Dark Days - week 9

This week was a rough one for finding local produce... mostly because I thought I had plans to bring in a mother load of local produce, but my plan was foiled.

When I was searching for local flours, I had heard from someone that the Saturday Market in York, PA might be a good place to find it.  When I looked it up online, it appeared to be the holy grail of local food... but this was clearly my imagination, since in reality it was anything but. 

First of all... it's not in York.  It's about a half an hour past York. Which is already an hour away from Baltimore. 

Second, the Saturday Market is more of a giant garage/yard sale than a farmer's market.  Yes, there was food.  Homemade potato chips (the peppered BBQ was delish), spicy kettle corn, several purveyors of baked goods and a couple of the butchers appeared to be local.  But the two produce stands were entirely non-locally sourced.  (They did say they had local produce in the summer though.) 

The most frustrating part was all the crap that surrounded the food.  For every food stand, there were approx. 10 stands of people selling old books, DVDs (that fell off the back of truck?), cheap perfume, Steelers jerseys, military garb, etc.  Add to that the fact that many vendors didn't even appear to be open, and it made for a frustrating trip.

So we were left with no more local produce than when we started, and I once again am fixing breakfast for our local meal:

2 eggs over-easy, a slice and a half of bacon and hash browns made with mushrooms as well.  The raisin bread is from a local bakery, although not the one that I am positive sources local ingredients.  The coffee is from a local roaster which sources organic fair-trade beans.

Although this is a pretty decent weekend brunch, I was hoping for something a little more augmented by vegetables.  Some kale, maybe?  I really wanted some kale.

The best I could find after making a trip to our local market, was cabbage.  I'm thinking I'll make a cabbage soup... and in preparation, I decided to make some beef stock from some local soup bones I had in the freezer from my "secret Amish source". 

So that's what's coming down the pike.  Cabbage soup.  With homemade beef stock.  Details next week.