 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to Vega. It's our show that means vegetables in great abundance. Now here in New Mexico, we know what vegas are. They're actually those big thick beams that hold up the roofs on our doby houses. So what do vegetables and vegas have in common? Well, vegetables are also the foundation for a very healthy diet. If you think about the way most Americans eat, we tend to not eat as many vegetables and fruits as we need to. And it's too bad because these foods provide us lots of important things, fiber for one, but also vitamins and minerals and even antioxidants and some phytochemicals, which are compounds that we're just now learning to really understand what they do for us in our bodies. So what we're doing on this show is focusing on healthy vegetables and fruits that you can find at a local farmer's market. Now wherever you live in New Mexico, you're going to find a farmer's market somewhat close to you. We're featuring markets that are close to Albuquerque for this series. I'm Carrie Bachman and I work with New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service. We have county offices all around the state where we offer nutrition education classes and where you can also find out some of your questions, get some answers to some of your questions related to foods and plants and gardening and those kinds of things. If you'd like more information about our offices and what we can provide, please call the toll-free number on your screen. Now today we're going to be featuring a market in the southern part of Albuquerque and we're going to visit the growers there and pick out three very interesting ingredients that are a little bit different varieties from what we might be used to. Some of the things you find at a farmer's market are going to be surprising and that's one of the reasons that I really like to go and visit them on a frequent basis. People grow varieties of vegetables and fruits that you won't necessarily find in your local grocery store. So let's go now to the market. We're going to visit with one of the board members and find out more. It's a beautiful, cool Saturday morning and I'm here at the South Valley Growers Market visiting with one of the board members, Rhonda Reinert. Rhonda, as you can see, has a variety of different vegetables and plants that she's selling and she's also going to tell us just a bit about how this market operates. Thank you, Kerry. Our market is really different from other markets and a lot of other markets in the state. We run as a cooperative market and in terms of decision making and running the market. What we do is we have a board that makes the decisions and the board runs the market and we have a lot of participation among our vendors to do certain things like events and going out and doing promotion and all that. Well, tell me a little bit. I noticed this morning we have some beautiful decorations which hopefully we can show on camera and also some tasting happening and that apparently is all done by some of the vendors as well. That's right. One of the vendors, and she did it last year, she's actually a new vendor this year and she's growing different products but we wanted to do a food tasting partly because it's time and things are in season. So she and her friend Karen, Susan Musante and her friend Karen, volunteered to do this and they are in charge of it and they're doing it like they want to do it. No one tells them what to do and they are in compliance with all the rules of the state and they've checked that out. So we just allow people to make choices and do different kinds of activities. Joe is another member of, he's a vendor also, but he's responsible for doing special publicity and just certain kind of events too. Wonderful. Well, you know, and it's really nice, you come to a market like this and you may see a lot of products that you're not sure what they are. Oftentimes people, the vendors themselves will say, hey would you like to try this and they'll cut open a pH or an unusual type of cucumber. And here today as Rhonda mentioned, we are just lucky enough to have a sampling tasting table where they're putting together all kinds of produce from different vendors around the market and showing you the exciting combinations that you really can make and the healthy dishes that can come out of the farmer's market. Rhonda, tell me a little bit about the relationship that you have with the church here because that's also very, very special I think. Christe Hotel Vallée Presbyterian Church allows us to use this parking lot and their other parking lot right next to their church and has for free for the past at least seven years and they require nothing of us other than we be here and they don't charge anything and they provide a service by opening the church every week and the vendors can go and use the facilities in the church but we can do whatever we want here and we have given back a little bit of donations to them over the years and now we're going to try to do some landscaping and beautify the site and they'd like us to put up a real sign and so we've been very successful in small grant applications that we've made and