My local farmers’ market doesn’t open until the second week of April, but after a couple of nearly 70-degree February days I have started thinking a lot about those lovely Saturday mornings and the prospect of fresh vegetables. I try to arrive about 15 minutes before the market actually opens, so I have enough time to find a parking place that isn’t blocks away and take a reconnaissance stroll to see who’s selling what this week and where the Mennonite bakers are set up.

Our market is laid out like a dog bone: farmers’ stalls down the middle, with restaurant vendors and food trucks and the occasional jazz quartet at either end. And the rules are pretty strict – no stalls selling junk merch or T-shirts or timeshares or, worst of all, commercial produce. So that 6:45 a.m. stroll, when the day hasn’t had time to get hot and humid, and the farmers and their kids are still unloading the backs of the pickup trucks, when there are only a handful of other people also checking the layout with cups of coffee in their hands, is the best time to spot one-of-a-kind items like two boxes of baby cauliflower, or the season’s first tray of fingerlings from the nice young potato guy.

In early July, the Corn Family shows up – I know them only as the Corn Family because they have no sign but bring the same green pickups and a half dozen teenagers year after year – and everyone swarms their stand immediately. About the same time, the Tomato Lady arrives, setting up her booth at the southwest end, with the most beautiful fat Big Boys and Beefsteak tomatoes you could hope to see in this lifetime. There are other tomatoes to be found at the market, but none are as good as hers. The day she arrives, I load up on tomatoes and stop at the grocery on the way home to buy thick-cut bacon and a loaf of Pepperidge Farm white bread, and then we make absolute pigs of ourselves eating one BLT after another for lunch.

We mostly like to eat our vegetables plain, with not even butter or salt added. So it’s a little bit of a mystery why we have collected a lot of complicated vegetable recipes. They’re all tasty, but it is alarming how many of them involve hefty amounts of sour cream, mayonnaise, canned soup, or cheese. (Although I hear through social media that canned soup is now charmingly retro-vibe whatever and is again an acceptable ingredient.) All told, many of these we make for ourselves as treats, and eat plain vegetables the rest of the year.

Photo by Anne Preble on Unsplash