Sweet peppers from Happy Quail Farms, Palo Alto Farmer’s Market
I have a taste memory of savoring Pimientos de Padron peppers at a tasting a couple years back and being amazed at how delicious they were. They’re so addictive, too! It’s like eating really good potato chips or french fries – you can’t stop at just one. (That is, until you hit the hot one…)
We tried to grow them in our garden last year but didn’t have any luck. So when I read that Foodista got some Pimientos de Padron earlier last week, I knew I had to seek them out. After all, the grower, Happy Quail Farms, is in East Palo Alto, just a little bit up the Peninsula from us.
Happy Quail’s web page said that they were going to be at the Palo Alto Farmer’s Market on Saturday, so I convinced Annie that we needed to make the drive up to get some pimientos.
I’ve eaten a lot of different kinds of roast pork over the years, from Chinese roast pork, to char siu, to Hawaiian-style kalua pig, to pulled pork barbecue, and many others. I’ve even had some awesome roast pork knuckle (I didn’t even know pigs had knuckles) from a restaurant in the state of Kedah in Malaysia.
And then, I discovered porchetta. Ever since reading this article on Eating Asia, we’ve been wanting to visit the Roli Roti rolling rotisserie vendor at the San Francisco Ferry Building to have some of this delicious roast pork. One fine Saturday morning, we had occasion to drive up to San Fran to shop at the Farmer’s Market there and, of course, buy some porchetta.
We went to the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market, south of Austin to have a look-see. It’s a great neighborhood farmer’s market, with lots of organic produce. I liked the raw milk cheddar cheese from Full Quiver Farm but they ran out so I couldn’t take a block home.
We picked up lunch from the Deli Bento vendor to bring back home. I haven’t had a bento in ages!
I remember reading an article once that suggested college students could save money on food by eating lunch at Costco. Not by buying food at the food court, however. But by going inside the store and eating from all the samples!
Now, we didn’t go to Central Market in Austin with that in mind. We just wanted to check out Whole Foods’ competitor and see what it was all about. But of course we wouldn’t turn away from all the various plates of samples left out, like at the cheese counter where we couldn’t stop sampling a fantastic vodka currant cheese from Sweden.
Or the beef fajita wrap served hot at another station sampling various meat rubs and seasonings:
