First weekend out and I'm already tardy due to domestic and social chaos. But I did make it to the market. The fall fruits and vegetables have started to arrive, but alas, they did so at the same time as a mini-heatwave, so the idea of making anything with squash when it was 85, was fairly horrible, so my shopping remained in the summer-vein. Where my memory allows, I've included the name of the stand from which the product was purchased:

blueberries (Fantasy Fruit Farms)
cantaloup (Hoeffner Farms)
red salad onions
red cippolini onions
yukon gold potatoes
red new potatoes
grape tomatoes
radishes
cilantro
cucumbers
ricotta cheese (Tonje's Dairy)
eggs (Quattro's Game Farm)

Saturday's Recipes

I mentioned the social chaos of the weekend, but I should explain: My husband came home late Friday night and announced that his grandmother's birthday celebration on Sunday was not going to be at her favorite restaurant as planned, but instead would be brunch at her house in the Bronx and I needed to make "something sweet". Not only that, but also we needed to go to his production partner's for dinner Saturday night and it would be great if we could bring her husband's favorite appetizer. I'd planned on having all day Saturday for chores and my first creation for the blog. In the end I made three things, but none were even half as complex as I'd planned.

Cantaloup Radish Salad with Mint

1/2 cantaloup cubed
3 large radishes thinly sliced
1 bunch Kentucky Colonel mint finely chopped (from my deck garden, plant from Silver Heights Farm)

All of the above tossed together with a little black peppper made for a really tasty and energizing breakfast accompaniment to rolls.

Richard's Favorite Mango Salsa
I know, mangoes aren't regional, but I said from the beginning the market goods would be enhanced by and occasionally enhance other things. Non-greenmarket items will be italicized.

1 pint grape tomatoes quarterd
1/2 red salad onion diced
1 T chopped cilantro
1 T lemon juice
2 medium mangoes cubed
1 clove finely chopped garlic
salt and pepper

Toss all the ingredients together and allow to sit out at room temperature for a couple of hours so the flavors blend.

I've made this recipe at least a dozen times and it's always different due to not only variations on my part (cilantro v. parsley, garlic v. cumin) but to the characteristics of the produce itself. This time around the tomatoes were the biggest factor, I like using grape or cherry tomatoes because I don't like salsa to be runny, however they're usually incredibly sweet. These tomatoes weren't sweet at all, but intensely tomatoey--almost as strong as tomato paste--and thus it was really savory with just a little bit of sweet bite from the mango.

Lemon Olive Oil Cake with Lemon Ricotta Cream and Blueberries

The cake was a dairy-free (thanks to my lactose intolerant sister-in-law) lemon chiffon that was in Gourmet a few months ago and can be found on Epicurious.com, so I won't spend a lot of time on that other than to say I used the Quattro's eggs (lots of 'em, separated, and blended several ways) and the whites meringued up like a dream. It wasn't bad, but it would've been a heck of a lot tastier if it'd been made with butter.

Lemon Ricotta Cream and Blueberries
1 pint fresh ricotta
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
1 t. vanilla
confectioners sugar to taste
milk to thin

1 pint blueberries

I used a stick blender to whip the first 5 ingredients together throughly to make sure all the lumps were out of the cheese and then returned the cream to the original cheese container. Once at his grandmother's, I sliced the cake into thin wedges and served with a dollop of the ricotta and a sprinkling of blueberries. It looked really impressive! The blueberries were not only a flavor contrast but a color contrast.

It also ended up being a really good dessert for people with very different tastes/dietary concerns. Everyone could choose how much ricotta cream or how many blueberries they wanted on their cake; or, in the case of my husband (who hated the olive oil taste of the cake) to have a bowl of blueberries with lemon ricotta cream on top.