Blog – Austin Farmers’ Market

Today I had fish tacos, one of my most favorite and simple dishes. I also added a side of sauted collard greens splashed with Texas Olive Oil’s True Love rose-infused balsamic vinegar. Best to keep the greens separate from the taco, though.

The taco is made this way: broil some of San Miguel Seafood’s snapper or grouper (end pieces, or belly flaps that are quite inexpensive and easy to peel away the flesh once broiled). Take the tender white meat and divide into small bite-sized pieces.

While the fish is baking, chop up fine whatever you have that is crunchy and tasty from the farmers market, e.g. carrots, cabbage, onion, squash, par-steamed green beans or broccoli, etc. and put it in little piles on a plate for loading up in the tacos.

Toast or just warm some organic corn tortillas (I don’t fry the tortillas because I want to keep this dish as healthful as possible).

Once the fish, veggies, and corn tortillas are done, then place the fish (about 1.5 oz) into a small tortilla, top with a mixture of the vegetables, then–the grand finale, top with the Rios Brazilian malagueta sauce. Repeat for one or two more tortillas.

I think I am going to go sparingly on the rose vinegar and think about what Mediterranean dish I can use with this–lamb perhaps. It’d be great for some type of sauce reduction.

While I can’t say that I spend every eating moment in the zen-like appreciation of the body’s connection with the food that I eat (after all, I have spent my lunch hours consuming soup or salad slurping away while I read the newspaper–just to get the stuff in me so that I can go back to work at my desk), it comes pretty close to self-awareness a majority of the time when I consume what will give me sustenance.

This love of food has landed me what I consider one of the best jobs on the planet, at least for me. I love being the Austin Farmers’ Market director, working with a team of passionate co-workers from Sustainable Food Center, and getting a payoff of helping dozens of farmers and food entrepreneurs make a living, which incidentally contributes to thousands of families living more healthily as they shop from the farmers.  

I do love food, and I do love cooking it from an untrained point of reference, but I think that in the past several years I have come to appreciate food more for its stories that it transfers from the grower to the eater. There are real people out in the fields, in the orchards, in the grasslands, who bring back an essence of their stories, their trials, their successes, in a whisper that’s captured in the delicate crunch on a carrot, or in the rolling over of a spicy pepper on your tongue.

We are making history…I don’t think any farmers market in Austin has been open from 8 am to noon on Saturdays other than the time when we tried it the first year, in 2003, for the Austin Farmers’ Market. Back then, we thought it was a good idea (in May, folks, when summer started typically in Central Texas) to have an earlier morning market. Many shoppers stayed in bed until a little later.

That was before the Food, Inc. film, Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma (and subsequent In Defense of Food), Super Size Me, and many other mass media appeals to human sensibility to eat more of what nature gives you–and not fall for the tantilizing food industry’s manufacturered “tastes” largely constructed of atoms of fat, salt and sugar with a binding of genetically modified corn holding it all together.

Just as the Austin Farmers’ Market has grown up, you as consumers have too. There are the stalwarts who have always known (and who have for seven years come to the market when the first clang of the market’s opening bell rings). And now there are more. You are the newly awakened body of tasters who truly taste, who truly enjoy the art of eating from local sources. You understand the intricacies of what makes a sustainable food system, including your part in it.

We appreciate that–and we want to make it easier for you to participate in a year-round routine of shopping from the best sources, the farmers themselves. Thus the change of our Saturday hours to 8 am to noon, through October 24th. (We change back to 9 am – 1 pm October 31st, with the daylight savings time change, and will flip back to 8 am to noon in March, when it changes again).

We have experienced your commitment in the continued rise of attendance at the market over the years and now we think the time is right to be able to set a schedule for the Saturday market that fluctuates by the seasons. We did not think this was possible in the past, to have such an avid following that would take notice of changed hours mid-stream. But now we do. It is a new day….

We at the Austin Farmers’ Market are often compared with California, or Madison, Wisconsin, or Portland markets when people make reviews of the market’s value, in their opinion. The truth is–comparing Austin’s farmers market to others on the West Coast, in the Midwest or on the Eastern Seaboard is like comparing tomatoes to peppers. You can’t with fairness.

Firstly, there are fewer commercial level, mid-sized farms growing vegetables and fruits in Texas than in other states (that’s a farm in the several hundred to several thousand acre category); most farms in Central Texas are in the 20 acre size, and there are just a few of them compared with what there could be.

Second, we have fluctuations in weather that other growers don’t have. Already this first quarter in 2009 there have been 40-degree days immediately followed by 80-degree days several times. Coupled with hail and/or freezes during the night and in late spring, these rollercoaster weather patterns require farmers to replant, reseed, take a loss and definitely bring less to market than planned. Some farmers even retire or give up.

Also, the availability of land that is arable, has water, is reasonably priced, and is relatively close to the Austin epicenter is scarce. While this may be a fair comparison with California’s farms as well, the return on investment is not. More people shop more from farmers’ markets in California than in Texas, so a farmer investing in land close to San Francisco can stand to reap many more sales than in Austin (at least right now). Thus, there are less farmers that what you’d expect in a year-round market.

But, it’s only a matter of time. The markets that we are compared to are 15 to 20 years older than Austin Farmers’ Market. We are entering our 7th season this May. The markets that we love and support in the West, East, and Midwest most likely had only three dozen farmers and two dozen (or less) specialty food vendors in their first few years.

Finally, we established the market in a slice of time (2003) when we had obstacles of faltering economy post-9/11, a tech bust in a highly dependent tech town, and within just a few block’s proximity of the newly built headquarters and flagship store of the largest natural foods grocery chain in the world (Whole Foods). The older farmers markets came out in the late 80′s and early 90′s when they were the only game in town.

We have been growing exponentially in the last year (up 31% in sales, 17% in farmers), so give us time to catch up, invest in new farmers, figure out how to farm in severe weather and extreme drought, and capture more of your hearts to make us more like the favored markets from other locales in the U.S.

A grassfed beef farmer is cutting back on production and saving the heritage herd. . . farmers are using up to date technology to send water above ground in a semi-hydroponic system outside in the field . . . shade cloths go up over high tunnels rather than green houses’ clear plastic for early spring–it’s too hot.

Rather than lament over what could have been, farmers are adapting and producing in the face of adversity. The rain deficient Central Texas area is the worst that it’s been in in 50 years, and some say, since the Dust Bowl. Add to that the dilemma of the water rights issue that is being discussed in the legislative session right now (it’d take more than a mapquest search to determine all the turns and routes that either the ‘ground’ water or ‘surface’ take in their legal ramifications), high hay costs (to keep feeding grassfed animals grass), and ever rising costs in general in farming–seeds, compost, labor, energy–and you’ve got some very, VERY resilient folks that just want to feed the public good, healthy food.

Please let’s support them, even as we have to spend more money to buy local foods. It’s a tomato in hand to ward off an emergency room visit later in life because of diet-related disease. It’s almost to the point that it’s best for your health to know the name of your farmer rather than the name of your doctor. It’s building of social capital to have relationships with your friends and family while you cook daily meals. The stock that you build up in the area of local food assets will never drop in value and will never need a bailout.

A couple of weeks ago, I woke up at 3:30 am, dispairing that I did not have any free-range, organic, local chicken soup to feed my two sons, who had just fallen to winter colds and coughs. We had been to the local grocery store the night before to stock up on cough syrup, homeopathic cold remedies, etc.. I had had a civil argument (I hope it appeared civil to the other grocery store shoppers) with my youngest child about why I refused to buy a canned version of chicken soup (even organic) there.

The end point was, he felt I couldn’t ‘prove’ that conventional cans of chicken soup had bits of chicken in it that were from just a few consolidated agri-business operations because I hadn’t talked to the companies myself. My point was, that I didn’t need to have had the conversations, because there are plenty of watchdogs out there (and very eloquent ones at that, like Michael Pollan) that either had talked to them, or had investigated records on them that proved it. And besides, I was the mom.

Arguments not withstanding, I still felt I had short-changed my kids when I just felt too tired to put together something when we got home. Thus the wake up at 3:30 am.  Then I remembered that I had already taken out some chicken bones and leftovers from a roasted chicken from Countryside Farm (at the Austin Farmers’ Market) to prepare just a simple soup for the season (pre-cold symptoms). I factored in that I really needed to go back to sleep, so I put the bones on low with a pot of water and figured in two hours that it would be a very nice soup stock, guilt absolved.

Waking to chicken broth aroma in the morning, it just took a few more minutes to take out the bones and get some really local, organic, free-range chicken bits back in, along with fresh herbs, broccoli, carrots, onion, and chard back in for a truly delicious cold-banishing soup. I’ve since made another pot with another batch of chicken bones that were thrown into the freezer at an earlier time.

One chef once told me that there’s a reason that doctors and nurses prescribe chicken soup (as it used to be) for a cold. The marrow from the bones and the gelatin are aids to digestion, and the added vegetables are definitely antioxidants.

This is the new website for the now 6-year-old Austin Farmers’ Market. What you may not have known is that the Austin Farmers’ Market is very much thriving, vibrant and growing!

The farmers are corner to corner at the 4th and Guadalupe location downtown, along with multitudes of prepared foods and specialty foods. If you haven’t been for a while, you’ve been missing out on some “new” stuff, like certified organic eggs from Vital Farms, the excellent sprouts from Ottmers’ Family Farm, Oma’s and Opa’s Farm, and Winfield Farm. There’s also Thai Fresh (remember Thai Cooking with Jam–yep, same person), a meat rub from Cocoa Puro, San Miguel’s Seafood (fresh from the Gulf and only place in Austin!), Spring Orchids, new vegetable start plants from Betts Nursery, great jams/jellies, and much, much more!

Wednesday market at The Triangle is thriving too, with more than two dozen vendors even in the winter. Catch your meats, cheeses, veggies, and prepared foods here with no problem. Enjoy hot Texas Coffee Traders cocoa or coffee and sit back and listen to live music in the park.

EASY TO PARK – check out our traffic alert on the home page with a quick ‘look-see’ every week, but pretty much count on plenty of available parking in the State Parking Garage between 3rd and 4th streets on San Antonio, also within the top half of a block of the Classified Parking lot next to the market, and, on the free metered spots downtown on Saturdays.  On Wednesdays, there’s a 700-space parking garage right next to the market!