FUN WITH FARMERS

Roasted purple (!) asparagus with my favorite accompaniments: lemon zest and freshly grated nutmeg.

Yesterday Debbie M. and I took a trip across town to the Buford Highway Farmers Market in order to forage for Exotic Foodstuffs.

I love the BHFM, I really do.  All kinds of exotic produce, meats, fish, and Ethnic Goodies.  You need ghost peppers? Chicharrones?  Fresh galangal?  Candlenuts?  Gochujang?  You can find all of that crap there, and then some.  Debbie was more than patient as I bounced excitedly from aisle to aisle in full ADHD kid-in-a-candy-store mode, finding endless distractions and Objects of Interest, some of which I actually planned to take home and eat.

A lot of the basic, no-frills produce is there, priced at a fraction of what the Lily-White Suburbia food shoppes charge.  Plus, you can score some really scary-looking stuff.  Why stop at a chuck roast when you can bring home that steer’s heart, lips, testicles, and horrible, snakey pizzle?  Why, indeed.

I might have been tempted to bring home a jar of squid ink, but it was, at almost $80, a tad pricey.  Maybe next time.  Debbie, meanwhile, grabbed a whole yellowtail, hacked up to her specifications (filleted, head on).  Yummy.

I was happy to find a heap of chicken backs and feet, which I will use to make a flavorful chicken stock, the kind that has real flavor and body.  It beats the prepackaged stuff like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

And, lookee: Purple asparagus!  Why eat green or white asparamagoosalum when you can get weird dark violet stalks that look like the bastard child of asparagus and Gilbert Grape?  It really is purple, at least in the raw state - strangely, roasting seems to take away some of the purple color and bring up the green.  Tastes just like green asparagus, too, and has the same stinkifying effect on the old Pee-Pee.  But, still... purple asparagus!