 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to another edition of Vegetables in Great Abundance. This show is called Vega, and here in New Mexico, we know of vegas as the large beams that support our adobe houses. Well, I like to think of vegetables in the same way. They make the foundation of a healthy diet. My name is Carrie Bachman, and I work with New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service, and I work in nutrition education. Now, the focus of this series of programs is farmers markets in New Mexico, and all of the wonderful produce, fruits, and vegetables, and other assorted delights that you can find at a farmers market. What we'll do every show is go to a farmers market, buy different kinds of produce, and then come back to the studio here and prepare it. Now, yesterday I was lucky enough to visit the Albuquerque Growers Market, which is located on Central. And we're going to see how I chose some very interesting items to combine together to make a favorite in New Mexico. It's a type of salsa, but something that you might not normally see. That's part of the fun of going to the farmers market. You never know exactly what you're going to find, and you can take new and exciting ingredients and combine them in different ways. And so it's a way to keep yourself interested in cooking, preparing healthy foods for your family. The other thing that's really great about farmers markets is kids love them. So I really encourage you the next time that you visit a farmers market, take your children along with you. You'll be surprised at how excited they are to pick out their own fruits and vegetables. Now with the VEGA program, as I mentioned, we're focusing on different farmers markets in the Albuquerque area, but there are farmers markets all around the state of New Mexico and in other states as well. If you're interested in finding out where the closest market is to you, please look at the screen right now and call the number that's there. That number will connect you to all the farmers markets in the state of New Mexico. Let's meet our market manager. Well, today I'm glad to introduce you to Mike Sophia. He is the manager of the Albuquerque growers market. And Mike has a very interesting story to tell us about how he personally became involved in vegetables. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad you guys came. I was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and raised in Buffalo. My grandfather, Sam Bonacorso, and that's as Italian as you can get, was an old produce huckster. And when I was about seven or eight years old, he used to take me to the farmers market downtown Niagara Falls. And he taught me the produce business and I've been at it just about all my life. You had mentioned to me earlier that some of your best clients are WIC participants. Can you tell me a bit about that program? That program is WIC, it's three letters, W-I-C. It's Women, Infants, and Children of all the markets in New Mexico. We command the most WIC checks between $75,000 and $80,000 worth each and every year. Now that's an incredible amount when you think that that money is going straight into the pockets of growers and producers who are your neighbors and friends in your local communities. The WIC program, as Mike says, is a really important piece of the success of farmers markets and also a great way for people to be introduced to fresh vegetables and fruits that they might not normally purchase. Mike, do you find that some of the people who come by with the vouchers for produce continue to shop at the farmers market? All the time. All the time. And another thing is the state as well as the federal government wants to help the people who are in need of this. There's a certain people need help financially and this is one way to do it. And I really appreciate the diligence of the vendors in working with the WIC program and making this a success. It's something that we're hoping to replicate in the future with senior citizens. Other states have done that and have distributed vouchers that they can use in the same way at their farmers markets. Now the nice thing is anybody can come to a farmers market. You'll see people here young and old, wealthy and not so wealthy. It's a place that is really a meeting place for everybody in our society. I really encourage you to get out to your local market. The next one that comes up, take a look in your paper or give the New Mexico Farmers Market Association a call and find out about the market that's in your area. Well, here we are at the market visiting with the Marcus family and I have Judy Marcus and her daughter Amanda here with us to tell us a little bit about the wonderful variety of onions that they've got. Judy, what are the varieties you have for us here to show us today? Well, what we have at the market is Vidalia, which are good for onion rings, purple onions for salads. We have onions, yellow onions for hamburgers. We have a variety of boilers. That's an incredible variety of onions, especially for this time of year. How many varieties do you generally grow on your farm? Usually about six or seven varieties. That's great. And