Farmers' market and fennel!

Fennel, apple, vidalia onion, brown rice, dill, peas, sauteed in butter with white wine vinegar.
Beach peas!

Beautiful heads of fennel

Grapefruit and stracciatella gelato...side by side


We'll start with the inaugural Cape Ann Farmers' Market! It's back and seemingly bigger and better...hooray! Perhaps some things aren't so farmy but I'll take a risk on permitting gelato, pies, and honey at my markets.

After reading an article about them, I was quite excited to see Giovanna Gelato there so I traipsed over to get my fix: the grapefruit had a wonderfully smooth and refreshing icy texture and the stracciatella was very delicate (made with whole milk) and with just thin slivers of dark chocolate. I was being impulsive getting the two, but they were actually quite good together!

I went back to the market and got a tart from Cape Ann pies: strawberry rhubarb and I'd say it was like a mini-pie in character, nevertheles delicious.

Overwhelmed by all the vegetables, I finally decided on fennel which was $.75 a head! Score.

I had already been to Karl's sausage kitchen that day and needless to say I couldn't cook up that fennel right away. It finally stopped raining so what else but a walk to the beach? I had to walk on the path since it was high tide and was pleasantly interupted by swaths of beach peas!

At home I decided to make a whatever is in the kitchen sort of dish. I cut up the fennel bulb (including not leafy stalks) and sauteed it with vidalia onions in butter, I added apples a bit later, then the beach peas and brown rice (already cooked). Toss on a little dill and white wine vinegar and you've got a lovely early summer plate!

S.