 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Hello and welcome to The Vega Show. Vegas we know in New Mexico are the very thick beams that hold up our adobe houses. Well in this television show we're actually using the word Vega to stand for vegetables in great abundance. And you might ask, well what does a vegetable and a vega have in common? Well if you think about a healthy diet, a lot of vegetables will really be a strong foundation for you to be healthy in terms of what you're eating. I'm Carrie Bachman and I work with New Mexico State University. You may think of New Mexico State as being in Las Cruces, which is true, but I'm also with the cooperative extension service and we have county extension offices all throughout the state. If you're interested in finding out more about nutrition, taking some free nutrition classes, feel free to contact us at the number that you see on the screen below you. We'll show the number again at the end of the show in case you didn't catch it the first time. Anyway, what we're going to do today is visit one of the markets in the Albuquerque area. We're in about mid-August and so we're starting to see some of the fruits coming into season. And we're going to make sort of a surprising salad that I think will be very enticing and tasty for children. Children are really an important focus when we think about nutrition because the habits that they develop when they're young are what is going to take them into adulthood. And if they learn to develop a taste and a desire to eat vegetables and fruits, at an early age, they're more likely to continue on with those habits as they get older. Now, farmers markets are the big feature of our show here. There are many farmers markets throughout the state of New Mexico and in each show we visit a different market. If you would like to find out more about markets that are in your area, please call the 1-800 number that appears on your screen below and they can give you a better idea of what days and locations the markets are that are closest to you. Now, why should we shop at a farmer's market anyway? Well, it's a really nice way to get to know the growers and producers that are in your area. You'd be surprised but all over New Mexico we have people growing wonderful fruits and vegetables and they live right next door. There's no reason necessarily to go to the supermarket to buy all of your fruits and vegetables. It's a really nice idea to go visit the farmer's market, pick and choose, get to know some different vegetables, get to know the vendors and that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to go right now to the South Valley Growers Market and visit with one of the board members in just a moment. Stay with us. 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 and 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. The Crystal Hotel Viay 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, Farmers 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. Back at the market, I'm visiting now with Bill and Minnie Richardson and I'm really excited to see the carrots that you have here today. Can you tell us just a bit about those? Well, they're Red Corp Chantneys and I planted them way back in, I think it was March. March or something like that? March or February or March. The weather conditions went right for planting earlier. Yeah. So I had to wait to plant them when the weather condition was right. Well, it's really nice to see carrots like this. You can tell this is a carrot that's actually been grown not for sale in a grocery store. All of those are uniform. These are all real interesting different shapes which your kids are really going to like and the flavor of a fresh carrot is almost like a different vegetable compared to something you buy in the store. I notice you've been enjoying some carrots here this morning. Tell me, how did you all get started selling at the markets, Minnie? Well, he started years ago at Five Points. Well, actually the first time we ever went was at the Civic Auditorium. My daughter and I went just to sell tomatoes. That was before they had the market set up really. And that was back in the 70s. But then he's been selling like at Five Points and Caravan and then here probably for the last about 10 years or so. Last year we went to Corralis a few times. Well, it's nice in Albuquerque. There are a lot of different farmers markets around and if you can't make it out here for say to this market on a Saturday there are markets that are during the week, in the morning, in the afternoon. Basically there's a website which you can take a look at on your screen and access that and you can find out the schedules for all the farmers markets in the state. What other products do you grow? I notice we've got some delicious garlic and onions here. What other things do you all grow? We've got tomatoes, I see them. Green beans later, they're not ready yet. So they were planted in July, so there'll be a later crop. And bell peppers? Bell peppers, yes. We had cucumbers earlier too. Well, it's wonderful to see the carrots fresh this time of year because normally I don't see them this late. Do they keep in the ground pretty well even when it's hot? Yeah, we keep them in the ground all winter if we have any left and we just pull them out when we need them. So they're pretty good. I would say they're delicious. We're looking forward to going back into the kitchen and preparing them. Thank you all so much for being here at the