We are so grateful to stroll to downtown Menlo Park on Sundays & find an assortment of fresh, delicious & wholesome food brought to us by the hardworking, nice farmers & their helpers.

~ Vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, olive oil, crab, honey, flowers, herbs, sachets, wreaths, chocolates & much more. Thank you for all your hard work in bringing it to us locally!!!

Ta Da! Crab salad garnished with the Fresh Tomato Cocktail sauce made in my most previous post.

Luscious, fresh Dungeness crab with Farmer's Market fresh hydroponic butter lettuce, tomatoes + Kalmata olives and thin sliced red onion, peppered with Porcini mushroom salt.

It all started with horseradish. Or was it crab...no, it was definitely horseradish as I was buying for and planning when to make my new batch of SuperTonic. (See my post how to make.) I decided to spread my horseradish around and get some crab as well, but...

It is Dungeness Crab season and for 11 days it was not available because the crab boats were offered $3 a pound at the beginning of the season, but when wholesalers had a glut they changed their minds and offered $2.75/pound. So for .25 the crabbers had to strike. Brother! Cummon people! Let's give our food providers what they deserve for all their hard work.

Well they finally did and on Wed./ Thurs. crab was available again! I sent my husband to the store on him way home from work on Fri. and he bought two, cracked and cleaned them right away so I could make the salad!!! Now, yum, it's ready and we have to go eat...

A working gurl often needs to take shortcuts, even while attempting to make fresh food, instead of buying the prepared from the grocery. So I've pretty much always made my own cocktail sauce because the grocery bought doesn't taste good to me or my husband.

My cocktail sauce has usually been made with organic ketchup or tomato paste, the freshest horseradish I could buy in a jar, 1/4 Tsp of Vinegar, a pinch of salt & a dash of cayenne pepper should the horseradish be mild.

Today I decided to make up my own fresh horseradish cocktail sauce as follows:
- Two Tbsp Fresh grated horseradish
- Two chopped fresh garlic
- A tomato chopped fine
- Two celery pieces chopped very fine
- A tiny dash of Sherry vinegar
- A tiny dash of lime
- A Tbsp of organic ketchup for creaminess
- Himalayan crystal salt and Porcini mushroom salt dashes
- One more tomato when I discovered the horseradish was mouth watering hot and needed some taming!

See my next post for this cocktail sauce put to good use...

Refreshing and healthy drink from the Nopal "prickly pear" Cactus fruit.

Traditional Mexican Folk medicine used for Diabetics.

...this prickly fruit is amazingly nutritious and said to be good for the joints.

Wear gloves or pick it up with  tongs or you will gain tiny spears in your hands. :)

We opened a cantaloupe that turned out to be a bit mushy, but still tasty, so I whirred it up in the Vita-mixer for a healthy mid-morning drink.

When eating melons of any kinds, I always remember what I read years ago: "Melon, eat it alone or leave it alone" so my melon drinks never contain bananas, etc. Turns out it such a perfect food it requires no digestion at all, so if eaten with other foods, it sits in the stomach waiting for those foods that take more complexity to digest. In this state, the melon can ferment while waiting and cause gastric distress.

It only takes about 20 minutes to digest on an empty stomach, so if presented at a meal, I eat the melon first and wait awhile before eating the rest of the food.

Mango Peach Smoothie

1 White peach
1/2 Mango
1 Kiwi
Dash of lime
2 Tbsp soaked hemp seeds in their water
Basil leaf garnish
Handful of ice

OMG! this is an amazing taste! We just got home from a hot walk in the sun and it really quenched our thirst.

Refrigerate to make it colder if needed.

Around the end of March we started buying the green garlic that lasts until about now when it's skins begin to harden and the cloves are pronounced. In the beginning it is more like a fresh green onion and the cloves are not yet formed. We love to eat green garlic on fresh bread slathered with olive oil. We use garlic for health blood pressure and strong immune system, to name a couple of it's life giving qualities.

Today when Ronald was at the Farmer's Market he bought 10 bunches of 3 green garlic and a woman observing him asked him what he would do with them. He told her I was going to dry them out, but he couldn't remember how to do it.

I thought I would post how I am going to dry the garlic and show a few stages of green garlic and talk about how I use it.

Drying Green Garlic

It is quite simple to dry garlic. Buy the late stage green garlic and either hang it or spread out loosely in a dry, dark climate. Do this for a few weeks and by then your garlic should look papery and a bit shrunken. Now if you bought enough, like my dear husband had the foresight to do, you'll have garlic for many months to come.

Stages of Garlic

Here are some pictures with some stages of green garlic from over the past few weeks. These pictures are more from the later stages of the green garlic and #1 are just starting to form cloves. At this point they begin to get hot and are spicy when you eat them raw. Before that you can eat the garlic raw without the heat - when they look more like a green onion.

The picture directly below:
1. The small bunch of 5 is from 3 weeks ago.
2. The ruby colored garlic in the red bowl are from last week.
3. The large bunch - brought home by Ronald today.
4. The small bowl has dried garlic bought at the store.

My husband picked up a few things from the farmer's market this morning, so when he returned I used it all for a fresh made omelet.

Green garlic
Green onions
Shitake mushrooms
Habanero pepper
Wild arugula
Coconut oil
Sea Salt
Eggs





I put coconut oil in the frying pan and after it melted I tossed in a pinch of coarse sea salt. I always wipe the coconut oil from the spoon and rub it on my face, arms and in my hair as the properties in coconut oil are good for the skin and hair.

Next I chopped the onion, green garlic, pepper, mushrooms and tossed them in the now heated oil. Sauteing lightly, I whipped up the eggs and fine chopped the wild arugula & grated some Parmesan, putting them both in the whipped eggs and blending it in. This mixture I now poured into the sauteed veggies.

Cooking the eggs on low heat until soft I find gives the kind of omelet we like, not rubbery. While doing that I chopped fine more green garlic put it on buttered fresh Levain walnut bread from Mayfield Bakery and lightly toasted under the broiler.

We enjoyed our omelet and garlic toast on the deck in the warm Spring sun.

While I worked, I put all the garlic and onion tails, soft garlic skins and the stick ends of the arugula into a pot which will later have more greens, potatoes, onion, etc added to water to make a nourishing broth to take to work.

Since Spring brought the beginning of the year's bounty of food to the Farmer's Market, we are so grateful to walk or ride our bikes downtown to stock up on a week or two worth of fresh, organic and small-farm lovingly grown veggies and fruits.

Here are some pictures of yummy things we brought home.

New baby cucs; young artichokes, wild greens including arugula, green garlic, baby lettuces, cilantro bunch and tomatoes. The oranges we picked this morning from the tree outside our kitchen window.