Food, Round Two

On a drive early in my stay here I noticed, on the Edenderry Road, a small sign, Organic Farm Shop, Friday 1-7.  It took me until today, three Fridays into my stay, to be able to go. I missed the turn on the way back from Ballinderry and got nearly to Edenderry before I realized I had done and made the always precarious u-turn back. The lane into the farm went under an archway of sheltering trees just coming into bud that were planted on both sides of the dirt track. At the end of the lane the drive opened onto a gravel yard. On the right was a small farmhouse painted white with the usual dark wood trim. Directly in front was the barn. The door of the narrow side room was open, and inside two young women were packing eggs. Across from the house on the third side of the rectangle was a second outbuilding; this one housed the shop.

The shed, a low-ceilinged windowless building with cement block walls, was about eight feet deep and maybe twice as wide. It was filled with food, fruits on the left, vegetables directly in front, whole free-range chickens and packages of spelt and other grains on the right. On the floor under the chickens were glass bottles of unhomogenized milk. The table in the center of the room held two huge wedges of cheese, which turned out to be a locally made Emmenthaler. Everything was organic.

            I had despaired of finding produce that wasn’t shrink-wrapped and shipped from Spain or China, and although everything at the shop was certainly not locally sourced (the pile of bananas on the fruit side was a dead giveaway) it was all fresh, healthy-looking and utterly appealing. Thinking of my tiny fridge and the fact that I had stupidly bought some produce at the Dunnes Stores the night before, I nonetheless filled my arms with broccoli, potatoes, an enormous head of red-leaf lettuce, cremini mushrooms, and some gorgeous parsley. Sadly, I had just missed the asparagus, a vegetable I haven’t laid eyes on since I got here and would have paid nearly anything to have.

 The wiry woman in a knit cap who runs the stand, clearly a great marketer, offered me a taste of the cheese; the complexity was intense, but I succumbed to only a tiny sliver, most of which I have already devoured. She of course talked me into eggs, and I couldn’t pass up the milk either; I’ll make some cream of broccoli soup for my cousins.

Tonight I had a short time to prepare dinner before heading off to a meeting of the Edenderry Historical Society. I found myself focusing on my usual fallback dinner when I’m in a hurry, scrambled eggs. This time the yolks of the eggs were thick and rich and orange when I whisked them. I sautéed the mushrooms

first, then stirred in the eggs and finished them off with lots of chopped parsley. With the eggs I had the red-leaf lettuce in a salad with red peppers and feta cheese, two purchases from the supermarket. Heaven.

This week I’ll buy some pans so I can cook some asparagus and one of the chickens, and I’ll be on the doorstep when the shop opens at 1 next Friday.