 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Hello and welcome to another edition of VEGA, Vegetables in Great Abundance. I'm Carrie Bachman and I'm a nutrition educator with New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service. Now I'm actually based in Las Cruces, but we have employees who are in all of our county offices around the state and they are ready to serve you in any way related to foods and nutrition. So if you have any questions as you're looking at the show today or want to find out some more information about how to attend free nutrition classes or learn some healthy recipes and receive a recipe booklet, please give the number a call that is on your screen right now. It's toll free and we'll connect you with the county extension office in your community and they can really help you with the questions that you might have. Anyway, you might be wondering why we call our show VEGA or Vegetables in Great Abundance. What do vegans have to do with vegetables? Well, those of you who are from New Mexico or who've lived here for a long time know that VEGA is the word for the long thick piece of wood that we use in our ceilings of our Adobe houses and those support the roof, so they're very important for the strength of the roof and sort of form a foundation for that roof. Well, I like to think of vegetables in the same way. If we don't have enough vegetables in our diet and most Americans don't then it can be really hard to have a healthy diet. Vegetables give us so many things. Obviously they've got fiber, they've got a lot of nutrients like minerals and vitamins but they even have some things that we're only beginning to understand. Like these are called phytochemicals and we don't really know all of the wonderful things that these substances do for our bodies. It's better to get these substances from real fruits and vegetables than to use a vitamin pill because we just don't know all of the things that we might be missing if we're only taking a vitamin. So that's why vegetables are really the vegans or the foundation of a healthy diet. What we do on this television series is visit a variety of farmers markets around the Albuquerque area in New Mexico. Now if you don't live actually that close to Albuquerque we've got farmers markets in other parts of the state as well. There's a number on your screen right now and if you call that number they can connect you with the local farmer market, the local farmers market. Tell you what day it occurs and what time of day and where that market is located. So don't despair if your market isn't featured here on our VEGA program. What we do is we go out and visit the markets, talk with different growers and purchase some of the products from them and then come back into the studio and prepare them all into a delicious and healthy dish. So I hope you'll enjoy us as we travel on this adventure today. We'll be visiting the Edgewood Farmers Market which is one of the newer markets in the state just on the outskirts of Albuquerque. So come along with me and let's see what we can find there at that market. I'm at the Edgewood Farmers Market and I'm visiting with Madeleine Hastings and I'm actually going to purchase from her today some of these lovely collard greens. They're baby collard greens, a little bit smaller leaf than you're used to seeing in the grocery store likely. How do you grow these? What's unique about collard greens for those people who aren't familiar with them? I'm not sure what's unique about them. These have been grown under row cover in order to keep them a little bit more sheltered from some of the pests that we've had problems with this year as well as the rabbits. Oh, the rabbits. Yeah, rabbits like greens. Well, generally I think of these as a cool weather crop and they're still producing for you. Wow, that's great. They're voiced and under covered. And they do okay. I'll have to keep that in mind. I normally grow mine in the fall and winter and they can even over winter in Las Cruces without any problem but it's an exciting thing for me to see them this time of year. Now Madeleine, you perform a very special role at this market. Tell us about how you got involved here with the market. I think about the only farm in Edgewood. I had been selling my crop locally but basically at the street corners and one of the city councilors approached me and asked if I'd be willing to start a farmer's market and that's how it came about through that process. So how many weeks have you been open then, if this is your first year? We opened on July 11th this year. Well, it's really amazing for such a new market. I've seen so many customers here today and you have a real nice variety of vendors too. It's a small market but we do have a good variety of vendors and I heard one of the customers last week as they were walking out saying, wow, for so few people here, look at all the stuff I got. And I think that's been the general response that we've gotten from the community. We've really been very supported and we're just glad to be here. It's interesting, if you call the number on your screen you can find out what other farmers markets there are in the Albuquerque area and around the state of New Mexico. The thing that I like about the markets is they're not all on the same day. So here we are out in Edgewood in the afternoon. People