we've gotten some money from the New Mexico Farmers Marketing Association which is a big sponsor of us in the New Mexico Department of Agriculture and we will be paying for an artist to do a sign and some landscaping and we have some other partners that will also hopefully help in that. That's wonderful. As you can see, farmer's markets are really a part of our community. They're connected to you and your neighborhood and the people that you live with and work with. Come and visit one today. You will be surprised at the delicious foods that you find and the wonderful people that you'll meet. Thanks so much Rhonda. I really appreciate you all for being supportive of the markets because I know New Mexico Department of Agriculture and New Mexico State University are really instrumental in making this happen. Well, thank you so much. We're glad to be of service. Well, I'm here with Ron Job at the South Valley Growers Market and the product that I'm most interested that you have today, Ron, are your tomatillos. Can you tell me a little bit about those? Yeah, hushed tomatoes are very easy to grow. They make the best salsa that anybody has ever eaten but they come on, they don't last that long and you've got to get them when they're ready. Right, and how do you know when they're perfectly ripened? Well, whenever they fill out the husk, the shell around the tomatoes, some of them are full and some of them, when they start, the shell is as large as this but the tomato inside is small until they get this big here. I see. But again, I can't emphasize enough it really makes your salsa taste great. Well, it does and that's something we're going to look at, preparing in a slightly different way from what we're used to when we go back to the studio. Ron, tell me a little bit, how long have you been in the farming business and how have you proceeded with that over the years? Well, I've been in the farming business, I guess, all my life and I'll be 24 next month. Not really, but I've been in the Valley 30 years and I've been farming down here for that long and I've been here at the growers market about six years. And before that, I was, before we had a market here, I was at the one uptown and down on Gold Street many, many years ago. And you say that your farm is actually right down the road from here, am I right? Right off of Barcelona. I have two acres, I have about 80 fruit trees and a small nursery and a small garden. Wow, and you can see some of the bounty from Ron's crop here. We've got some pears, some golden delicious apples that look a lot better than the ones you see in the store and also some red flame seedless grapes. The fruit is actually coming on a little bit quicker this year but Ron tells me because we've had really hot temperatures down here in the Valley. So if you come out to your farmer's market, you'll find some fruits that you may think of more as fall fruits and they're already here in mid-August. You know, one of the things that I like to focus on when we come to the farmer's markets is the fact that this food is really local. Ron is from just down the road. You can't get any fresher than that. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us, Ron? Well, I just would appreciate the people that come here at the market and buy some good, healthy, wholesome food. We appreciate our customers more than you know and we hope they keep coming all year. Well, thank you so much and thanks for coming out to the market for so many years. We appreciate it. Well, thank you very much. Bye-bye. For being here. We're going to go ahead and take some of those tomatillos. I think I'll take a couple of bags of those if that's all right. That's great. Okay. Thank you so much. Here we are back in the studio with our vegetables that have a different type of cover on them than what you're used to. These are tomatillos and as you can see, here's the husk that covers them like this. It just peels right off and I've got some here that are already peeled as well. Now when you get them, you're going to want to look for a tomatillo that is this type of color. If it's too yellow, it's actually going to be a little bit overripe and I have to apologize to Ron. It's been several days since we visited the farmers market and so I did actually have to purchase these tomatillos at the grocery store because yours had started to go a little bit ripe which is one of the benefits of going to the farmers market. You're going to find very ripe produce that's ready to eat. Now once you peel your tomatillos, you'll notice that as you touch it, see how it sticks to my fingers a little bit. You're going to want to rinse that off in some water and I've already rinsed these here. The stickiness is not anything that's going to hurt you. It's just a little bit of a strange texture. Now you can prepare tomatillos in a variety of ways. If you look inside, it looks pretty much like a tomato in there except it's obviously not red. It's a little bit more lemony in flavor. So what we're going to do to prepare these is basically just chop them into bite-sized pieces. They don't have to be all the same size. You'll see that when you chop them like this, they stay together a little bit better than tomatoes do which makes for a nice chunkiness without a lot of extra liquid. Now a lot of times though, you want to have the tomatillo liquid released and so what you can do then is put them into a blender and you can blend them till they're still chunky but you'll be surprised at the amount of liquid that they actually release. They're very tasty as Ron mentioned in salsas particularly is where you'll find them most frequently in Mexican foods and New Mexican foods. In fact, if you go to Mexico and order enchiladas with a green sauce, you'll be surprised that you're not going to get green chili. What you're going to get is a sauce made out of tomatillos, most likely. They have a bit of a lemony flavor which I really enjoy. I use them in a lot of different things. Now to this, we're also going to add some green onions. Let's go ahead and chop these ends off here and I'm just going to use the green portions here for our salad today. You can also use the white portions but I'm going to go for a little bit less strong of a taste. Let's go back to the market now and see what else we can find. I'm visiting here with Soela Baca and she's one of the local growers here at the market. Soela, you've got some really interesting cucumbers. I noticed these from a distance. Can you tell me a little bit about those? These are Armenian cucumbers. They're called Armenian cucumbers and my two brothers grow them in their garden. And I go pick them. I cut them up like this because a lot of people don't know when they see them like this. They don't know what they are. It doesn't really look like a regular cucumber, does it? No, but then once you cut them up like this they stay very crisp. Keep them in the refrigerator. I like them too. They taste like cucumbers but different also. They're crisper I think as you say and a little bit milder. They're not real pungent. They're supposed to be burpless. That's another good thing about it. That's wonderful. We'll definitely take a couple of those for one of the dishes we're going to be making. The other thing that caught my eye, Soela, is this beautiful blue corn you have here. You told me that this is something you and your father have been growing and processing for years. Tell us about that. My father used to plant blue corn which is like this. Really blue, blue corn. Years and years ago when he passed away in the year 2000 he was 96 years old and then my two brothers took over the garden and they can't keep up. Two of my brothers can't keep up with what my dad used to do. That's interesting. But there's a process to this blue corn and first they have to harvest it and then they have to dry it and then they have to take it off the cob and then we have a wood stove where they roast it. And then we take it to the mill to have it ground and that's what this is. Wow, and so this is something very, very specific and traditional to New Mexico. Outside of the state I don't think a lot of people would know what this is to be honest. This is Native American because a lot of I've seen a lot of Mexican people coming around and they don't know what this is. And I thought maybe they would know but they don't. So this is something that you enjoyed eating as a child in Atolle or Chacaue and you've got some recipes here. If you come to the farmers market you'll find the vendors are really knowledgeable. They might have some things that you haven't seen before but they can give you all kinds of ideas for how to prepare them. We have recipes here for cornbread for muffins like she bought cornbread from, I mean blue corn mill from me blue corn muffins. That's wonderful. And so you can make a lot of things with it pancakes, crepes and we make Atolle mostly and Chacaue. Well that's wonderful tradition. You can go into it. Oh really? Yes. And it tastes a lot like enchiladas. Oh, delicious. So that sounds wonderful. I'm going to go ahead and purchase a couple of bags of corn and then also some of these wonderful Armenian cucumbers. Soila, thank you so much for visiting with us. Thank you. Thank you for being at the market as well. Okay, thank you very much. Here we are back from the market with Soila's beautiful Armenian cucumber. Isn't this just lovely? This is something that if you looked at you might think it was a squash or a gourd not necessarily a cucumber. But let me go ahead and show you what it looks like when you cut into it and you'll recognize it when you cut into it. Now the nice thing about these cucumbers you can you notice they're not waxed. The store-bought cucumbers will tend to be waxed because it kind of helps them preserve the quality a little bit better. But these you don't actually have to peel and look how beautiful that shape is if you were to use a round shape like this for some hors d'oeuvres or crudités or something it would be just lovely. Now what I'm going to do with it instead today is actually chopping into pieces. We're going to use a certain size necessarily. Just bite size. Look at the crunch that you've got here. We're going to throw them into our salad and this is something that kids will really like. Kids like cucumbers anyway but this one is particularly mild in flavor and you can even use cucumbers. I bet you didn't know this. You can even use them in stir fries and sautés. Kind of cook them a little bit like squash. So we'll put a little bit more cucumber in later. Now you'll notice I've also got some other ingredients here in the bowl already. What these are some kidney beans, the red beans here. We've got some black beans and these are just out of cans. What I've done is taken the canned beans poured them through the sieve right here the strainer and I'm going to do it with the third type of beans right now. These are our garbanzo beans. This is a way to get rid of the liquid. I'm not going to rinse them here today because actually we'll use the remaining salt that kind of clings to the beans so we don't add any more salt to our bean salad. So you can probably guess right here what we're making today. This is a three bean salad. Beautiful combination of colors in the beans with our tomatillos and our cucumber. Make it a really nice salad. Let's go up ahead and cut up a little bit more cucumber. And I did want to mention that I do have some of the blue corn that Soila was showing us at the market as well. Just a piece of it. Isn't it just lovely? Use it for decorations or also as she does to roast and grind it and then make it into a tolle or other dishes. Let's head back to the market now for our final ingredient for our three bean salad. Let's see what we can find. Well I'm visiting here with Darryl and Rose Randall and we are at the South Valley Growers Market again. You can see from what they have left here what else did you have before we got over to your stand? We had some tomatoes a lot of green beans purple beans squash cucumbers. I think that was it. What we really want to do is grow flowers but they just don't sell the same way that vegetables do. Well you know it makes a kind of nice combination. Rose was telling me earlier that you have sort of a joint operation here. Rose what are the things that you work on in terms of the farmers market? I harvest and make the flower arrangements. Darryl does all the selection for all the seeds and the varieties that we grow. And then I also photograph flower beds around the house and make some cards, some other cards too. And then this year I discovered soap making so I make a few soaps also. Well you'll see coming to the farmers market you're going to find a variety of things in addition to fresh produce. The reason I'm here today is because of the fresh produce. And I in fact was able to reserve the very end of the beans here, which you'll see right here in front. Can you tell us a little bit about these beans? Well I don't know a whole lot about it. This is called royalty purple pod and one of the things that it appeals to me about it is that it does not attract insects diseases to the same degree that the green beans do. Oh no, that I didn't realize. So that I don't know anything about entomology but I would assume that the insects don't perceive the purple color the same way they do the green color. Well that's interesting. Now the beans are so beautiful what happens to them when you cook them? They turn green. Yep, you lose it all. If you had yellow, purple beans and you cook them you'll have yellow and green. Well you know I think what we're going to do is keep them raw for our recipe but I'll have to do it. They're tasty. They make a very nice out of hand snack. In some ways I think the purple have more of a bean flavor than some of the green beans. They work so hard to get the green beans nice and straight and long, so they look very well. I was speaking to a chef recently and he said that today we eat by by sight not by previous societies ate by smell or something like that but it's presented more than anything else. Well and that's one thing. The farmer's market as you can see has glorious beautiful produce and flowers but it also tastes really good. I find a lot of the things you buy here don't keep really well and that's why they don't sell them in the larger markets. That's right. What do you like to do with some of the produce that you grow yourself? What are some of your favorite dishes? We eat a tremendous amount of salads. We didn't have any greens with us today but we usually keep greens of all kinds growing and then whatever we have that we can add to those greens or if we don't have anything else we just have greens but I think salads especially during the hot part of the year we tend to supplement dishes all year round are like my favorite thing. Salads are so healthy and you can do about anything. Put anything into them so I'm in agreement with you there. Well thank you all so much for being here at the market and I'm really looking forward to preparing those beans in a recipe. Thanks so much. Here we are back in the studio with Darryl and Rose's purple beans. So we've got a three bean salad. It's actually going to now become a four bean salad because we're going to use these fresh beans and what I like to do with these look how gorgeous these are when you cut them on a slant diagonal you can see the green portion inside but you can still see the black or purple part on the outside. They are just beautiful and you can certainly put in some