 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to another edition of Vegetables in Great Abundance, or VEGA. Now vegetables are one of the foundations of a healthy diet. Just as vegas here in New Mexico are one of the foundations for our houses. They're the thicker beams that we have that support the roofs on our adobe houses. Well, vegetables and fruits for that matter serve a similar purpose. Without enough of those in our diets, we don't have an optimal chance of being healthy. And especially for children, it's really important that they learn to enjoy fruits and vegetables at an early age. Once they develop those habits, then they'll carry them on with them throughout their lifetime. Now there's no better way to enjoy fresh vegetables and fruits than by going to your local farmer's market. In New Mexico, we're really lucky. We have farmer's markets all around the state. In this television series, we're focusing on some of the markets that are close to the Albuquerque area. And in fact, today we're going to be visiting one of the newer markets, which is on the outskirts of Albuquerque. So that's kind of exciting to focus on a new market that's springing up and serving a different community. I really encourage you to visit the farmer's markets that are nearby you and to take your kids with you. They will love the shapes and the sounds and the textures and smells that they'll be able to experience. It's not at all like going to a grocery store where you're not allowed to taste or touch or handle things. Farmer's market is a real sensory experience for kids as well as for adults. Now today, as I mentioned, we'll be visiting a farmer's market where we will actually find three different products. I'll visit with the vendors of those products, the people who actually grew them and produced them. And then we're going to come back here to the studio and prepare them into a dish. Today our focus is going to be on three very delicate items that you can find at a farmer's market. Now these are things that you might be able to find at a grocery store too, but usually they're not going to be of such a good quality and probably the flavor won't be nearly as fresh. These are items that, you know, taste best if they've been prepared fresh or picked just that day for you. And you can take them home and make them yourself in your own home. Now I have to say it's been a couple of days, in fact, about a week since we were at the market. And so I've had to, you know, pick and choose and select over some of the produce that we bought. So if it doesn't look exactly as fresh as you think it should, that's because it's not just from yesterday's market. Anyway, let's visit the market now. I'm here at the Edgewood Farmers Market and I'm visiting with Madeline Hastings, who has a variety of things for sale, but most importantly I think she's also the market manager here at Edgewood. Madeline, can you tell us a little bit about how this market got started and what your role is in that? The market came about because there was a demand in the community. My farm is in Edgewood and I had been selling my raspberries kind of along the roadside. And that's, you know, a difficult thing at best. And one of the city counselors approached me and asked if I would be willing to start a farmer's market. So that's how it came about. And it was just a matter of finding someone that would, you know, let us locate on their space and set up a market. Well, it's a nice location. You're really centrally located right off the highway, in fact. So do you ever get tourists coming through and buying things? I'm pretty sure that we do, yeah. Yeah, during the summer months, you know, a lot of people stop to, you know, come and get gas and ice cream at Dairy Queen and they see us and come over. That's kind of nice. Now Madeline, I have already purchased some of these beautiful raspberries. Can you tell me about how they grow? I'm sure that's a lot of work and very labor intensive. Yes, it is. I have ever-bearing raspberry canes and basically you cut ever-bearing canes down to the ground every winter and they bear on first year canes every year. They generally start blooming in June and July and most years we begin picking a crop in July or very early August. This year has been the latest that I've ever seen and apparently most of the other growers in the state have reported the same thing. It's just been a really late crop this year. And then they continue blooming through frost and setting fruit until frost. So people have a good opportunity to get out to the market and still pick up some raspberries. It's not like they'll just be here for a couple of weeks. Okay, wonderful. Now I know you do some other things with raspberries in terms of preserving them. Tell us a little bit about that as well. I have a processing business. I make raspberry jam. I make a no sugar raspberry jam and I make a raspberry freezer jam which is an uncooked jam. I make raspberry barbecue sauce and raspberry vinegar. Do raspberries dry very well? I've never seen dried raspberries so I'm not knowing. I have. I've never eaten any of them because once you dry it and take the liquid out there's not much left but seed. And I don't think they'd be very interesting dried but there are people that