Today’s Farmers Market Haul

Tiny zucchini;  more little Yukon gold and red potatoes to cut up and bake in the oven with olive oil; more English peas (they’re a toy, when you shell them, and then they’re a dish!); and some rhubarb and a half flat of strawberries. I lugged them all home on the train, and I just got done hulling and smashing 3 cups of the berries and freezing the rest. My jars are sterilizing. After dinner (leftover couscous to which I’m adding garlic, shallots, and pine nuts, with some leftover broccoli), I’m going to get out the big copper jam pan and attempt my first strawberry-rhubarb jam.

I’d link to the recipe, but the link buttons are still greyed out. I need to find out what’s going on here.  Dinner and jam first though!

Baby Ducks! No Eat!

Why I don’t eat ducks, illustrated:

Bad Blackberry photo from yesterday.

Actually, the fact that ducks have babies is not why I don’t eat them. One of my first workplaces had a duck couple who adopted us, would eat out of our hands, etc., and ever since then I haven’t been able to eat them. Coming across mom and her ducklings yesterday just reinforced that.

Actually, recently I was reading a book of Barbara Brown Taylor’s (and I am unable to link at the moment for some reason, or I would), in which she described a friend’s farmer father getting into the back of a trailer on their way to the slaughterhouse to calm a hysterical calf…who proceded to lick his arm the whole way. The father got out of the truck in tears. When I read that, I finally swore off mammals for good. I have yet to give up chicken and fish, but we shall see.