markets and sharing all of your wonderful produce with us here in Albuquerque area. We really appreciate it. So we're back in the studio now and Bill and Minnie provided us with such beautiful carrots. I hardly want to cut them up. They're so lovely. You can see they kind of come in all different sizes when you get them at the farmers market. It's a little bit different from shopping form at the grocery store. And that's one reason I like to tell people kids just really like going to the market. Look at this carrot here. What kid wouldn't enjoy picking that carrot out, washing it and eating it? Carrots are wonderful raw which is how we're going to prepare them today but they can also be cooked. So let's go ahead and get started. Now what we're going to do, just slide these over to the side a bit. We're going to be taking some of our carrots and we'll just chop off the root ends and leave the stem ends on because you'll see what we're going to be doing. These stems are actually going to help us out a little bit. We want to be grating our carrots today and you can use a grater like this or a box grater. One thing I like about this grater is it doesn't, it's a little bit easier to clean. And you can use the small holes if you like but the large holes leave a slightly larger grate and I think that's a nicer texture in some respects. Now this is something the kids in your household can actually help you with. Certainly they're going to have to be a little bit older. You don't want them getting cut on the grater but just let them know not to go down too far to the nub of the carrot here and they should be just fine. It's a really fun job. Now you may ask, well why didn't you cut, why didn't you peel the carrots? Well as long as you wash them carefully beforehand, actually the peel on a carrot, it's not really a peel, it's just an outer skin and that's in fact where a lot of the nutrients are. So you really are better off leaving that peel on there. You're just going to grate a number of carrots. Really this carrot salad recipe doesn't have an exact measurement of carrots per se. It's really just how many people you're cooking for and it's really up to you and your own taste. So you just want to get to about that level on the carrot. All right, we're almost done here. I know some people like to drink carrot juice and that's a nice way to eat carrots but really you're getting a lot more nutrition if you use the full carrot. You get the fiber and the crunch, fills you up a little bit more. Now the other thing that I want to grate a little bit of is some ginger. If you're not familiar with ginger, I really encourage you to try it. You can go ahead and just wash the ginger root and then just use the same grater. You can see it comes out the other side just nicely. You don't even really have to peel it unless you don't like that color but it's certainly edible. And we're just going to go ahead and toss this ginger in with our carrots. So this is the beginning of a carrot salad. You'd probably want to grate a few more carrots while you're at it. We'll just start with this today but just look how lovely these colors and textures are going to be. What we'll do now is go back to the market and see what other things we can add to our carrot salad. Well, we're back at the market. I'm visiting here with Trudy Cisneros of the Cisneros Torres Vineyards. And tell us where you're located and some of the history behind that location, Trudy. We're about 10 miles south of Belen on the old highway, Exit 190 and take the old highway. We acquired the vineyard back in 1996. And it was a dream of my dad's and I'm not sure. It was 20% operational. We're about 100% operational now. We're getting ready for some wine festivals. We're also in the picking time. They asked me to sell here since I live here in the South Valley. I also have tomatoes, eggplant, a few vegetables and stuff. But my main product is grapes. We do have wine. We're making wine right now. We're getting ready for a grape stomp probably close to October. So at a vineyard it's interesting you're growing grapes for wine but they're also grapes that you can eat and that's something people don't often realize. What are the two varieties that you have here today? We have our Champagne, our V-Dabloc which are the white and also the Chancellor Grape which is used in some of the mixes and they're also good to eat. Now these have seeds I noticed and what do you tell people about the seeds? Many of us are used to eating grapes without seeds. Well, a wine grape is going to have more seeds but they're also good for eating. I mean they're good for digestive system and stuff if you eat the wine grapes. Well, and I've noticed they're nice and crunchy actually that's something that I enjoy the taste and the texture of the seeds. What happens when you're making wine is we squash the seeds and it becomes a juice. So here we have our second ingredient for our carrot salad Trudy's beautiful grapes and I've got some here as Trudy told me at the store when you take them home don't store them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator store them in either a paper bag or what I did even was wrap them in a towel very gently. It lets them air a little bit better and they'll keep much longer. I've gone ahead and picked off some of these grapes from the bunches. This is a really fun activity for your kids to do. Again, this is a great kids recipe. You may think well my kids like grape juice why do they need to actually