other green beans in here as well whatever you'd like to use but the purple beans again are just so beautiful. You'll notice like Darryl said they're not very straight but actually I think that gives them a little more character not as easy as it can obviously but you know when you're just putting them into a fresh salad like this that's not exactly the idea. So we'll cut up a few more of those beans here in a second. I also want to add some additional seasoning to our salad. Here we have some cilantro which I've already rinsed off we're just going to chop it fairly finely you can add as much or as little cilantro as you'd like. This is one of those things in New Mexico we tend to eat quite a bit of but sometimes people aren't that used to it let's go ahead and just use this amount. If we want more we can add it later I'll just throw it in there in the salad. And what we'll also do now is prepare our sour dressing for this. Now often you eat a three bean salad you get a lot of very sweet oily dressing. Instead what I like to do is use more vinegar which I've just poured some into this bowl and use a fair amount of it and then to sweeten it you can use either sugar or some honey got some New Mexico honey here and we'll put a fair amount of that in there and then use a whisk to stir that up a little bit. Now get that nice and combined we're not going to add any salt because we already had some salt in there with the beans I've just got some plain canola oil here which adds a sort of a neutral flavor you could use olive oil too if you wanted the trick is to add it fairly slowly in a stream as you're whisking it to get it to combine with your dressing and traditionally as I said there's a lot of oil in these bean salads but we're not going to put nearly as much today it's just enough to kind of carry the dressing you can see we've got that combined really nicely here and then we're just going to toss that over the top of the salad. The salad can actually marinate for several days in the refrigerator and it gets better and better so don't worry if you don't eat it right away. Let's go back to the market now and visit with one of the moms who I met there. I'm visiting with Sandra here at the Farmers Market and Sandra's been coming for a couple of years to the markets here in New Mexico tell us how you found out about them and what brings you here? Well I've been a recipient of WIC and they encourage use of the Farmers Market coupons and so they issue coupons to the recipient each season during the summer and fall and I've been coming here about two years and we really look forward to it there's such a variety of fruits and vegetables that we normally wouldn't think about using and so we've really enjoyed it. I noticed you all were tasting a couple of grapes earlier were those good? I've still got some they're very good. That's one thing you don't do at the grocery store probably it's frowned upon so it's nice to be able to taste them here. Well it's so wonderful that you're thank you for talking with me and that you're coming to the market I'm glad you're bringing your daughters and have a great summer. Thank you. Thank you. Well we're back now in the studio with our final dish we've got our three or really a four bean salad here. Watch I mean go ahead and toss it you can see the dressing's been marinating with all the vegetables and the beans we've got those tomatillos on the bottom almost forgot about those look at the lovely colors and the salad is just tremendous three bean salad is something that was really traditional in my family especially in the summertime but you can prepare it any time of year that's one of the nice things about having canned beans on hand and then adding some fresh vegetables with it as well. Let's plate some of this up and you can really see the beautiful play of colors and textures here kids actually really like three bean salad you might not think that they would but the something about the vinegar that tart vinegar flavor and then combined with the sweetness of either the honey or the sugar really makes it very tasty for children so I encourage you to give it a try there's so many different variations on how you can prepare three bean salad thanks so much for joining us here at the Vega show today as you remember Vega means vegetables and great abundance and you can find those at your local farmers markets here in New Mexico we have so many markets to choose from just call the number on your screen and they will let you know what the day and the time of the market closest to you is the markets operate primarily in the summer but also some of them into the fall and spring and sometimes even the winter as well so even if you think that there may not be a market going on where you live it's a good idea to look into it and see especially if you receive wick benefits because you can use those valuable coupons to purchase vegetables and fruits at your local market I hope you've enjoyed the show today and that you'll join us next time for Vega until then enjoy your local farmers market with your children and cook up lots of healthy vegetable and fruit dishes thanks 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