No, I'm Not Going to the Market Today

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For some odd reason the husband/lover/breadwinner stated last night that I should plan on going to the local weekly Farmer's Market today.  Although I've enjoyed going there many Wednesdays in years past, and in fact made it a regular outing with my children when they were young, now, without any pack mules children to carry all my bags, cantaloupes, watermelons, and corn on the cob, it seems more like work than fun.

Not only that, but as the market has grown over the years, and people are coming from farther and farther away, the parking situation is a serious issue.  A patron can circle around for quite a long time before finding a space, and there's no guarantee it will be anywhere within a comfortable walking distance from the produce stands.

Added to all of that, the weather people are forecasting today to be the hottest day of the summer, with very high humidity.  No thank you.  I'll be staying home in my comfy air conditioned home.  Yes,  I'm a wuss like that.

So, no.  I'm not going to the market today.

Instead, I'll just be thinking of fruits and vegetables.

I'll be thinking of the last time I tried a new vegetable recipe, to be exact.

I used to hate asparagus, or at least thought I did.  I have a particular childhood memory of a night my mother served the family asparagus.  With one quick look, I disqualified it from my "Acceptable to Eat"  foods list, and not one bite was taken.  I seem to remember some sort of standoff between my mother and me in which we both decided we would win "this battle."  To this day I'm not sure who won, but I do remember the skirmish and it wasn't pretty.

Recently I bought a bunch of asparagus, and using a simple recipe I had found on Pinterest, the grandtwins Tori and Brianna helped me prepare some asparagus for that evening's dinner.  They had never experienced asparagus, and at first when I told them what we would be making, one of them asked, "Why would we want to eat a sparrow?"

I started by having the girls cut off the tough ends of the pieces.  They had told me their daddy doesn't let them use knives yet, but I told them things are different with Germalls, and so they carefully used dinner knives to cut off the ends.  No fingers were lost or puppies harmed in the making of this recipe.

They put the asparagus, ends trimmed, into a large ziploc bag.

Into the bag each girl added a squirt or two of olive oil, a spoonful of minced garlic (the kind in a jar), and some salt and ground black pepper.

The bag was zipped closed and then each girl shook the bag for about 15 seconds.  We put the bag into the refrigerator to keep until dinner time.

When it was nearly time to eat, the spears were spread onto a cookie tray and baked at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Delicious.   I will be making asparagus again, and possibly even exploring other recipes using it.

The other good thing is that I have learned to eat a new vegetable now.

Just don't tell my mother, please.