be eating grapes? I'm gonna go ahead and toss these in with our carrots and our ginger. Well, the grapes have fiber and a lot of antioxidants and there is some research to show that when you're eating the seed along with the skin of the grape you're actually getting a lot more nutrients than if you're just drinking the grape juice. So we really encourage people to eat the whole fruits. So we've got our grapes here. Now let's go ahead and add some spices. One of my favorites if you've watched my show before you know that I really like cardamom. Cardamom comes in these green seed pods like this and basically what you wanna do is just open up a seed pod. You can also buy it already crushed but it tastes so much better. You can see inside it's got these black seeds and you wanna go ahead and take the black seeds and then we'll just put them straight into the mortar and pestle. I already have some others in here and then we'll just pound them up a little bit. This is a great ingredient in fruit dishes as well as pastries. You'll see it in Scandinavian pastries. The funny thing is you also see it in Indian dishes. So cardamom is a spice that's used in a lot of parts of the world. You wanna get that fairly ground up. It smells so nice and we're gonna use this in our fruit dressing. If you don't have a mortar and pestle you can just use a rolling pin between some sheets of wax paper. That's not as easy or as fun. Again, this is another part of the recipe that your kids will really enjoy. Okay, we've got quite a bit of crushed cardamom here. I'm not gonna use all of it in our recipe because it's really strong. But let's go ahead and put it into our dish. We're also now going to cut up an orange and the orange we're just going to use, look at that, how nice and juicy. This is a fairly seedless orange so I actually don't need to use a strainer. We're gonna use this to provide some liquid for our dressing. Now what else do we wanna put in here? Since it's a pretty sweet orange I'm gonna go ahead and use a little bit of rice wine vinegar which is a very mild vinegar. You could also use lemon juice if you wanted to. And we're gonna use a bunch of poppy seeds which are one of my favorite spices. That's a little bit of crunch. Okay, so we've got most of our ingredients. We're gonna head back to the market now and look for our final piece of fruit. Let's go. We're back at the market. I'm visiting with Tony Montoya and he's actually a producer of peaches and he's got some apples here as well. Tell us a bit about the peaches, Tony. The peaches are our hail havens gonna be the first one of the year. It's a freestone peach. We've kind of gotten away from the Albertas and things like that. We want peaches that have a unique flavor that are different. We have four varieties right now. We did plant some more trees which is gonna be a fifth variety. We're trying to kind of like overlap our peach varieties and that. So we can have peaches for about six weeks, seven weeks somewhere. Okay, so are we in the middle of the peach harvest right now? Is it a little earlier this year because of the heat? It's a little bit later by about two to three weeks on everything right now. So, you know, peaches aren't the only ones. But I think we're gonna have a late season unless we get a frost, you know, later on or early in October. But, you know, it's gonna be a good year for fruit. Excellent. Well, the peaches are just beautiful. As you can see, we've already got a basket of them set aside for us. What do people like to do with the peaches? Do they tell you when they combine they mainly eat them as a fresh fruit or? It's kind of like a split right now. When you pick peaches, some are going to be ripe. We try to get them to the markets as soon as possible. But with peaches, you have to get those into a cooler and keep them down at a certain temperature so that they stop the ripening the process and that. Those ripe peaches that I would just mentioned is we put them in boxes and people to try to, or that do make like your peach butters or peach pies, things like that. We sell those boxes a lot cheaper because it's gonna be kind of like a damaged peach. And we hate to throw things away, but sometimes we have to because we've got so much. But I think it's kind of split right now. A lot of people buy per canning. A lot of people buy just for eating. Do you ever dry any of the peaches? Unfortunately, I need a dehydrator and I don't want the government getting on fee. There are a few regulations for those of you who are interested in dehydrating fruit. The reason I asked I was at another market and we got some wonderful dried pears and apples, but I'd never seen dried peaches in New Mexico at a market. I would love to try anything, but I'll tell you but I would love to have certified kitchen, but I don't have it yet. Well, in the meantime, if you come out and buy some peaches from Tony, if you get some that are a little on the less ripe side, you might want to try drying them yourself at home in a dehydrator. I'm gonna give that a try and see how they work. We are going into our second peach here Monday, which is gonna be a red globe. They get better as the season goes along. Well, it's just wonderful. You go to the grocery store and you're not even sure what the variety is that you're buying and most of the time they don't have much flavor, if any. It is kind of a cardboard. They pick them so green. You come here and you're gonna get a fresh peach loaded with flavor, very juicy. You