do dry them. Interesting. Well I'm not sure yet what we're going to do with our raspberries but we're looking forward to giving them a try. Thanks so much for visiting with us Madeline. So here we are back in the studio with our first product from the Edgewood Farmers Market. Madeline's wonderful strawberries. No, they're actually raspberries. I'm not sure why I called them strawberries. As you can see we've got some here in a bowl just about a cup or a little bit more. Now what I'm going to be doing with these today, they are wonderful and delicious but instead of eating them just in this usual form like we often see them we're going to make them into a sauce. And often when you think of a sauce oh you think I've got to cook it on the stove I'm going to have to strain it. It's a heck of a lot of work. Well it really doesn't have to be. What we'll do here, I've got my blender at the ready. I'm going to go ahead and just put all of the strawberries into the blender. And then to add a little bit more liquid to them what I'm going to do is add a bit of lime juice. Now you could use lemon juice, orange juice, a lot of different things. Just kind of depending on what flavor you want to focus on. The lime juice though gives sort of a nice tropical flavor. Raspberries are something you can find in higher elevations in the tropics like in the Caribbean. They're not really common but the flavor combination is very tasty. This is a very juicy lime so I think just this one half of a lime will do it. It doesn't have any seeds so I didn't have to strain those out of there. Now you might imagine this is going to be a little bit tart so we will add just a bit of sugar here. Let's go ahead and do that and I'm not really measuring today. Add a small amount and then we'll see how that tastes and we can adjust the seasonings later on. Now let's go ahead and blend this up. Look at that beautiful color and look how thick that is. That's naturally thick. You don't have to add any cornstarch or anything. I'm going to pour it right back here into this bowl and you can see that's no water, cream or anything. Just a bit of sugar. This is going to be our raspberry sauce for our dish. Now you could say well why don't you strain it and get out all of those pesky little seeds. Well to me the pesky little seeds are part of the enjoyment of the sauce. Actually they add a nice texture and they're kind of contrast with the smoothness of the other fruits and the other ingredients that we'll be using here in a few minutes. And they add fiber too. There's really no reason to strain the seeds out. If you do feel like you want to strain them what I suggest you do is strain them out and save them and add them back to say a baked good that you're making whether it's pancakes or muffins or something like that and then you're not throwing away all that wonderful natural fiber. So we've got the beginnings of our dish right here. Now we're going to go back to the market and visit a person who produces a very different product that you may never have tried before. Let's take a look. Well we're back at the market and I'm here visiting with Donna Lockridge of South Mountain Dairy. Donna actually works with goats and she's got three different types of cheeses that we're going to look at in a little more detail here today. Donna can you tell us about what you have? Sure. What we do is right now we're making three different types of cheeses. We make a chevre which is a traditional French spreadable cheese. What we've done with this is we have our plain which you have and then we also take different herbs or spices, different kinds of combinations of jams and jelly, green chili, jalapeno to kind of give it a little more flavor. They're very good to cook with. You can use them in a variety of ways. You can certainly always use them as hors d'oeuvres or you can also cook with them. Put them in your enchiladas. You can certainly spread them over your salads even as to spreadable ones. A lot of people will use them as sandwiches. It's my lunch half the time. The honey walnut and what I call my breakfast blends which is the chevre with jam in them are great for breakfast on bagels. The really nice thing about these is they give the kids something sweet but also something very, very healthy with dairy. It's very good and there's no preservatives in any of my cheese so it's very, very fresh. The other cheese I make is a traditional Greek cheese called feta. Feta is very good on salads. In fact, a lot of times when you go into restaurants I have sprinkled feta on top of it. It's also very good there again if you can do a spaghetti sauce, the very fresh sauce with the Rome tomatoes and then you sprinkle feta on top of your sauce in a very light summer. It's a very good summer type of cheese. Then this is my traditional New Mexican queso blanca. Years ago a lot of the small farms and areas, people would always have one or two goats that used to go for milk for the children and then they'd also make cheese. Fancy French cultures were not available back then so what people would do is they would heat the milk to 180 degrees to get it very, very hot. You want to stir it to make sure it doesn't scald and then you pour vinegar in it and that causes the cheese to curd. Then you take the curd and hang it, press it and it makes a round that you can slice. They would have it for their children, maybe breakfast. Many of my Hispanic friends talk about their grandmothers making it as a treat for them for breakfast and pouring maple syrup on it or sprinkling it with sugar. A lot of people use the queso blanca in their enchiladas or just spread it on a tortilla and roll it up and have it that way. Very, very versatile different types of cheeses. Well I actually got interested in goats a number of years ago when I had some friends that had a small farm down in the south valley and I used to farm sit for them. They had goats and I was so intrigued by these animals they could recognize people's voices. We had a pastor, one of our pastors would come to the farm and the goats would hear his voice and they would start crying to have him come over. I have to have goats. It's hard to have goats in Albuquerque and I was traveling to different jobs at the time but when I moved out to the east mountains I got my first two little goats just mostly as weed eaters and pets and then I thought right about pack goats and then I had to have pack goats because goats actually can be used much like a llama, a horse, a mule to actually carry a pack. They're much more gentle on the environment. They're browsers so they don't tear up the environment very much. They have a very soft pad. They can go places. No other animal can go. And part of that is because of the shape of their hoof and their dew claw. So I thought pack it well you can't raise pack goats unless you have a doe to have the goat. When you have a doe to have the goat then you have the milk. When you have the milk it's like in there you have it. And you know I get to retire soon and we need to have the girls to help pay their way and since you can't give them a paper route because who knows what the paper would wind up like by the time they got to it. But goats are very intriguing animals. They've been very belittled but they're quite wonderful. You know you can certainly, Cabrito is one in fact one of the fastest growing meat products in the United States right now is goat because of the number of ethnic people moving into the United States. So there's huge goat farms down in Texas. The largest area to retail goat meat is actually Chicago. For the slaughterhouses and that. Mexican Americans, Arabian Americans, different ethnic people. People from India are very used to goat milk because they're again their cows are sacred so they tend not to eat beef. So goat provides another meat for them. And with the prohibition for a number of the Jewish community against pigs if they don't want to eat beef goat provides another meat. Now I don't eat my friends so I've sworn off Cabrito for a while. But there again they give milk, they make cheese. I actually have some pictures from a journal that shows in the turn of the century people actually having babies nurse off the goats. They would actually act as nannies for babies. A lot of the zoo right now has a baby giraffe and they're using a friend's goat milk to feed the baby giraffe. So very versatile. You can have fiber goats, the Angora's and the Cashmere, definitely their fiber. A lot of people use the hide. Very, very soft hide. A lot with gloves. Most of my work gloves are made out of goat skin and then for companionship you just can't beat them. They all know their names, they know who they are, they have personalities. They're just a wonderful animal. It's a great animal for kids too. We're really working with a lot of the 4-H groups in the local neighborhood who are either working with the pygmies or the Nubians, the little Nigerians rather the little miniature goats. They're very general animal for kids to get involved in 4-H and they're relatively easy to take care of. So it's a good animal for kids who are wanting to learn about animals and responsibility and taking care of something. For those of you that are listening, the Cooperative Extension Service is where you'll find your local 4-H program. Just visit your county office and there'll be an agent there who can tell you more about how you can get involved with animal projects. There are also a variety of baking foods projects as well as working with plants, rocketry, all kinds of things for kids. So it's really exciting to hear that you're working with the kids. The 4-H, I am absolutely convinced 4-H is the best thing in the world for kids. It teaches them responsibility and maturity and it's great. I am sold on 4-H. Donna, thanks so much for visiting with us and I am really going to enjoy cooking with these cheeses. Alright, thanks so much and best of luck. Here we are back in the studio with Donna's goat cheese. I just loved visiting with her and finding out more about how she got interested in goats and all of the wonderful products that goats can give us. We don't really think about goats very much in our society. But here we have some of the chevre and they call it their plain-jane chevre. And a chevre just means basically goat in French. So it's a very basic goat cheese and this is really nice to make into salads. You can crumble it over the top of salad, see the texture here that you've got. Makes nice dips as well. We're going to do something a little bit