Red Stick Farmers Market at 5th and Main

This week’s trip to the Farmers Market felt like opening a basket on the set of Chopped. Sometimes I go there looking for specific items with an idea in mind of what I want to cook. And sometimes I let what I find help decide the dish or dishes I’m going to cook over the weekend. There were plenty of fresh eggs, some nice king trumpet mushrooms, fresh cream, green onions and creole tomatoes and that led to a crust-less quiche. I added some California Garlic Mission Jack cheese and some chopped bell pepper and popped it in the oven for about an hour at 400.

I’ve been looking all over for chicken hearts to make giblet gravy and finally found some at the Goppelt Farms booth along with some gizzards. Make sure you rinse the hearts and gizzards well before running them in the slow cooker with a chopped red onion, a quart of beef broth, some packaged brown gravy mix, salt and pepper, bay leaf and Italian seasoning for about five or six hours until the meat is super tender. No need to brown anything, but you can if you want to cut some time. Add some rice, add some biscuits. Heaven.

And creole tomatoes made a great side for the Dover sole I ended up with when Whole Foods didn’t have any speckled trout. I’d decided to fry up some trout despite the mess frying inevitably creates, so it was easy to settle for doing the sole, since I’d already resigned myself to cleaning up the white flour I knew I was going to spill all over the place.