can stop by after work and pick up produce. A lot of the markets are on the weekends. Some of them are earlier in the morning on weekdays. So check your schedule by calling the number on your screen and you can find a market that's most convenient to you. Another thing that's interesting about the markets is that you can use WIC vouchers, coupons to come to the markets and purchase fresh produce. Tell me, do you receive many of those from your clients? Yes, actually we do. There's an active WIC program out in the Torrance County area in which it also overlaps into the Santa Fe County, which is where we're in. And in the past the people that have received these coupons have had to go all the way into Albuquerque to redeem them. And so there was a pent up demand for that as well and we've really received a lot of WIC customers at this market. Well it's a great opportunity for those of you who do receive WIC benefits to visit your farmers market and get acquainted with the vendors and maybe some new products that you haven't tried before. Madeleine, thanks so much for visiting with us. We're going to enjoy the collared greens. Thank you. Well we're back in the studio now and I really enjoyed visiting with Madeleine the market manager and getting some of those baby collared greens from her. Now the sad part is we actually visited the market about a couple of weeks ago now and those collared greens unfortunately didn't last until the time of our studio tapings for the recipes. So what I've done is actually gone to the grocery store and purchased some collared greens there. These are very nice collared greens, but look how big they are. You can see that baby collared greens as Madeleine had for us are quite small in comparison to these and they're going to be a lot more tender. What we're going to do though, you basically for this recipe would prepare them in a similar way except for with the large full-grown collared greens we need to take out this stem here. This is edible so you can cook with it. But you're going to go ahead and take all of the stems out of the leaves and then cut them in half like this. And then what we do is basically you can stack more leaves than I've got here, but then cut these into strips, fairly thin strips. They don't have to be super thin. The idea here is we're taking a vegetable that's usually used in a cooked fashion and we're going to be eating it in a raw manner. And so we want the vegetable to be small enough that it doesn't appear to be too tough or too earthy for people. So this is the look that we're after. You can also use this. Today we're making a recipe by the way, I forgot to tell you, called panzanella. And that's an Italian form of a salad that actually uses bread. So it's a very unusual salad for this area, but it works really nicely with collared greens, also not traditional in the Italian version. But you can see I've already got some collared greens chopped up here. These can also be used in addition to panzanella. You could use them in a slaw as you would cabbage for a coleslaw. So that's another great usage for this type of collared greens. Again, we're not cooking them so that's kind of new. We've got our collared greens. Now you know I mentioned that this is a bread salad. Well, I purchased this really beautiful loaf. It's kind of an artisanal loaf. It's got whole wheat flour and also some white flour. So it's a bit in the middle in that regard. You could use an all-white bread or a whole wheat bread if you'd like. Basically what I did was took a serrated knife and cut pieces of this off and then tore them into chunks like this, bite-sized pieces. Then what you want to do is let these air dry. You can see this is not really soft anymore. Every piece that I have in here pretty much has some crust on it, too, and that's intentional. We want this to be fairly sturdy bread so that when we toss it with the dressing it's not going to get all soggy. So we've got our bread here. I'll go ahead and put our collared greens on top. Kind of lovely that is. And now what we're going to do is go back to the market and visit with a very interesting woman who's selling some plants there. You can also buy farmer's market plants as well as vegetables. Let's see. Well, I'm visiting here with Wendy McGuire at the Edgewood Farmers Market. Wendy, tell us a little bit about your operation. What is the name of it? It's Guyana del Sol Farm, and we're in the upper part of the Estancia Valley. We raise heirloom vegetables and flowers and herbs of all different kinds. And we also raise heirloom poultry, turkeys and guinea fowl, and now exotic pheasants. Boy, that's quite a variety of things to have animals as well as the vegetables. Do you find that it's kind of a nice synergy there in terms of having the animals as well as the vegetables? Well, we tend to split the tasks between two of us. One of us is the plant person and the other one is the animal person, and I'm the animal person. But it's nice to listen to them all and to smell the stuff going by that doesn't smell like animals. That's nice. Well, you know, and I found some wonderful epazote here, and I'm actually going to take this back. You can find a lot of potted plants at the farmers markets, and many of them are edible. So we're going to be using this in the kitchen in one of the dishes that we're