A Little Catch-up and the Dane County Farmer's Market

I've been away from this for way too long. It's been a busy last few weeks, and I haven't done much exciting cooking to be totally honest; until the last few days. With summer vegetables just hitting their stride, I was well overdue for a trip to the farmer's market.

The Dane County Farmer's Market is the largest producer-only farmer's market in the United States. Amazingly, in my 4+ years here I've never actually gone down and fully checked it out. Before this weekend, my longest excursion consisted of getting spicy cheese bread (the stand is the first food stand you see off State Street, so that's not saying much). However, after this trip I will definitely be going back, most likely on a weekly basis. There's tons of unique stuff and it's so fun to walk around the capital and sample things from the different vendors. I ended up coming away with raspberry hot pepper jam, tomatoes, corn, rhubarb, finger potatoes; not a bad haul. You can seriously go down there and get your breakfast fill in just sampling and buying different finger foods. If you have a local farmer's market I highly recommend giving it a shot.

All those fresh ingredients got used up making Giada de Laurentiis' Roasted Eggplant and Tomatoes. I've never had eggplant before, and I have to say it's not half bad. In fact, this was absolutely delicious. She calls for canned tomatoes, and I would actually recommend following that unless you really squeeze the juice out of your fresh ones. We used fresh ones and it ended up making the eggplant a little softer than I would have liked, but learning is half the fun of cooking stuff you haven't made before.

While I was doing work on the eggplant and tomatoes, Alyssa put together a fantastic rhubarb crisp. The vibrant pink rhubarb and crunchy topping was much more photogenic than the rest of the meal. Speaking of which, I'm going to go snag some of that and work on my next post. Check back soon!