Amanda, what do you like to do on the farm? Do you help your mom out? Yeah. That's wonderful to see all of the different generations of the family involved here. Tell us a little bit about your background in farming and how you've gotten to be involved with the Farmers Market. Well, we've been doing it for about five years now. My husband, my mom, my dad, my uncle, and we enjoy coming to the Farmers Market, especially here at the caravan. It's a great atmosphere. You get to meet new people. You get to know people and they get to know you and they just enjoy our produce. And we're a bit early in the season here, but Judy was telling me that we're actually going to have quite a larger number of vegetables later on. A lot of okra. What are some of the other things we'll be seeing? We'll be having a large variety of melons and green beans, cucumbers, yellow hots, jalapenos, pumpkins, a variety of chilies. Wow. That's just great. You know, I think the thing that I'm going to take here today is get some of those beautiful purple onions. Can you pan me just a couple? I really like them because they're nice small size. You know, sometimes the purple onions you get in the store can be really large and you may not use the whole onion, but look at this beautiful shape and color. This purple onion tends to be a bit sweeter than some of the white onions we might be familiar with. And so that's something that I'm going to take into the studio tomorrow and we're going to prepare into a dish. Thank you so much, Judy, for taking your time and for being here at the Farmers Market. Yes, and everybody please come down to the caravan here on Central. We're here on Tuesdays and Saturdays from 7 to 12. It's the best market in town. Here we are back in the studio with these same beautiful purple onions that Judy showed us yesterday at the market. What I'm going to do is just slice them and put them as the beginning ingredient for our special salsa. Now you can see, as I mentioned when I was at the market, look how nice and small these are. These are really young onions. Some of the onions that you'll buy in the market are not going to be quite as fresh and let me just slice open here to show you what that beautiful color looks like. That color is one of the reasons that these onions are so nice to put into salads. Now what I'm going to do, you want to of course peel off this papery outer layer. Look how fresh that is. Wow, I wish you could smell that too. I'm just going to slice this into thin slices. The idea is we want some onion flavor but not overpowering and these slices will separate on out. Now that is beautiful. You can see how they just kind of separate out. You can do that by hand or as we mix them they'll probably separate out just fine as well. Some of you might want to add a little bit more onion and in fact I think I will go ahead and do that. Now this red or purple onion is a storage onion which means that it's fairly low in water content and that means that it will store pretty well. You want to store your onions at room temperature of course. Not in the refrigerator. This is in contrast to the sweet onions which are very popular here in New Mexico. You can actually find quite a number of them this time of year beginning in May through about August and the sweet onions have a higher water content so they're not keeping onions. They're sort of similar to the Vidalia and in fact Judy mentioned that they sold some of those there at their farm stand as well. Those are really a nice raw onion as well for salads, for burgers. Onions are related to garlic and if you think about the way that they grow they're very similar. It's kind of a bulb underneath the ground with the green leaves coming straight up to the top like grass. The green leaves are edible on basically any kind of onion but there are special onions that are actually harvested or bread and harvested for growing the green tops which we think of as scallions. There's also another type that we know as chives. So the onion family is really quite diverse and we're lucky here in New Mexico to be able to have such wonderful fresh onions available. What I like to do with this purple onion is put it into salads like this. It goes really nicely with vinegar and then adding a little bit of something for sweetness which we're going to see here in just a minute when we go back to the market and visit with another one of our vendors. Let me go ahead and put this into our bowl in preparation for our other ingredients. We've got a couple of other vegetables that I'm going to add as well and I'll show you those quickly. We didn't get them from the market but later in the season we could. We've got green pepper, we've got red pepper and we've got our cucumber. Green, red and cucumber and I'm going to put that in the bowl as well. One of my favorite things to find at a New Mexico farmers market is local honey and today we have a special guest with us here at the market. Ken Hayes is a beekeeper and more than that he actually works with beekeepers around the state to help the industry grow and thrive. Tell us a little bit about that, Ken. Well, I'm president of the New