Smart Market: Uncle Fred's BBQ is Back!

This Week at our Oakton Market
Saturday 10 a.m.–2 p.m.
2854 Hunter Mill Road
Oakton, VA 22124
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This Week at the Market

Uncle Fred will be back in the flesh with all his great smoked meats. Buy for lunch, dinner, or for your rec-room tailgating Sunday. He will have ribs, brisket, pulled pork, chicken, and those great beans and tangy slaw.

Smart Markets is gearing up for the winter season, welcoming new vendors in coming weeks and bringing new prepared foods to enhance winter celebrations and satisfy comfort-food cravings.

New Vendors This Week

JFS Confections brings us FudgEuphoria — finally, chocolate in the market! Jeff Schoeplein will bring a wide selection of handmade fudge from his kitchen in Leesburg. He will have samples to tantalize, and you can order ahead for the holidays.

Vendors With Us This Week

Deepa will be with us this week and may begin coming every week now that her other market has ended. Ask her about doing another demo for us soon! Her Aromatic Spice Blends are such great additions to the traditional soups and stews of the season.

Vendors Absent This Week

Fabbioli Cellars and Whim Pops will be back next week.

From the Market Master

As the storm was on its way to our area, I was in the kitchen cooking up things in my refrigerator and freezer, assuming that it would be easier to heat soup on our butane cook stove than to make anything from scratch. I also made tomato sauce to have on hand for a variety of uses. I was lucky to have local, grass-fed, meaty soup bones for stock and canned tomatoes (Cento and Muir Glen are my favorite brands) to add flavor and body to the soup.

Once I determined that I had the basics, I started going through the refrigerator for ingredients. Everything I needed for a great soup was right there, and it was all local, from our farmers’ markets. I had onions, carrots, sweet peppers, squash, green beans, turnips, potatoes, lovely fresh shell beans, and even the last of the corn from Saturday’s market. It was some soup, hearty and healthy.

If you have a gas stovetop and oven, you can weather a storm much more easily than those of us with only electric appliances. And anyone who loses power has inexpensive alternatives for cooking. Once you are able to get out of the house, you can run to your nearest Asian grocery store and buy a butane cook stove and four butane canisters for less than $20. It may be a challenge to make soup on a cooktop, but you can always turn it into an indoor family camping adventure. You can make an entire recipe in smaller batches or cook the various ingredients two or three at a time, combine them all and add broth to the veggies as needed to complete the soup for two or ten.

Using your raw ingredients and cooking something that can be kept in a cooler packed in ice will also help to preserve veggies that you might lose otherwise.

If this reaches you too late to help you out this time around, make sure you get one of those cook stoves for the next snowstorm. Our demo chef, Annie Sidley, uses one all the time for her demos, and it’s pretty amazing what she can do with such a small appliance. If she can make stir-fries, soups, and sauces in the middle of a market, you can make them in your kitchen.

Here are some good recipes for cooking in a storm:

• Tomato-Carrot Soup
• Winter Tomato Sauce
• Winter White Soup
• Sweet Potato and Black Bean Chili

See you at the market!