Summer Colors at the Farmers Markets

California is known for its agriculture, and its shining moment is definitely in the summer when the farmers markets are packed with all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables, along with tons of people out and about on a sunny weekend day.

Of course, heirloom tomatoes just scream summer. They're at their peak right now, and they look so juicy and ripe.

Summer squash can really turn into some beautiful gems with its marbling patterns. Plus, it's like sunshine on a plate.

I'm not a fan of eggplant, but I do love the purple color. At Chue's booth, they had four different kinds of eggplants, from Japanese to Chinese to Italian. Oops, I forgot the fourth one. Maybe it was Korean?

Grapes definitely say California to me, and although I'm more a fan of red flame seedless grapes, these black grapes look pretty classic.

I just enjoy wandering the farmers markets and just seeing bursts of color. This weekend the summer weather finally arrived, and just in time to spotlight all the amazing food here.

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Peppers at the Farmers Market

I was at the Grand Lake Farmers Market this morning in Oakland, and one of the farmers' stand had a table filled with these peppers. One side of the table were padron peppers and the other side were shishito peppers.

I fell in love with both varieties last year. They're best when just simply blistered in a pan with some oil and then just eaten warm. The Spanish Padron peppers are famous for being mildly sweet and then you get hit by a f-bomb when you bite into one that's super spicy.

Shishito peppers are the Japanese cousins of the Padron peppers, and I find them fairly similar in taste, except I feel their skins are a bit more waxy. I love them both so I would buy one basket of each one, mix them up in the pan as I blister them and just munch away.

Now, can you tell which ones are the Padron and which ones are the Shishito? Top or bottom? Find the answer in the comments section.

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Springtime Onions

I'm not a fan of onions, but I saw them everywhere at the farmers market last weekend. And while I don't really like to cook with them, I find them quite beautiful, from the pearly white bulbs to the intense purple.

What's interesting about the onions I saw at the farmers market was that many of them still had the green stalks on them, some almost a foot long. Some of the smaller bulbs with the long stalks could be green onions on steroids, but others had a huge bulb that looked like a full-sized onion. With the warmer weather approaching (one can dream, OK?), I bet some of these onions would be amazing on the grill. So how have you been enjoying your spring onions?

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Stubby Carrots from Marin Roots Farm

I've loved carrots since I was young. Maybe it's because I was born in the Year of the Rabbit. But I just love the crunch.

At the farmers market, I'm always amazed at the variety of carrots you can find. Just last weekend I spotted these stubby looking carrots at the Marin Roots Farm stand. What's interesting is that one bunch of carrots come mixed with yellow and orange carrots. How do they get them to grow duo-colored that way? (Oh wait, I just realized they probably just manually mixed the carrots. Ha! If they told me they grew that way, I would have totally believed it!)

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Hapa Ramen at Home at the Ferry Building

When I was off during the holidays, I took advantage of a free Thursday to check out the San Francisco Ferry Building farmers market and, in particular, the Hapa Ramen food stand.

I’m always looking for good ramen, but the reason for this visit was more than just a growling stomach. It was sort of a second parter to a visit to a Hapa Ramen pop-up earlier in the year. Some of you might recall (and some of you may have experienced it first hand), that pop-up in May was a major fail, partly because of the Twitter-generated crowds and partly (by Hapa Ramen’s own admission) some kitchen issues that affected the final results.

I didn’t want to just write off Hapa Ramen and its creator, Richie Nakano. So after Hapa Ramen finally launched at the Ferry Building farmers’ market, I wanted to see how the ramen tasted after settling in for a few months.

Nakano gained a following as a line cook at the popular Nopa restaurant and blogging about it at linecook415.blogspot.com. He developed the idea of ramen using quality ingredients from local sources over the last year or so, and now sets up show at the Ferry Building every Tuesday and Thursday as well as occasionally doing a pop-up service around town.

With his schedule, I’m not sure if he’s still working as a line cook at Nopa. He was, however, manning the ramen noodles station at his Hapa Ramen stand when I visited a couple of weeks ago.

Hapa Ramen serves up four different ramen options, with “the works” called the Big Daddy for $12. But that bowl includes fried chicken nuggets. So when I found out all the ramen bowls are the same size, I skipped the Big Daddy and got the pork belly ramen ($9) and added a farm-raised egg for another $1.

My bowl of ramen was filled with noodles, the extra egg, pork belly, some seasonal greens and a piece of nori on the rim.