Mexico Beekeepers Association have been for quite a time and what I do is try to promote beekeeping. We need beekeeping for pollination about one-third of everything you put in your mouth. It's dependent on pollination by the bees. This facility is a real neat New Mexico honey and she can take a taste of this. Oh, thanks. Now, this is, I notice a very light colored honey. Very light colored? Facilia is something I'm not familiar with. What type of plant is that? It's kind of a thistle-y plant that comes up when we have a lot of rain and snow in the wintertime and in the early spring and it comes up and yields a tremendous amount of honey and it excites bees. We have a lot of swarming because of it. But it's really nice tasting honey. I was just going to mention it's a fabulous flavor. It's a light flavor but very, I would say distinctive. It's not like a clover honey but delicate in a similar way. I definitely think we're going to have to try some of that here today. Now, I notice next to that and you've got some of this honey here. A tamarisk honey and that's a really much darker color. Now, tamarisk is something people might know by another name. It's salt cedar. As you know, each plant or tree has two names, common and technical. It's salt cedar is the common name that everybody knows the plant by or the tree by and tamarisk is its technical name and I want you to taste this. It's a really fabulous honey, one of my favorites. It's a rich, dark, robust honey. Well, let me give this a quick taste. Look how beautiful that is. And again, you can see honey comes in different colors, different flavors and the flavors come naturally by depending on what flowers the bees are actually visiting. Wow, that's a really deep flavor honey. I can see that that might be very tasty in a cup of tea. Oh, that is just delicious. Or coffee, it's great. The other thing that I think is so great about buying local honey, you are supporting a local business person and the family that they belong to and somebody who's part of your community. It's a far different thing from going to the grocery store and buying honey off the shelf where you don't really know where it's coming from. As Ken says, the bees serve a very important purpose in our ecosystem. And so buying the local honey actually helps us help the environment as well as enjoy something that's really tasty. Well, Ken, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it and best of luck with your honey and your bees. Thank you very much. So back here in the studio, well, we've got the beginnings of our wonderful salsa, this beautiful purple onion from the market. And then as I mentioned, it's not quite the season yet for red and green pepper and for the cucumber. So I had to purchase those at the grocery store. But later on in the season, you'd certainly find those at the farmer's market as well. Now, you buy it out of guess that we were going to find honey at a farmer's market. And I just think Ken is an amazing source of wisdom about honey and beekeeping. One of the ingredients of this salsa is going to be some honey. And I think today what we'll use is the facility honey, which he mentioned earlier. This is the lighter colored, lighter flavored honey. I also had to buy a jar of the, or a container of the tamarisk or salt cedar honey. I just, that's a delicious flavor, a little bit reminiscent of buckwheat honey. And then let me show you real quickly too this whipped honey. This is actually nothing but honey. What is done is it's beaten with a big paddle mixer. And you can see it makes this real nice creamy texture. It's just air that's incorporated into the honey. Really nice to use on bread or toast. Just kind of a different type of a honey product. And again, all it is is honey, nothing else added. So let's go ahead and we'll measure in a little bit of honey. You know, in the United States, there are over 300 floral sources for honey. So that means that there's 300 different types of plants from which bees gather their nectar. And then that's what they use to make the honey, which we enjoy so much. We're going to put just about two tablespoons in here. Use a spatula to get this sticky stuff out. And this again is just to add a little bit of sweetness to our salsa and also that nice honey flavor. Now honey is something else I really like to use in baking. You can substitute it for all or part of sugar. Depending on the recipe, you need to, you know, test it a little bit. But what honey does is it makes baked goods brown very nicely. And it also is something that retains moisture. So when you add honey to baked goods, your baked goods will actually keep longer. They will not go stale as quickly, which is a bonus in our dry climate here. Now the other nice thing about honey is that it actually enhances the sweetness of things more than sugar does. So you'll find that you can use less honey than you would sugar and still get the same level of sweetness. One thing we do need to remember about honey is that it's not a good idea to feed it to children who are less than one year old. It can be a source of botulism, which can produce toxins in the body, which are very dangerous. Let's go now and visit our next producer. We have Fernando Herrera here today with us at the Albuquerque Growers Market. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes to visit with us, Mr. Herrera. I would like you to tell us just a bit about the farm and what types of fruit and produce that you actually grow there. I grow beans, corn, some peas, green peas, green beans, and different things, some other things. Well, and this early in the season, I know it's a little bit challenging to bring too much to the market, but I did notice you have some beautiful apricots. Can you tell me about your apricot trees? Yeah, I got a couple of apricot trees, and they're all gone, these are the last apricots I got. Okay, so we're lucky today to be able to find these apricots. Many of you who are familiar with fruits from New Mexico, apricots are one of the most familiar fruits that we find. Well, and it is something that traditionally people have canned in New Mexico. You can also actually dry apricots, and they taste really nice when you do that as well. But as Mr. Herrera says here, his main purpose with apricots is actually selling them. Do you come to the market every week then? I try. The farm that you farm on, is that one that you inherited from your parents? Part of it, yeah, part I bought it. Well, it's something that when you visit the farmer's market, you'll find people of every part of life, people who have farmed traditionally for many, many generations, other people who may have just gotten into farming as a second job or a hobby, and they find that they love it so much that they continue to work with it. Farmers are as diverse as any other group that you'll find in our society, and by coming to the market you can actually visit with them, meet them, and get to know some of their issues and concerns, and also feel like you're contributing to their survival in our society. Sometimes farming is a pretty hard job. Yeah, it is a hard job, but I'm used to it. I've been doing that all my life. Well, thank you so much for taking your time for visiting with us today, and best of luck with your growing season this year. I appreciate it. You can see we've started cutting up our apricots here today, and these are just beautifully ripe. You notice they're very delicate, and that's one reason they're so expensive in the stores. Let me show you how nicely the seed actually comes out of these. Really very easy to get out, unlike some peaches and plums, and you can just kind of cut them in whatever shape you'd like. This is our surprise ingredient for the salsa. Now, if you'd like more information about how other ways to prepare apricots, particularly drying them, freezing them, canning them, I encourage you to call the number on your screen. That will connect you to our extension service, and you can get information there or visit your local county office. Now, apricots are a great fruit for kids. They really like the delicate, sweet flavor, and when you put them into a salsa like this, you're, of course, going to want to adjust the amount of heat, depending on what your family's preferences are. Now, what I've gone ahead and done is chopped up half of a jalapeno pepper. You can see the jalapeno looks like this in the beginning. One thing that I like to do is take out all of the pith and the seeds so that you end up with all the heat is concentrated in those areas, and then just chop this part up. Then I've also used half of a serrano pepper, which is a little bit different variety, different type of heat, and again, this is what it looks like when it's cut up and you'll want to take that pith out. So let's go ahead and put in this chopped up pepper, and let's see, what else do we need in our salsa? Well, a little bit of acid might go nicely with that honey, and what I've done over here is I've gone ahead and juiced a couple of limes, and we're going to use just two tablespoons, the same amount that we used of the honey. Put that right there in the salsa, and that's going to add a little bit of tartness and it complements the honey flavor really nicely. Now, the final thing that we're missing is a bit of cilantro. I've already cut up, oh, I'd say about two tablespoons worth here. You can use more or less. Again, most of the recipes we make here on The Vegas Show are very approximate. Now, you just want to stir this up, and again, it's nice to let it sit a little while, keep it in the refrigerator until you serve it, and that will let those flavors mingle a little bit. Now, apricots originated in China. They're a really nice fruit tree. If you have a small yard and can't grow larger trees like pecans or some of the apple trees are larger, an apricot makes a nice tree to have in a small yard. You know, the other thing, if you're not lucky enough to have apricots in New Mexico, they're so abundant. A lot of people have trees and they don't have the time or the energy to harvest them. So it's a nice thing to actually ask, of course, before you harvest their tree, but ask them, and then you can give them a portion of the harvest if they agree, and you can keep the rest to prepare for your own family. So it's a