Last week my roommate and I had house-guests (not including the cat currently residing with us temporarily. She makes herself way too much at home to consider as a guest…). The guests we had, the good kind, were just in town for a few days, but that was enough time to make our way to the city’s best farmer’s markets. I need to clarify something here. “Farmer’s Market” to me doesn’t exactly mean Jean-Talon. Sure, it’s a huge market, but there are lots of shops that are not owned by farmers or farms. To be fair, most smaller farmer’s markets, the kind where small booths are set up in an area on a specific day and all the vendors drive in for it) isn’t always all farmers, but this one actually is. Even a nice man who sells his nature photography at the Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue farmer’s market every Saturday morning isn’t even allowed to sell at the Plateau farmer’s market every Sunday from 10am-2pm.
Everything being sold at that market is food or drink, local, and organic. Jean-Talon is far from organic. As much as I love my fruit guy, Leopoldo, I know what I’m buying. Most of those vegetables were sprayed with things that shouldn’t really be eaten. Save a few stalls, there isn’t a whole lot of organics being offered by the farmers and not farmers of the city’s biggest markets.
I had a point once.
Oh, my point was that I hate garlic scapes. I need to say it now to make sure I get back to it. These house guests and I went to the Plateau farmers market, and purchased all sorts of lovely things.
We sat down to a really nice picnic lunch of the organic gazpacho with sprouts and whole grain toasted bread offered by the Market’s main stall. Our guests also purchased a container of garlic scapes pesto. One was vegan and this cheese-free pesto was perfect with the baguette from a delicious bakery stall.
They offered to share their pesto but I really hate garlic scapes. In French, they’re called “fleur d’ail”. They’re the twisted, long green things that look like green onions in the picture below. You can use them in soups, salads, stir-fries, anything where you’d use garlic. They’re supposedly milder than garlic, but I always seem to eat them in raw form (salads and spreads) and the bad breath stays with me all day. I also find they’re often very tough and not chewy, so even in soups they don’t want to soften up enough to not ruin the texture. They are great, however, if you purée them. Still, I politely declined my house guests’ offer to share the garlic scape pesto.
When they moved on from Montreal they left the rest of the bottle of pesto in my fridge. What am I going to do? I don’t like this stuff, but it’s high quality, local, and organic. Hmm…well, it’s swimming in oil, so the next time I need to sautée garlic for a recipe, I’ll just toss in a tablespoon of the pesto. PERFECT!
So I decided to make a risotto. I didn’t buy wine that day at the market, since my house guests also left about half a cup of an organic local kind you can find at the SAQ (“Orpailleur”. I’ve taste-tested the whole line, but they don’t offer the best ones at the SAQ. The white and red you can fine are perfectly fine table wines, though). I could have used a nice honeywine from Desrochers winery and honey farm if I’d wanted something sweeter, but carrying bottles of wine home on my bike is not my ideal bike trip. 
I had oyster mushrooms and a beautiful shallot from the Ethiopian farmer at McGill’s Organic Campus, so I cheated with a bit of chicken broth leftover from some amazing pho’ ga from Pho Lien and I even used basmati rice. This was going to be a weird risotto.
Since this really turned into a post on the Farmer’s Market, I’ll give the risotto recipe tomorrow. If you’re not a patient person I’ll spoil the results for you and say that the risotto was just okay. It was sticky and delicious in texture, but if I hadn’t served it with grilled fish with fleur de sel, it would have been bland. Thank goodness for sea smelt. “Grilled fish” sounds so much nicer, doesn’t it? Ah, North American expectations.
Leave a Reply