August 21, 2004 PSU Farmer's Market

This morning I woke with a muzzy throat -- not only was it a bit sore, but my voice sounded bad enough that Joseph, my 11 year old son, asked me regularly to clear my throat. It hurt him to listen to me.

So, it seemed, phone banking for John Kerry was right out. I had signed up for a noon to three shift at Azumano, but we stopped there on the way to the farmer's market, and left a note on the door in apology.

Secretly, I am thrilled to have more time for cooking. Cooking! This is a passion in my life -- one that I've rarely shopped out. Like sex, it seems to me that cooking for utter strangers as a job would be a sad diminishing of a truly amateur art. Cooking is about offering the destruction of life for the sustaining of life. It is about sacrifice made art. It is an offering to the gods. It is the maintenance of the bodily temple. It is the ritual of family, of friends, of bonding.

Every dish has a meaning. Each day of cooking is sacred.

So, it is in that intention -- to bring a message about how to feel and think about the food in one's life -- that I put forward this blog and eventually the cookbook or foodie-book from it.

Leaving the office door where I was to phone bank, Joseph and I head for the bus mall and wend our way to Portland State where on Saturday we love to go to the market. Portland, Oregon has farmers markets nearly every day of the week. For us, the major markets are Saturday at PSU, Wednesday at People's Coop, and Thursday evening at Hinson Church -- the last a bare three blocks from our house.

Farmers markets provide a connection between the food grown and the food prepared that is bidirectional. Cooks chat with farmers, and trade them recipes for intelligence on the crops coming in the next weeks, allowing us a sense of delighted anticipation. This week was a wonderful week at market. Besides dill and parsley, a leek, jalapeno and anaheim peppers, an eggplant, red and yellow cured onions (this is to say, with clean dried onionskin, vs the ones fresh plucked from the earth meant to be eaten today), and my weekly order of some large oysters from the coast, we hunted up Damsons, Chanterais Melon, and the first Butternut Squash of the season.

I'll try to address each day's cooking, and I suspect I'll have material for a cookbook in no time.