different here with it today and I'm not going to tell you quite yet. As we have before, if you're just tuning in, we've already got our delicious raspberry sauce here. The raspberries that Madeleine grows and that's ready to go. So right now we're going to make something with our cheese. So I went ahead and put in a whole six ounces of this, four ounces, I'm sorry. You wouldn't need to use this much because certainly for this recipe it won't take that much. And I'm just pouring in a little bit of milk here. What we're going to do now is whisk this up. I'm just trying to get a little bit of a creamier, more liquidy texture. Milk is the best thing to use to do that. You don't want to add any additional color or flavor at this point. But you can see it's already kind of forming a little bit more of a, almost a whipped texture, which is interesting, more yogurt-y. Just thinning it down a little bit. And you can thin it as much or as little as you'd like. You can see this texture right here would be really nice for sandwiches or for crackers as a dip. You can thin it really as much as you like. I think we'll go just a little thinner. Now the goat cheese has a very strong and very particular goat flavor to it. But the one thing that I like about Donna's cheese is it's not quite as goaty. I actually happen to like goaty flavors myself. But this cheese is a little bit milder than some you may have had before. Now we're going to add a little bit of spice here. What I've got, black pepper. And you might be saying raspberries, black pepper. That sounds like a very strange combination. But actually black pepper really goes well with fruits. The heat of it sets off the sweetness of the fruits. These peppercorns are popping out on me a little bit here. And we're just going to pound these up in our mortar and pestle until they're still fairly large pieces. Just like you would get out of a coarse grind of your pepper grinding mill. I just don't really care for the pepper that you buy that's already ground up. It doesn't have a lot of flavor. Now we've got our pepper ground up. And we'll be ready to go back to the farmer's market for our third ingredient to finish off this mystery dish. Let's see what we can find. Well, we're back at the Edgewood Farmers Market. And I'm speaking with Ann Summeriva. And I really was enticed by this wonderful basil that we've got here. Ann, can you tell me a little bit about how you raise the basil? What are some of the tricks in terms of growing basil? Out here basil is the one crop that I grow that's always under row cover. It needs a lot of protection out here. Well, and it's something, you know, I have tried to grow basil at home and I have never had success. So that's one reason going to the farmers market is good for even if you have a garden yourself at home, there often going to be some products that you don't grow yourself or that aren't really working for you that year and you can kind of fill in, if I've got great tomatoes at home I'm going to come to the market and definitely buy some basil to go along with those. Now tell me Ann about your involvement with farmers markets. I understand you also actually are the coordinator, the manager for the Cedar Crest Market? Yes, I'm the manager of the Cedar Crest Market which is, we're having our fifth year now and that's also another East Mountain Farmers Market, East Mountain of Albuquerque and I also have been at the Santa Fe Farmers Markets on Saturdays. So you're quite busy then, I know that it takes a lot of work. We come as customers and see everything set out here and it looks so lovely but there's a lot of behind the scenes work that has to happen, I imagine. How early do you have to get up when you go to Santa Fe? I leave the house at 5 a.m. Well, it's just wonderful. I am going to actually take some of this basil and what variety is this? Is it a... Genevies? Okay, so it is the regular large variety. Perfect for pesto. Exactly. That's what I was thinking in fact. Well, thanks so much and we'll enjoy the basil. Thank you. I wish you could be here with us in the studio because this basil just smells amazing. I've got the fresh basil that we just bought from Ann at the Farmers Market and this is what it looks like when it grows. If you're familiar with mint, basil is actually in the same family. It's got a square stem which is kind of indicative of something in the mint family and just like mint, basil actually goes really well with fruit and berries and so that's why we're going to be pairing it with our goat cheese and our raspberries today. What I've done is taken off some of these bigger leaves and then rinsed them in water and then basically have just stacked them here one on top of another you can see and then we're just going to take the knife. The nice thing about basil is it's very tender. You don't have to cut really, really hard. We're just cutting it into fine thin strips as you can see here. Now basil when you use it this way has tremendous flavor. You don't need to add too much of it to your dishes. So if you've got leftover extra basil from the Farmers Market what I suggest you do is process it into pesto or even just go ahead and blend it up with a little bit of olive oil and throw it in your freezer and then it'll be ready next