe contains raw grated quince and the other contains chopped quince that I cooked down slightly. I’ll share the results with you in a few weeks when the infusion process is complete–though I feel confident both will probably be mighty tasty. The ingredients I used were the same for both recipes – these quantities will make you enough ratafia for about one quart-sized jar.  Read more

Mercado Kitchen: 3-Ingredient Pomegranate Pistachio Chocolate

Posted on by Mission Community Market in Blog, Mercado Kitchen, Recipes, Twin Girls Farm, Winters Tree Fruit | 1 Comment

This recipe was inspired by the arrival of pomegranates from Twin Girls Farm! Now, if you’re like me you’ve always had a love/hate relationship with pomegranates. They taste amazing but there’s the special challenge of getting at those delicious seeds. The juice gets everywhere, not to mention those funky thin membranes. But I’ve always found that if I just throw on my oldest stains-are-ok shirt and go along with it it pays off, because they’re just so good.

In addition to being delicious, the juice from pomegranates is chock full of health benefits, including high antioxidant power, benefits to cardiovascular health, and there is even some evidence of anti-cancer properties.

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