This Week at the Smart Markets Oakton Farmers' Market

This Week at our Oakton Market
Saturday 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.
2854 Hunter Mill Rd.
Oakton, VA 22124
Map

This Week at the Market

Dear Shoppers,

You may need your wellies and brollies, but we hope to see you anyway at our St. Patrick’s Day market. I can promise you that you can find just about everything you need for an Irish feast from our market vendors this week.

Leading the pack will be Nyall of Celtic Pasties with his nearly all-Irish lineup this week, including Beef and Guiness, Cottage (Tochin) Pie style, Chicken and Leek, Colcannon, Bangers and Mash, and Corned Beef and Cabbage. Let’s hope he adds a couple of these new ones to his weekly menu.

Remember also that we have beef, lamb, and chicken for you to cook up your own holiday dishes, and please check out our Smart Markets tent for St. Patrick’s Day–inspired recipes such as this one from Jamie Oliver: Bubble and Squeak. In Ireland the dish is most often made with just cabbage and potatoes and is called Colcannon. I am sure the Irish would also enjoy it with the sausages that Jamie includes in his version. And you can do the same — Doug will have his varieties of all-beef sausages, and Heritage Farm has pork and wonderful lamb sausages.

Kylie’s Pop Shop will not be with us this week. Kylie is on her spring break and hopefully enjoying a well-deserved rest. For a young lady, she is certainly ambitious, creative, and a great baker and candy-maker. Also, Rockahock Farm will not be with us, as Alix is feeling under the weather. But they were so well-received last weekend that they will return as soon as possible, and we hope Alix feels better soon.

If you are planning some interesting Easter uses for those fancy eggs that B&D Poultry brought last week, this may be the last week to pick up some of their rare examples. Martha Stewart Magazine’s most recent issue has lots of good ideas for naturally dying and displaying a wide variety of fresh or blown eggs. And she teaches you how to blow them out if you want them to last forever. Wait till you see how spectacular the quail eggs look when dyed red. B&D graciously agreed to attend our little market and bring their fresh chicken and eggs while Heritage Farm waits for its chickens to mature — you may thank them for the commitment to Smart Markets and our shoppers. They have spent a wind-blown winter with us out at Bristow, and now we are bringing them out in the rain!

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

If you read this New York Times article, then you were no doubt as appalled as I was to learn, once again, more than we need to know about the stuff called “food” that is sold in the grocery store. The article was just an excerpt, and while the book is now available, I am not sure that I want to know any more.

The challenge for me, and for those of you who feel some responsibility as I do for getting the word out, is how to reach the masses with the news about unhealthy foods. I am especially concerned about those families who will not be reading the Times, buying a Michael Pollan book, or going to see a documentary about our food supply chain. What grass-roots effort will work in the disconnected suburbs where the unwealthy are not always part of the mainstream media audience?

These musings take me back to the first political campaign in this area that I worked on. An early hero of mine, Fairfax County Supervisor Herb Harris, was running for Congress in Northern Virginia against a Republican incumbent.

The amount of money spent was nothing compared to today’s campaigns, but Herb still had much less to spend than the incumbent. I managed the campaign in Prince William County, which was not expected to switch allegiance to the challenger, but we had a tremendous group of neighborhood volunteers who hand-delivered more than 50,000 pieces of literature door to door in a county of 140,000. And we carried the county for Herb -- not by much, but enough to help him win the election. I have never figured out why we can’t still do that; it was much cheaper and much less annoying that those phone calls and TV ads.

But back to today. How do we duplicate that effort with a campaign to educate the public about the importance of eating real food, whether purchased at a farmers’ market or a grocery store? I actually believe that most moms out there would change their buying habits and cooking routines to some extent if they knew what simple home cooking with real food would accomplish: healthier families all through their lives. I’m working on this and I am talking about it with our partners in the community, but I would love to hear from you.

You probably already shop at markets and know what brought you to them. How would you convey that to someone else? Group outreach might work best so that reinforcement would be built in. Reaching children is important. I am thinking that door-to-door “campaigning,” especially in areas where residents would be more concerned about the cost of their food, would be effective. What do you think? Let me know, because through Smart Markets, I can reach out to our friends and partners and make something happen. And I need some good ideas.

Thanks for reading.