The first thing I noticed when I took a bite of the noodles was that they were better than the first go-around when I tried Hapa Ramen at the pop-up and at this past summer’s San Francisco Street Food Festival. I recalled that the noodles needed a lot of work because they weren’t exciting in flavor or texture. But this time the noodles had a bit of spring to them and had a bit more flavor. And maybe because of the early Web chatter that this is a pretty pricey bowl of ramen, I did feel there were a lot of noodles in my bowl.

The other components were interesting if a bit mixed in success. The pork belly was tasty but the fat-to-meat ratio seemed to lean more on the fatty side. Not being a fan of fat, this made me crave the tender slices of cha siu pork I’d find at traditional ramen shops. The seasonal use of delicata squash added a nice sweetness to the overall ramen, but I also found the broth to be less rich than in the past. The egg was cooked to a nice soft-boiled texture.

Overall, I enjoyed the ramen and it really hit the spot on a cold winter day. I think Hapa Ramen’s bowl of ramen has come a long way from those testing pop-up days. But I can also see how some may feel that the price is high compared to other solid bowls of ramen for equal or less price that actually come with a table and chair to sit down and eat. If Hapa Ramen wants to corner the high-end ramen market, it needs to deliver more unique toppings to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Hapa Ramen, every Tuesday and Thursday at the San Francisco Ferry Building farmers market from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. www.haparamensf.com

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Fabulous Fiberlicious Farro

An ingredient that I started noticing in restaurants lately is farro, a grain used often in Mediterranean dishes, especially hearty Italian soups. But in restaurants I’ve seen it also in salads and as a risotto, and I think it’s mostly because of its healthy features that make this whole grain popular.

I think because of its healthy aspect, I might have shied away from it thinking it might be boring. Then I saw a recipe in a magazine by Mario Batali for a vegetable farro soup. (First I had to find farro, and it’s not easy to find. Finally bought it in my own backyard at the Pasta Shop in Market Hall in Rockridge.) Although the soup turned out to be a bit bland, I fell in love with farro.

It had a wheat berry flavor that was nutty and filling. But really, it was more how farro made me feel. For the next few days, I felt like my whole digestive system was running smoothly. Not to be crude, but I just felt like I had my daily serving of fiber and then some.

So I decided to come up with my own soup recipe featuring farro along with some other ingredients I found at the farmers market. One of them was this brilliant orange fall squash. It’s huge and beautiful, and luckily the farmer sold it pre-cut in huge slices, so I bought one to add to the soup. And to make it even more healthy, I added curly kale, perfect for the season.

This soup is easy to make and quite filling, and just perfect for the rainy days we’ve been having lately. Enjoy!

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You Can't Beat Beets

This is the season of the root vegetables, and no root gets me rooting for it more than the beet. Yeah, they're kind of a pain to work with, and yeah, they stain your fingers, but when made fresh, they're soooo good. I'm a fan. I'm seeing a lot of beets at the farmers market recently, like this colorful chiogga beet that has that interesting design in the center. These particular beets are pretty nice when thinly sliced and blanched and then added to a salad. I have to start cooking more with beets now that they're plentiful.

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Exploring Fort Mason's Farmers' Market

Last weekend when I was gorging on chocolates at Fort Mason, I ran into its weekly farmers' market in the parking area. I never realized they had a farmers market, but it shouldn't be a surprise since we live in the Bay Area where there's a new farmers' market in virtually every neighborhood these days.

The Fort Mason market happens every Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. It launched during the summer and is now year round, so you can visit it any time you like during the year. (If the weather's drying out Sunday, you can head out and stock up for your Thanksgiving dinner with a lot of fall fruits and vegetables and apples, pears, persimmons, beets and all sorts of squash.)

The market was especially crowded when I was there last week, and it looked like a hearty crowd despite being smaller than most other markets around town. There were some regular market sellers like Scream Sorbet and Roli Roti, but I also noticed some different stands unique to this market.

It's kind of out of the way for me, but was totally convenient when I was at Fort Mason for an event. It's seems perfect for the Marina crowd, as can be seen by the cyclists and joggers stopping by to check out the goods. They probably can grow with a few more prepared foods vendors, but it's definitely a nice emerging market.

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Seen At The Market: Chilies

Saw this at the Grand Lake Farmers Market recently. I've never seen a big bunch of chilies like this. Usually they're all dried up and ready to be made into chili powder, never this fresh and red. Looks like the perfect decoration for Christmas huh?

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Goodbye to the Season's Figs?

I saw these figs yesterday at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco (which BTW was beautifully sunny instead of the stupid rain this morning). The ones in the front are called "Candy Striped" and they were sold at the Capay stand for $8 a basket, a bit more expensive than the more traditionally looking figs in the back.

What was interesting is that there was a sign saying this week was the last week for figs. Really? Already? That was a fast fig season. Or maybe it's just the last week for the candy stripes. Either way, I have to get myself some more figs while they last.

