Saturday, September 24, 2005

Miniature Crop on a Miniature Patio


Everything's coming in dinky this year, it seems.
Even the leaves.
It's our first fall in the townhouse, and we've been loving the change in the air. Couldn't even drag ourselves away to either the Ferry Building farmers' market in the City, or the sweet little Toby's Feed Barn market in Point Reyes Station.
Just as well we missed the latter, though. The New York Times travel section did a "36 Hours" feature (link dies in one week) on PRS yesterday, and it included many of the food secrets therein: the market, the new Marin Sun Farms shop, Hog Island Oysters. Not surprising, given that the author of the piece is a Bay Area food writer — and so, I'm surprised he left out Tomales Bay Foods, right there in town, which houses Cowgirl Creamery and other purveyors.
I'll bet he missed one more adorable local custom. At the Western Saloon across the street from the farmers' market, the lovely bartender (I believe her name is Ruby) tunes one of the two TVs over the bar to cooking shows every Saturday. The other one is set to sports, but everyone watches the cooking shows. And talks about them! ("Why's she putting so much oil in there?" "I never thought of lemon with those!" "Wish my knives were that sharp.") Every so often a patron jumps up from his barstool and runs across the street to buy another head of garlic, another slab of cheese, just before the market shuts down for the week.
And the market shuts down for the year after October, so I'll try not to miss next week.

3 comments:

Greg said...

If Ruby makes bloody marys I'm there!
G.

cookiecrumb said...

She'll make you one, but she'll probably roll her eyes. Tough old gal. :-)

Jennifer Maiser said...

I was thinking about the fact that you said you were going to try and come to the FPFM this weekend, and am glad you didn't. It was a pretty wild traffic weekend around here.