preparing. Tell us what you know about epazote. I know you're the animal person, as you say. I'm the animal person, but I do know epazote is a very widely respected herb from Mexico and South America. It's used in cooking. It's also used as a medicinal and making teas. And I'm really not sure what for, but one of the things that's nice about epazote is it grows very well in this area, and once you plant it, you'll never get rid of it. It just recedes and it's perennial. Now, tell us a little bit about the rest of your operation. I'm really interested in the birds that you raise. Oh, well, I have heirloom turkeys. The heirlooms of the turkeys that were raised on the farms and homesteads for generations and generations in the United States. Before they developed the broad-breasted button in the breast pop-up, unwalkable, turkey that they have in the supermarkets now. If you were to see those turkeys being raised in a factory, you'd see that they can't walk very well at all. Frequently, they have cardiomyopathy. It's early as four months of age. They have bad legs. They can't fly. They're always wheezing. Very short lives, very miserable lives. We raise the old-style and we raise them free-range in big, big pens and we have several different kinds. And they get to fly. They get to eat bugs. They get to do all the turkey things as opposed to living in a factory situation all their lives. And as a result, as you might imagine, the meat tastes incredibly different from the type of turkey that you would buy at the grocery store. I don't even know how to describe the flavor. It's almost as if it's a different animal. It's richer. It doesn't have the mushy texture. There's a problem with people that start talking about things being fork-tender. Meat isn't supposed to be fork-tender. That means it's mushy and it's falling apart. But this has a good firmness to it. It's not tough at all. But there's just a lot of flavor in this meat. And I imagine it's probably lower in fat as well. Oh, yes. Yeah. Much less. Now, if people are interested in getting turkeys perhaps for Thanksgiving, they need to contact you, I'm guessing, ahead of time, right? And we deliver them oven-ready. We don't have to worry about all the little feathers and things like that. Or what to do when that turkey looks up at you and smiles. It's all oven-ready when you get it. We also have guineas for any kind of purposes. And we have pigeons, squab, available occasionally. But mostly it's the turkeys. And then we have one other thing happening on our farm. And that is iris. We raise about 800 varieties of iris. And in any given year we probably harvest about 200 varieties, and we sell them in buckets and sell them as rhizomes. And we have different varieties every week because we keep digging every week. Iris are beautiful plants, and they do actually really well in New Mexico. They do. They're kind of a desert plant. They're used to fairly lean soil and harsh conditions, and they don't need terribly much water. And so this is a nice way, again, of coming to the farmer's market, picking up some rhizomes, planting them and then enjoying them the following year. Years and years, exactly. So what a wonderful combination of things that you have to offer. I understand you're at other farmer's markets, too. Which other markets do you sell at? Well, in the East Mountain area, we also sell at Cedar Crest, and then in Santa Fe, which is the biggest farmer's market in the state, and in Los Alamos, way north. So we get around. Well, in addition to those four markets, there are many, many others in the Albuquerque area, as well as around the state. So if you're interested, please remember on your screen to find out the market that's closest to you and do plan to visit it soon. Thanks so much, Wendy. So here we are back in the studio. Wendy convinced me to go ahead and purchase this epazote, and it is, I tell you, I'm already very, very much a fan of this. We tried it the other day in some eggs, and it was just fabulous. It gives this very nice, pungent flavor, very interesting flavor. It's very rich like a weed, so when I get home, I'm going to plant this in the yard, and we'll see if we can get rid of it after that. But seriously, what we're going to do with it today is we'll take a couple of leaves off of this. Now, this epazote is something that's traditionally used in Mexican cooking, and not as well-known here in New Mexico. We'll pick some of these older leaves that are at the bottom. And these, I will go ahead and rinse them. And we're going to go ahead and just cut them into very small very small mints, really. As I mentioned, it's a very strong herb. Wow, you can smell it even just right here. You don't want to get a huge piece of it in any one bite. So we'll go ahead and cut this up a little bit smaller even. Primarily, this is used in Mexican food in beans. It supposedly actually cuts the flatulence problem that many people have with beans. And it also adds a nice flavor to them, too. So I'm going to start using this in my cooking. I have to tell you, it's quite quite a distinctive herb. So this is going to be enough, believe it or not, to flavor our dish of penzanella. We don't want too much or it'll become a bit overpowering. So there we've got our epazote. Now let's go on and move on to our vinaigrette. We're going to be using here a