just can't beat it. So thank you so much for being at the markets. We really appreciate it. Thank you. So we're back at the studio with our final ingredient for our carrot fruit salad. I really enjoyed visiting with Tony and seeing his peaches and I have to say ahead of time it's been several days since we were there and as he warned me, his peaches were really ripe. So this is gonna be a good lesson in being able to cut peaches and you'll see there are a couple of bad spots here but for the most part these peaches are just beautifully ripe. What you can do, you don't need to peel them actually. Just basically cut out any bruised areas. The peel again provides more fiber and some texture as well as color. Just kind of cut them into any regular pieces. I like to put the peaches in last because they're a very delicate fruit. You don't want to get them bruised or have them exposed to the air too awfully long. Again, you can see I'm just cutting away some of these. Oh, a little bit bruised but actually these peaches are just beautiful. Now, you can use this, make this recipe with really a lot of different kinds of fruit. You're not always gonna find peaches and grapes at your farmer's market. Think of some other things berries would be really nice in here. Even some melon which is a good summer fruit. Just use your imagination. In fact, one of the nice things about going to the market is you're really gonna find that the things you see are quite enticing. And the nice thing is to take your children and have them select some things that they would like to try. So perhaps they'll see the peaches and say that, you know, perhaps peaches are their favorite fruit. They'll want to give those a try. They might see a fruit that they aren't familiar with and want to try that too. In a second here, we're gonna visit with a mom who takes her daughters pretty regularly, she says, to the farmer's market. And they really do enjoy getting to know the vendors and looking at the different produce and that type of thing. I've decided I'm gonna add just a little bit of honey here to this dressing to make it a little bit sweeter. I think I may have gone a little bit wild on the vinegar. And so what we'll do now, we've got our dressing all mixed up, our salad right here, just pour it over and we'll go back to the market for a final visit. We'll be right back. I'm visiting with Sandra here at the farmer's 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 farmer's market coupons. And so they issue a certain number of 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. Well, I noticed you all were tasting a couple of grapes earlier. Were those good? Yeah, I've still got some. They're very good. That's one thing you don't do at the grocery store, probably. That's true, you know, 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. I really appreciate visiting with Sandra and encourage all of you who receive WIC benefits to visit your farmer's market. Those coupons that you get can actually only be used at the farmer's market. So it's a great opportunity to get out into the community, find out about what's growing in your area and take your kids with you. They're really going to enjoy visiting. We've got our fruit salad here. I've gone ahead and tossed it. And let me just put some into a bowl here so you can kind of see the wonderful flavor, the wonderful colors, I mean, and the textures we've got. You know, the poppy seeds are really nice because they give you some crunch. And then also when you realize that you've got crunchy seeds in there from the grapes, it's not something that's quite as jarring. Some people don't like crunchy grape seeds but they're actually really nice, I think. So you've got your fruit salad. If you'd like to, you can also add other ingredients. I've got some yellow or light colored raisins here. Any other type of dried fruit would be tasty. Use your imagination. Now I'd also like to remind you that we do have nutrition classes available throughout the state of New Mexico. If you're interested in finding out more about those or would like some of the recipes for some of the foods and dishes that you've seen prepared on this show, please call the number on your screen. And we can get you connected with those nutrition classes right in your community or send you out some recipes. Now I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Vega Show. We've featured some of our New Mexico fruits and a surprise vegetable that normally we don't see so often in the middle of the summer. You never know what you're going to find at your farmer's market. So I encourage you to go to the market and visit frequently. Each week you're going to find different things as the growing season progresses and your kids will love exploring. They'll learn to recognize the vendors. You may even learn to recognize the vendors by name, in fact. And that's one of the joys of going to the market. It really becomes a community experience. You'll realize that those people who grow food in our communities are part of us. And when we go to the grocery store, we don't necessarily have that personal connection with them. So please do go out and visit your local farmer's market over the next couple of days. You'll find fruits, vegetables, plants, a wonderful variety of things. So if you'd also like to visit us next time, be sure to tune in to Vega Vegetables in Great Abundance. I look forward to seeing you then. 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.