Heirloom tomatoes = love.

This past Friday we weren't able to get to the Phinney Ridge market before it closed, so this morning we head over to the market on Broadway in Capitol Hill. That market started right around the time we moved to Phinney Ridge, so we'd never been and didn't know what to expect. What a great market! We were expecting something pretty similar to the Phinney Ridge market, with most of the same vendors and farmers with stuff to sell. Well, although there was certainly some overlap, the Capitol Hill market had a much more comprehensive produce selection with many more farmers, while Phinney has a narrower range of produce farmers but a broader variety of vendors overall -- more cheese vendors, more bakeries, and more vendors selling food to eat on the spot (pizza, crepes, and Ethiopian food all being represented at the Phinney market).

So our haul this morning was much more dominated by fruits and vegetables -- and what a haul we got! We've already had a delicious lunch of Pugliese bread, garlic, good olive oil, heirloom tomatoes from the market, basil from our garden, and a little Parmesan cheese. I really like when we manage to create lunches like that from the market and our garden. We also ended up bringing home an obscene amount of berries, including marionberries and tayberries, the latter of which I haven't tried before but seem to be sort of midway between a raspberry and a blackberry but a little less sweet. We finished out our take with more heirloom tomatoes, baby bok choy, white flesh nectarines, a lemon cucumber, some pickles, zucchini, and a soft pretzel that was unlike Philly soft pretzels but was pretty tasty nonetheless.

Now we just need to figure out what to plant in the remaining space in our garden. I guess we'll need to take a trip to one of the nurseries to see what kinds of things we should be planting in July.

We were talking the other day about whoever it was who described Pacific Northwest cooking as a bunch of really great ingredients looking for a cuisine. That seems about right to me.