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I’m Calling it Chinese Okra

Sometimes I wish my Mom was better with technology. Because if she were, I could send her a photo to her mobile phone of this squash I saw at the farmers market and ask her to identify it.

This long and almost prickly squash was a vegetable my Mom cooked often when I was a kid, so I had a craving for it when I started seeing them at the various Asian vegetable stands at the Civic Center Farmers Market. It’s kind of like a huge okra because it has the same texture on the outside and the same squishy interior. It also has the same reaction to heat like okra, becoming a bit glutinous when cooked.

My Mom used to make this with clear rice noodles with some shrimp paste, and it would be a real comfort dish because of the mushy squash. This isn’t a dish I think most kids would like, but I was kind of weird and liked all sorts of vegetables growing up.

After describing this to my Mom over the phone, she says it’s a jeet gua (“gua” is the Chinese word for all squash, and I’m not sure what “jeet” means and I’m just spelling it phonetically so not even sure if I’m close to the correct name). So basically, I’m just going to call this Chinese okra until someone else out there gives me the proper name. Hope my Asian brothers can help me out! (UPDATE: I told my mom about the reader comments that this is a see gua and she says they're right and she thought I was talking about something else when she said "jeet gua." I think "jeet gua" is the squash with the slight fuzz on the exterior. I am not cooking with that!)

Now to eating it. Even though my Mom says to cook it by itself or with cellophane rice noodles, I felt that would be too bland. Instead, I felt the bland squash (it really is tasteless like okra) needed to be countered with something bold and spicy, so I decided to make this somewhat spicy ground pork dish below. This was really easy to make, quick and really hit the spot. It was kind of like a Northern Chinese dish, but I’m pretty sure it’s not that authentic so I don’t want to call it that and have people call me out on it! (You know you want to “anonymous”!)

Even though I call this Chinese okra because it reminds me of it, you can’t eat the skin like you can with okra. You have to peel it off, and it might seem weird peeling it because of the sharp ridges, but once you peel down the ridges, it’s no problem peeling the rest of the skin. It’s just a big squirmy to hold because the interior is soft like a sea cucumber. Enjoy!

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Organic Beets at Temescal Farmers Market

Look at these huge organic beets I saw last Sunday at the Temescal Farmers’ Market. Don’t they almost look like sweet potatoes?

I’m really getting confused about what’s in season these days. A few weeks ago I found a ton of figs, which is typically a fall fruit, and now I keep seeing beets in the middle of summer when I thought they’re a root vegetable and most root vegetables are plentiful in the fall or early spring. I guess it’s the wonders of California. But since it’s at the farmers market, I can be sure it wasn’t shipped in from Chile. So I guess I should stop wondering and just enjoy the summer’s bounty.

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Special Eggs at Farmers Market

If Easter was yesterday, it would have been such a beautiful day instead of the gloomy one we have this morning. Oh well, I was out at the Grand Lake Farmers' Market on Saturday morning and they had a special egg hunt going on. However, I was at the tail end of the hunt, so most of the eggs were grabbed up by the greedy kids. (Just kidding, I love the little munchkins.)

But I was still able to spot some eggs that weren't grabbed up yet as I walked around. And I know what you're thinking: No, I did not bring that one blue egg and shoot it in different spots. Those really are different blue eggs and I just found them that way!

Hope you're all enjoying your day despite the weather. Happy Easter!

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Breakfast by the Bay

Yes, the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market can be a scene, crushed with young hipsters in their designer jeans and camera-toting tourists snapping away at some bell pepper. But this Saturday market is popular for a reason.

Along with the bountiful selection of fresh produce, flowers and baked goods, the farmers market provides one of the best views for brunch with outdoor seating facing the Bay Bridge (the pretty side).

The food options that line the side of the market facing the water can create some crazy lines, but often they’re so worth it. With a couple of new additions (namely Namu and Ryan Farr 4505 Meats), eating at the market got even more creative.

Spring is around the corner. So are endless days of sunny weekends (fingers-crossed). This just adds up to more people enjoying brunch at the farmers market. Here are just some of the breakfast scene at the Ferry Plaza that I took last Saturday. Notch this down as one of the reasons why we’re lucky to live in the Bay Area.

Home fries cooking on a skillet at Rose Pistola booth.

Kim chi fried rice. (Optional: Add an egg on top to make it more like breakfast food.)

Coffee drips at Blue Bottle booth.

Ryan Farr working the grill.

Raw/vegetarian options.

Longest line was at Roli Roti for the porchetta sandwiches.

The aforementioned view.

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