This is my Saturday market haul and produce I bought at the co-op on Friday. Pretty impressive, huh? It's amazing how hard people think this is, but really, look at everything I can eat. This is the work of 14 different farmers. It's awesome!

Breakfast yesterday was the usual, and lunch was leftover eggs and potatoes from the night before.

After work I did my weekly co-op shopping. I bought:

• 1 1/2 lb ground beef
• 2 large lamb loins (it turns out we have Humboldt County Lamb!)
• 1lb of butter
  
• 1 big kabocha winter squash, 2 poblano peppers, and 2 1/2lb of Flavor Queen Pluots from Willow Creek - this is the very last of these pluots!
  
• 2 red onions, 1 Walla-Walla and 1 bunch of cilantro from Blue Lake
  
• Spring Mix from Bayside
• 3 Comice Pears, 1 Bunch of basil, two big green bell peppers, 2 eggplant, 6lb of tomatoes, and 4 big zucchini from Orleans

Dinner was a bit of a disaster - two nights in a row - I hope I don't make a pattern of it! Right when I got home I diced the tomatoes and started them cooking for sauce. They cooked for an hour or so, and then I started on the challenge of the evening: mozzarella cheese.

The cheese kit I got was recommended by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Vegetable Mineral. It's supposed to be really easy - you heat a gallon of milk, add a little dissolved citric acid, and then take it off the heat and add a tiny bit of dissolved renit. The kit came with the citric acid and the renit. It's supposed to sit for 6-8 minutes and separate the curds and whey. They you drain off the whey, and shape the curd into a ball. While keeping the whey hot by periodically dipping it into hot water, you kneed it like bread until it's the right consistency. Sounds difficult, but doable....Unfortunately the curd just didn't get firm enough to separate from the whey, and so we ended up dumping it all down the sink. What a waste of a gallon of milk! I'm determined to try it again!

In the midst of the cheese making I had sliced up two big eggplant, spread a tiny bit of butter on each slice, and baked them. By the time the cheese experiment was done, the eggplant had cooked nicely. I also chopped garlic, basil, an onion, and a red bell pepper and added it to the cooking sauce. So in the end we had baked eggplant with chunky tomato sauce and we grated the rest of the Fontina cheese on top. It was quite good - like an eggplant stew. At least even when I screw things up, they generally taste good!

This morning I was all set to drive to the Ferndale farmers market to pick up my wheat. The farmer had warned me to call his cell first to make sure he hadn't forgotten to bring it, and lo and behold, he did forget! Arghgh! He said he'd still get it to me either today or tomorrow, I hope he comes though! I feel like he's my dealer!

So I ate my usual breakfast and went to the Arcata farmers market. I bought:

• 4 green tomatoes from Willow Creek (I didn't actually buy these, I know the farmer, and he gave them to me as a sample)
• 2 bunches of spearmint (they were out of peppermint) and 1 lb of the most delicious Black Mission Figs in the world from Orleans.
  
• 1 bunch of basil
• A 5lb bag of mixed potatoes, about 5lb of Yellow Finn potatoes, and 2 ears of bicolor corn from Arcata. (The corn was also a sample.)
• About 1/2 lb of shitake mushrooms from Arcata

I also stopped at the co-op for 2 gallons of milk and a pint of cream. One gallon is for the second mozzarella try, one is for yogurt, and the cream is for sour cream. This sure does keep me busy!

I'm really sensing the seasons changing. There's no more Willow Creek peaches, and the plums are at their end - pears, figs and winter squash are starting to take over.... There were lots of beautiful pumpkins starting to show up at market. I really do love this time of year, almost more than summer!