meal planning and prep for the farm market crowd

Our local farmers' market is in full swing, and oh, what a glorious bounty I brought home on Saturday! Strawberries, blueberries, and cherries. Local, free range eggs in various shades of tan and blue-green. Tangy garlic goat cheese. Carrots, summer squash, and kohlrabi for munching raw. And asparagus,  broccoli raab, mixed Chinese greens, cilantro, and mint for use in cooking.

After I returned from the market, I spent several hours washing and chopping and making easy meals to have ready in the fridge. With such a beautiful cornucopia of produce in my kitchen -- and a freshly brewed glass of minted iced tea at hand! -- this Saturday meal prep ritual felt like a habit I'd love to get into.

Today I ran across a great blog post from Heidi at Ward Street Bistro about getting yourself organized with your meal planning and shopping. I liked her approach, which includes a number of strategies I've found helpful myself. And it seems like it would work well in wintertime (when Heidi wrote the post). But in farm market season, I find myself needing to take a slightly different approach, so I can work largely with the glorious new things that are arriving at the market each week.

So, in addition to Heidi's advice, I'd add these few farm-market-friendly tips:

• Get there early! You'll have the biggest selection if you arrive at the beginning of the market. In my experience, the newest (and therefore scarcest) items will sell out fairly quickly.

• Keep in mind Janet Fletcher's wise advice to buy some "short term" and other "longer term" items if you shop on a weekly basis, and plan your meals accordingly. Things like peas, corn, and strawberries are best used within the first couple of days, whereas items like tomatoes, kale, and peaches are usually just as good (if not better!) several days later. 

• Get yourself some cookbooks that are geared toward cooking with local ingredients, and scan the sections relevant to the current season before you head off to market. (Two great ones on my bookshelf are Janet Fletcher's Fresh From the Farmers' Market and Deborah Madison's Local Flavors. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and her family is also a fun read and includes some seasonal menus and recipes.) This will fill your head with some of the lovely possibilities. You need not remember the recipes verbatim. If you're comfortable with improvisational cooking, just the ideas should be enough to get you started.

• If you're not an improvisational cook, but would like to learn to start cooking that way, you might enjoy Lisa Jervis' little "manualfesto" called Cook Food. It provides a selection of easily adaptable recipes, along with simple explanations of basic cooking techniques you can use to prepare a wide variety of foods.

• Don't hesitate to ask the growers for recipe and meal ideas. They can often suggest great combinations.

• More comfortable sticking with a recipe? Follow Heidi's advice and store your recipes in Evernote. You can then easily search your recipes -- even ones you've simply photographed -- from just about any mobile device, and find the ones that use the ingredients for sale that day. (I adore Evernote and use it for far more than just recipes.)

• If you're one of those people who simply must plan ahead, talk to your favorite growers as you're doing your shopping to find out what they expect to have available next week.

Looking to find the farmers' market nearest you? Do a search on localharvest.org.

P.S. -- As I was writing this, a neighbor stopped by with blueberries and black raspberries for us out of his garden. Hooray for farmers' markets and for good neighbors!