time you need to use it. So we've got our basil shreds ready to go. Now the final thing that we're going to use sort of as the base for this recipe is something I didn't buy at the market but I could have if they'd had them. It was a little bit too early I think in the season yet. This is a cantaloupe and so we'll go ahead and cut it open. I've rinsed it off of course already. Cantaloupes are beautiful and look at the colors we've got here. Green, orange, pink with our cantaloupe. This is one reason I really encourage people to go to the Farmers Markets and if any of you receive wick coupons, I'm not sure you know about this but you can actually use, they have issues, special wick coupons that are for use only at the Farmers Market. So I encourage you to take those to your Farmers Market. If you live in Edgewood give the Edgewood Market a try. They're just a wonderful way to get familiar with the market and some products that you might not normally use. So we've got the seeds out of there. I'm going to go ahead and cut it this way. And what we're going to do here is just cut some pieces of the cantaloupe. It's often easier to get the rind off if you cut it into smaller rounds like this and I've got a smaller knife here that will help us do that. This is a nice ripe cantaloupe, luckily. Sometimes that green rind is quite a bit of a large part of the melon. So I'm going to go ahead and finish this off camera but just to remind you when we come back we're going to be putting together all of these strange ingredients into a wonderful dish that's going to taste just fabulous. You may not find these exact ingredients at your Farmers Market but use what you find and experiment. That's the joy of it. We'll be back in a minute. Well, I'm visiting with a couple of customers here at the Edgewood Market. This is Jeremy and Annette. Tell me how did you find out about the market? I understand it's your first time visiting. Actually, somebody I work with has a booth out here. I don't actually see her out here today but she's normally out here and that's where she told me to come out and decided to come out and take a look at it. What did you see that you bought today and what else looked interesting to you? Well, we bought the green chili goat's melt cheese. Pretty unique in flavor and texture there. It's local and so we stopped and visited and tried it out and it's quite tasty. Good. Do you think it will be coming back to the market in the future? Sure. Yeah, it will probably stop by and see as more harvest comes around for fruits and vegetables, make visits. Well, thanks so much for visiting the market. It's the first year of it and it's interesting to see how many customers are already coming by and getting to know the market. So thanks so much. So we're back in the studio. We can complete our dish now with all of these different ingredients. Let me show you how it's going to look when we're finished up. This is the finished plate. Now it looks sort of like a dessert but you could actually use this as a salad. If we can get a close-up on that, that would be great. It's sort of like a salad that you could serve with bread. You can also use it as a very light dessert and you can see what I've done. I'll go ahead and show you the beginning part of it here. You just want to spoon some of this beautiful raspberry sauce into the middle of a clear plate if you've got one. It doesn't have to be a plate this big. You can adjust as you like it. Just sort of cover the middle part. And then what we're going to use is a bit of the goat cheese that we've thinned with the milk and put that in a dollop in the middle. Like this. And now the tricky part, you can use a knife or a fork which can make even different looking swirls. But you can really do this however you like to. This is sort of a different swirl than I did up above. A little bit more subtle. But you see that the white just carries into the raspberry and makes a beautiful, wonderful pattern. That's very simple. Now all we're going to do is add some of our black pepper. We don't want to forget that. So we just sort of scatter that over the top. A little bit onto the plate as well. And then we would add our cantaloupe as you see around the edges here and sprinkle with our very small thin slices of basil. What a wonderful combination of tastes here. You can eat the cantaloupe then. You'd serve it with a fork or a spoon or perhaps both. Some people might like to eat the goat cheese with the raspberries combined or use the cantaloupe and the basil to pick it up if there's a lot of different things you can do with it. So here's a wonderful dessert or appetizer or even a light entree for a light lunch. Now you're not going to necessarily find all of these ingredients when you go to your farmer's market. But the fun thing that is so great about the farmer's market, you'll find a lot of things there that you won't even really know what to do with. And the great thing is you can take them home, experiment, see what your kids like, try new dishes. This is something that I just invented and it's really quite fabulous. So I do hope you'll visit your farmer's market soon, enjoy lots of healthy fruits and vegetables and join us next time for Vega. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.