nice way to make sure that the fruit is ready to grow. Now, what would we serve this apricot salsa with? Well, let's go back to the market. We're going to meet with one of the patrons who really frequents the Albuquerque growers market, and he's going to tell us a little bit about one of the other very traditional foods in New Mexico. Let's go visit with Joe Valencia. My name is Joe Valencia. I live here in Albuquerque. I've been here for over 40 years. I came here from Santa Fe, and prior to that, I was from Glorieta, New Mexico. We lived on a ranch. I was raised there. Me and 11 children, brothers and sisters. But we had a lot of fun. We raised a lot of beans. Well, and we have some beans here to show everybody. What is it that makes beans such an important thing in your diet and to the diets of people in New Mexico? Well, it's survival. It's survival, believe it or not. Without these things, there would have been people who couldn't have survived, I don't think. We depended on planting beans. We had several acres of them. And we raised beans. My father was very persistent about that. Well, what is it that makes dry land beans so much better than the irrigated variety? Well, I wouldn't say that they're better. I just like them better. You know, I'm used to them. It's such a healthy food. It's fairly inexpensive. And again, it carries so much culture and tradition with it. To see them here at the farmer's market is really quite exciting. Now tell me, Joe, why do you come to the farmer's market? I come here to shop a little bit and then visit with the people. I love people. I have a business close by. And I enjoy visiting with the people here. They're kind. They're beautiful. They're hard workers. I can just imagine by the product they bring to this market how much work it's taken to produce it. And I don't mind paying for it. Of course, my wife's the one that does the shopping for it. Well, it's nice to hear that you and others here in Albuquerque appreciate the growers and the fact that they take their time and energy to come to the market and share these foods directly with their consumers. If you go to a grocery store, you don't really have that connection, do you? Well, grocery stores are a little different lot. They say they're fresh product, but by the time they market them out of California, Arizona, Texas, and Mexico and other parts of the country, it's not the fresh stuff like they have here. Early in the season, mid-season, late-season, you're going to find a variety of different things. That's exactly what you'll find, and that's part of the excitement of the market. And as Joe said, it's a place to get to know people, become friends with people who you know that you'll see week after week. It's really a social event as well. Well, thank you so much for visiting with us. Thank you for having me and enjoy the market. It's always very great and the food is great. Buy it. Well, we just learned a bit about beans at the farmers market, and we're back here with our gorgeous salsa, really nicely with some beans. You could even put it into a burrito. This would also go really nicely with chips as a kind of alternative to your regular tomato-based salsa. Lots of interesting things you can do with it. Now, you might want to add some other ingredients as well. A tiny bit of salt if you need to. I don't really think the flavor requires it. A little bit of ground pepper perhaps. Some chopped fresh ginger would be really nice to add. This would add a great kind of Asian flavor to it. And in the fall, one of the things that you're going to find is cranberries, which as you can imagine would just be beautiful. Just use the cranberries that come in the bag, the fresh ones, and just chop them. Put them straight in here, and you'll have to add a little bit more sweetened or honey perhaps and balance the flavors out. But there's so much you can do with this wonderful fresh produce that you find at the farmers market. Now, if you'd like the recipe for this apricot salsa, or any of the other recipes you've seen prepared on The Vega Show, please call the number on your screen to send you out a recipe booklet. The other thing that you can find out about is nutrition classes that are offered in your community. These are called iCan, and they're from the local extension office. They're absolutely free. It's a series of classes where you'll learn to prepare healthy, easy, delicious recipes just like this one. And you and your kids can actually learn to enjoy healthy foods and become healthier as a family. Now, I hope that you will join us for another Vega Show. When we visit another farmer's market, maybe the one that's right next to you. Remember, if you're somewhere else in the state, I'm sure you've got a farmer's market located nearby. Call the number on the screen if you'd like to know where that is and the dates and times of its operation. And I encourage you, in the meantime, be creative with vegetables and fruits. You can come up with so many delicious, interesting dishes that your family is sure to love. Until our next Vega Show, I'm Carrie Bachman. On behalf 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.