Peaches, Finley Avenue, and Worries About Our Truck Farmers

Last Sunday, we took ourselves out to the Birmingham Farmer's Market on Finley Avenue.
This has long been a mecca for truck farmers from all over Alabama, and you can get truly wonderful, right-from-the-vine Sand Mountain tomatoes (finest in the world) and peaches from Chilton County (also finest in the world), and most any other fruit or veggie you might desire. And it's open seven days a week!
A good number of truck farmers are setting up at our Saturday morning market known as Pepper Place. They do a nice job of it too, with arts and crafts, cooking demo's, and live music going on. Mount Laurel, south of Birmingham heading down Highway 280, also has a nice Saturday market. It's so important that we support farmers' markets whenever possible, not just for the benefit to ourselves, but also for the fact that it's getting even harder to be an independent truck farmer. Gas prices keep going up and up, making for expensive "food miles" on the farmers' end. The drought last year was catastrophic for small farmers as well. The very tired and hot, but very kindly man whom we bought a watermelon from was almost apologetic when he told me that the melon would be $6.00. That's still a bargain for a large, locally grown watermelon, considering that the insipid, flavorless little green basketballs they sell at the grocery store are running $5.00-6.00 right now. We try to make it a point to find out where the farmers we patronize are from, too. Not only do we like knowing where our produce is from, it gives us a little glimpse into a very different world from our own and we meet some really warm and interesting people.

So, don't forget to pray for the farmers, go out to the markets, and BUY LOCAL WHENEVER YOU CAN!!!

I have a confession to make.

I don't really like peach cobbler.

I know! I know! How can a Southern girl like myself even admit to that? I LOVE fresh peaches. I just don't really enjoy cooked fruit of any kind. I don't know why. Hopefully, I have enough other redeeming qualities which will allow me to be forgiven. I do love peach ice cream, does that help?

We also bought a case of tomatoes for homemade sauce. We chose the hottest day of the year thus far upon which to do this. Hours in the kitchen with a huge pot of boiling water in which to blanch the tomatoes so the skin would slide off easily, then an eternity of seeding and chopping, then hours of the finished product simmering on the stove. They say Southern ladies don't sweat, they glow. If that's the case, we were lit up like radioactive Christmas trees. The sauce is divine, though; completely worth the effort. We got the recipe from the Alabama Co-op website. Rich and with a little bit of a kick, and it "freezes beautifully", to quote Steel Magnolias. My next post will have the recipe - it needs a post all its own.

Of course, the day after we bought all those tomatoes, we hear on the news about salmonella poisoning connected to tomatoes.
Luckily, ours were local and the FDA said Alabama tomatoes were fine.
Yes, they are VERY fine!