Farmer's Market to the Rescue! ( Adventures in Berries and Applesauce )

My family loves berries. We eat berries pretty much every week. When I made the switch from normal junk foodee-ness to eating more organically a few years back, I discovered the delight that were berries. Have a sweet tooth? Take some blueberries and drizzle some honey on them for some spoonfuls of healthy sugary goodness. My family has become accustomed to berries at breakfast time and for snacks.

However, berries come in plastic containers in all the nearby grocery stores. Mostly in part that berries are not grown all year long and so must be froze and shipped for sale for the rest of the year. So since I started on the Zero Waste challenge, I have not been able to buy berries, and my kiddo and I are missing them.

I don't usually go to the Saturday Farmer's Market. It is one of those things you do when you want to meet someone there for crepes or you have a guest in town and you want to show them "the sights of the burbs... I mean Beaverton!" So I have not paid close attention to what they had, but I though they might have berries in bulk. I showed up right when they opened at 8am- found berries and then some.

First thing I noticed is that it looked like a geriatric care facility had emptied on the Saturday market lot. The median age of the shoppers seemed a cool 80 years. Why no younger people or families? I though this was interesting so I started asking some of the folks in line why they were here, and shyly asked why so many of their friends were here too.

They answered with two reasons:

1. They got things in bulk here for way, way cheaper that at the grocery stores

and

2. they liked having a relationship with the local farms and it reminded them of how things used to be... back before the subsidies of the farms in the 70's and chemically engineered foods of the 80s, back when food didn't have to be labeled 'organic' because it all simply was.

I really liked that. No I really, really liked that answer.

So I bought a crap-ton of berries. I got a huge flat of blue berries form a local berries farm named Ungar Farms. They rotate their berries crops so it lasts from May through October. I plan on coming back several times until October to buy more berries ( I filled the canvas bag I brought). I will wash and freeze them by pint batches and then each week thaw out a batch for the family- I should have berries all through the winter and into spring now!

And I was in such a good mood, that I went to an apple booth and learned all about apples being in season this week and the guy I talked to had a great crop this year. So I bought a crap ton of apples.

Which turned out to be providential because little did I know that my efforts of Zero wast-ifying our house has caused my hubby to think about what he could do. He had been eyeing my daughter's apple sauce containers- the kinds I bought before starting the ZW challenge that look like this:

He not only at that moment wanted applesauce for himself, but decided to go in the spirit of what we had been adventuring towards and wanted to make apple sauce.

And with my ton of apples, and the Kitchenaid thingy with the attachment we purchased for the canning of our salsa earlier that week, we were able to make applesauce, a crap ton of applesauce. And this stuff is thick and delicious guys- and heat it up just a smidgen with cinnamon- hello!

And you can't make the recipe any easier- here's the hubbs making the applesauce which he pretty much did all on his own too!

recipe:

1. get apples

2. peel and core them- (unless you have the attachment for your Kitchenaid which will do it for you, so skip this step)

3. chop up apples into 6ths or more slices

4. put slices into pot with a cup of water and bring water to boil

5. the oil of the water at the bottom of the pan will reduce and brown/soften your apples

6. ( if you had the attachment, you would out the reduced apples through it to remove skins and seeds at this point) and if not, then you would take a blender and blend up all the soften apples.

7. can them via glass jars, lids, rings in a boiling water bath for 25 minutes.

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