The joys of the roadside fruit stand

Bless the farmers and local growers, for they provide the luckiest among us with a chance to actually know what food is supposed to taste like.

We might starve this winter. We've gone through 16.00 worth of fruit this week in a two person household and it's all because I discovered a local market. Once there's no more fresh fruit, we may perish because I cannot see us actually going back to eating supermarket produce.

I've been using the Farmers market to buy my plants and sometimes baked goods or jellies early this season. But there was a store front I've been driving past everyday for years and I've never stopped. More shame on me.

I was driven to desperation by peaches. I'm not a glutton for peaches, but once in a while a really nice peach is a treat. Twice I've purchased them at the grocery store and both times they've been hard as rocks and I have set them out to ripen, where they promptly got moldy. And still hard. I had every intention of driving out to the orchard in a couple of weeks (it's only 25 minutes or so - well worth it) but I thought I'd give this place a chance.

So you pull off the side of the road into a little gravel lot, walk down a couple of little concrete steps into a low lying little single level building. Inside it's no wider than my master bedroom. And on the table directly in front of me are (choir of angels) PEACHES. Beautiful, fat, juicy peaches. You could smell them when you walked in the door. And so I took my time choosing the two best peaches I could find and then I wandered. Bad idea, my friend.

Canteloupe .49 a lb. Yep, needed one of those. Ooh, Honeydew same price. No idea how to pick out a honeydew, but the farmer running the place was more than happy to educate me on melon-picking-outing and he even tossed a couple of the melons deeming them "pig food", so he wasn't out to sell the shoddy stuff. Thirty minutes later I walk out with melons, sweet corn, grapes (1.99 a lb but I have to say they are definately worth it), bananas (obviously not Idaho grown, but I was out), a dozen lemons to make Lemoncello (again, not made in Idaho), beautiful Ranier cherries and of course, my peaches.

I didn't even get to the other shelves in the store sporting local jams and jellies and honeys and what not. I would like to point out that I gave one of my peaches to Anthonys sister, because her eyes glazed over and she began to drool when I showed her my wonderful peaches, and I'm a nice person. Mine is chilling in the fridge for desert tonight and very specific threats have been made against anyone who touches it. But I made a fantastic salad to fend of the fruit fiend in my house. Super easy and tasty.

Green Monster Salad

Chopped Honeydew
Green Grapes
Couple of diced up Kiwis
Drizzle with a little bit of simple syrup
Chill and eat

Delicious!