My Shopping Trip: Buy Local Market on the Capitol Lawn

It was a beautiful day to spend my lunch break outdoors. It was also quite a nice day for eating ice cream so I did that too.

Chris and I went over the the market about 11:30 yesterday. I remembered the lunch crowd from last time so I wanted to get there a little earlier this time. I was really hoping this market would be bigger than the one in July. After all, its September and everything should be coming in to harvest, right?
But, it was a bit smaller. The family that owns Fortune House restaurant in Owosso was not there this time, I don’t think. I bought a bunch of Asian vegetables from them before. A few of the stands were quite large though.

We bought some super-sweet red peppers, a couple of banana peppers, a pint of ginger gold apples (my favorite), a pint of plums, a pint of crimini mushrooms and some cheese from Grassfields Cheese of Coopersville.

While walking around, we sampled pickled vegetables from Safie Foods. I’m not sure how much I like dill-pickled green beans. The sweet and sour pickles were good though. We didn’t buy any as our fridge is ridiculous right now and I know where to get them in the future. We also had some sweet potato bread. It was decent but I think Chris was put-off by the vendor reprimanding him because he didn’t use the little tongs to pick up his sample. Okay… well he did take the last piece so its not like he touched anything else.

And we had ice cream from Mooville. Chris had strawberry and I went for mint chip, which didn’t actually have chips in it. I’m pretty sure that was just luck of the scopp though. The bowls with one large scoop were just a dollar each and made quite a nice lunch appetizer. Mooville milk is available at L&Ls and the City Market. I think they have ice cream at the market too.

I hope to see events like this continue to happen in Lansing and other places in Michigan. There are a lot of small food-related businesses in this state that deserve our support and the opportunity to develop a name beyond their little local shops. When I lived in Metro Detroit, I often saw things on the grocery shelves that were locally produced. Go 60 miles and no one had any idea what you were talking about. Garden Fresh salsa was just a Ferndale company selling salsa in local Meijers. A quick glance at their website shows you how big they’ve gotten.

Farm Market Today!

Today is the day!

4th Annual Select Michigan Day Farm Market, to be held on the front lawn of the Capitol in Lansing.

I went to the Buy Local Day back in July and found some cool stuff including veggies I’d never seen before, like water spinach (which sauteed up quite nicely in a little sesame oil). I’ll be there about lunch time to load up my bags again. And this time, I’m taking more money and an assistant to carry the haul!

It looks to be a beautiful day for this event. Hope you can make it!

Farm Market update

As promised, I walked over to the Select Michigan Farm Market at the Capitol today. As luck would have it, my order from Amazon arrived via UPS this morning and I was able to use one of my new Baggu Totes to haul my goodies back to the office.

And goodies I got:

1 bunch baby bok choy
1 bunch biggest chives I’ve ever seen
1 bunch water spinach
1 bunch pea pod leaves (from snow peas)
pint of sweet cherries
4 ears sweet corn
pint of grean beans
a jar of Sicilian meat-topping sauce (tomat-y doesn’t have meat in it) from Nicky’s Family Recipes
A bar of lemon verbena hand-made soap by Kapow Soaps of from Frankenmuth.

All for about $20!

I think tonight’s dinner is going to involve some fresh picked sweet corn and then later this weekend, we’ll have a little Asian-themed dinner. I haven’t done stir-fry in ages!

The Market was apparently a big hit, from the volume of people there. I did go at lunch time and it was pretty crowded. Two places ran out of food before lunch was over: the Fresh Lake Whitefish Company (who are also at the Lansing CIty Market on Saturdays) and Sweetie-Licious Pie Pantry of DeWitt. I’ve driven by Sweetie-Licious before but did not realize they also have soups and sandwichs until I looked at that website. Now I want to go right now to have a Chicken Salad Sandwich followed by a Ginger Lemon Clover cookie.

I wish I’d had more cash on me because Farming for our Future had the cutest kids t-shirts. Of course, I probably need a kid to put said clothes on, too.

It will be exciting to see what more they can do for the September 18th event.

Support Local Agriculture- C’mon, you know you wanna!

On Thursday, you can attend a special Farmer’s Market on the lawn of the Capitol Building in Lansing. From 10 AM to 3 PM, you can buy fruit, veggies, flowers and more from 40 vendors. There will also be booths with information about where to find local foods.

Go HERE to find out more about other Select Michigan events planned for this year.

To get a printable brochure for Thursday’s event, click here (its a PDF).

See you Thursday!

Just a quick dash

While in Minneapolis last week, we had some really tasty sheep’s milk cheese purchased from a local cheese shoppe (more in a later post). Attempting to do something nice for my boyfriend, I thought I’d use my lunch to zip over to the Cheese guy at the Lansing City Market to see if they had this stuff (they didn’t but if I knew the actual name, could probably get it).

I would have walked, both to save gas and for the exercise but its 80 degrees with humidity near 90%; I really didn’t want to get that sweaty and the distance is such that I would have needed a pretty brisk pace to make it roundtrip in my hour break.

Ha.

After swinging by the postal boxes by the Capitol building, I planned to continue on to Grand Avenue. Turns out you can’t turn left there, at all, due to the CSO project. The CSO project will be tearing up city traffic until 2020. Long-term benefits are probably great but in the meantime, it sucks. Especially when the lane closures change from day to day. I turned around to go down Washington, not an easy drive at lunchtime and even worse when some spacy girl doesn’t know how to drive her stick-shift.

I finally get down to Grand and Shiawassee where I intend to slide over the bridge to the market. Except its closed! This time, due to Common Ground activities, which started last night. I thought this was an evening event so I was suprised to see the parking people already looking to collect fees. After yet another completely out of the way detour, I finally made it to the market.

No cheese but I stopped at the East Lansing Food Co-op mini-store and bought some whipping cream from Calder Dairy (in Lincoln Park) and a packet of sunflower seeds from Country Life Natural Foods of Pullman (near South Haven in Wester Michigan). As I’m paying, the manager asks if I had an trouble getting there due to the construction and rerouting. Ha Ha. She then tells me that a lot of vendors aren’t coming in this week since its too much hassle. And she was right. The fish people were gone, the local meat company was off until Friday and there were only a few fresh produce vendors in the East Wing.

Since Shiawassee was still closed, I had to find an alternate route back to the Hall of Justice. By the time it was all said and done, I should have just walked.

I’m really looking forward to using my cream in tonight’s dinner that will include morel mushroom risotto.