This Week at Smart Markets Manassas Park Farmers' Market

This Week at Our Manassas Park Market
Friday 3–7 p.m.
One Part Center Court
(City Hall Parking Lot)
Manassas Park, VA 20111
Map

Now the fun begins! I am going to have to take a vacation next week in order to map out all of our activities for this summer and to make sure we get the word out to you. We will be hosting canning demos throughout the season and at least one free-of-charge, interactive canning class at a location where we will not be rained out. We look forward to having our Certified Health Coach Cindy Santa Ana join us monthly for a cooking demo to teach families how to cook together with market ingredients. And we are planning three musical events for this summer.

Beginning this week, Maria Whimpop (as we call her) and her staff will bring home-made, highly healthy and intensively tasty popsicles. In addition, she will host each week a 30-minute craft class for kids using popsicle sticks. While you shop, they will have fun and end up with something to decorate the refrigerator or their own rooms with. We will post the scheduled time this week on our Facebook page.

We are also thrilled to welcome Shelby’s Gingerbread House, where she will host a cupcake bar where you can choose the flavors and toppings you want and Shelby will make them to order. We’ll post pictures on Facebook — it is being painted to look even more like a children’s house of wonder.

Absolute BBQ was mentioned fondly in a Q&A column with restaurant critic Tom Sietsema in The Washington Post, and we appreciate the plug for the market as much as Martha appreciates the plug for her BBQ.

We will have plenty of new spring veggies this week. Watch for sugar snap peas and summer squash to show up, and we will continue to have strawberries for the next few weeks. The lettuces are beautiful and tasty this time of year. They won’t be around long; they don’t like hot weather. Hopefully, someone will bring rhubarb. You will need that to make my Strawberry-Rhubarb Sherbet.

We welcome this Friday a new meat vendor who will bring lots of country eggs and other farm products, and he will take pre-orders for his grass-fed beef until he figures out demand and his strategy for bringing beef to market. His name is Bob Kalek, and his farm is A Dozen Eggs.

Remember that some of the best food in Manassas Park is served on site, and you are invited to join us for dinner at the market — the Taste of Local food truck and Absolute BBQ both have chairs and tables for your dining pleasure.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

It’s not a stretch for me to say that I learn something new every day; I work with so many different people on so many different projects, and I do read a lot. But last evening I learned in one article lots of things I did not know and which happen to directly inform all those things I do.

Michael Pollan is at it again, going where no writer has gone before to enlighten and inspire us to change our lives and, in small ways, to change the world. His most recent piece for the New York Times Magazine is another clearly laid-out indictment of our personal diets as they are dictated by “Big Food” and our personal health as dictated by “Big Pharma.” In the article he moves from the revelation that he had his gut analyzed for levels of good and bad bacteria to a discussion of the history and geography of our diet and how it has evolved to remove from our bodies many of the good bacteria that would normally keep asthma, allergies, and other autoimmune diseases out of our bodies. It would seem that the greatest threats to our daily health may not be the bad stuff out there but the lack of good stuff in our own bodies to fight off the bad stuff.

You need to read this to see how his argument develops. But his final point, once again, is that the “components of a microbiota-friendly diet are already on the supermarket shelves and in farmers’ markets.” He reminds us that “the less a food is processed, the more of it that gets safely through the gastrointestinal tract and into the eager clutches of the microbiota” (the collective microbes in our bodies). And as he often does, he explains in great detail why his major point is so important for us to understand: “This is at once a very old and a very new way of thinking about food: it suggests that all calories are not created equal and that the structure of food and how it is prepared may matter as much as its nutrient composition.”

Feed on that, folks — read more and learn more.

Photo by Sarah Sertic