red wine vinegar, which is traditionally used in a penzanella. You can also use a balsamic vinaigrette. I like to use a fair amount of vinegar actually. It makes it taste really nice and assertive. So we've got some vinegar here. Let's put a bit of salt in. The bread already is going to have some salt, but the salt will carry the flavor a little bit. So that's the beginning of our vinaigrette and then of course you know if we're making something, an Italian salad, most likely we're going to be adding some olive oil. So here we go. Again what we want to do is add it in a very slow stream and whisking the entire time that we're adding it. That helps incorporate the oil into the dressing. Now traditionally this dressing would have more oil than I'm going to put in it. Traditionally the oil would be in a greater proportion than the vinegar, but here I'm actually going to do the opposite. Because I don't think we really need too much oil in the salad just enough to give it some good flavor and body. Okay. Very nice. So we'll let that dressing sit here for a moment. We've got our epesote, our dried up pieces of bread and our collard greens on the top. We'll go back to the market for one final ingredient. Let's see what we can add here to our panzanella. I'm visiting with Anne Samariva at the Edgewood Farmers Market. And she's got, as you can see here, some beautiful flowers as well as a lot of produce. Anne, what is the main part of your business for you? Well, I do about half cut flowers and half produce. So you're really diversified then. How much acreage do you farm? I farm one acre. Wow. So it's a very intensive operation. It's not like some of the large commercial farms that you might hear about acres and acres and using tractors to pull things out of the fields. How do you, what is a typical day like for you? I'm out there as soon as it gets light. I try and do all my work in the early morning. I harvest, weed, fertilize, water in the mornings and then I do two or three farmers markets a week. So that takes up most of my time. Well, and I understand you're also the director or the manager Yes, the east mountains of Albuquerque have two farmers markets now the Edgewood on Mondays and the Cedar Crest Farmers Market on Wednesday afternoons from three to seven. It's on north fourteen which is our fifth, it's our fifth year doing this market and it's grown quite a bit during those five years. Well, it's a really wonderful opportunity for those people who do live on the east side because you know, we think of Albuquerque and the sort of central area has quite a number of farmers markets but people aren't always aware of the ones that are on the outskirts. So do come out and visit the Cedar Crest and Edgewood markets. Now what I've seen here today are these lovely cherry tomatoes and I had to buy them really quickly because you just had a couple baskets. That's one thing, you know, the unusual things will go very fast at a farmer's market so you want to get there pretty early. Can you tell us a little bit about those tomatoes? This variety is called Sun Gold. It's an orange cherry tomato and they are very, very sweet wonderful delicious tomato and tomatoes are difficult to grow out here but the cherry tomatoes are dependable. Well that's interesting. I have trouble with tomatoes as well. So my garden consists more of herbs I'm afraid. They're a little bit hardier but we're looking forward to cooking with those and thanks so much for taking your time to visit with us. We appreciate it. We're back in the studio with our third and final farmer's market ingredient for a panzanella, Anne's cherry tomatoes. I've already got some of them cut up here. You can see what I've done and this is if you get your cherry tomatoes home with you from the market. What I find is kids love these so much it's really hard to keep them away from them and speaking of which, as a side light it's really a nice idea to take your kids to the market especially those of you who receive wick coupons that you can redeem at the market for fresh fruits and vegetables your kids will love getting a chance to know and learn different things and try different flavors like these beautiful cherry tomatoes that are in an orange color that you may not have seen or tried before. Anyway, back to the tomatoes. What we're doing is basically chopping them cutting them into halves. I've already rinsed them you just, again this is something the kids would like to do take off the little crown there and then just cut them into halves you want to use a serrated knife like this one because this will keep the tomatoes from getting crushed as you're chopping them. Now this way you really preserve the round look of the cherry tomato and the rest of the tomatoes out by tossing them cut into the salad. So let's go ahead and put those tomatoes on into the salad here and we've got that right over here there we go now we're going to add a little bit more a couple of other ingredients that hopefully you can buy at your farmers market as well I've got some garlic here this is local garlic and you know what Italians love garlic and so do I so I'm actually going to use cloves in this panzanella you can use less or more you don't even have to use any if you don't like garlic but it adds a very distinctive flavor especially because it's raw and it's quite tasty in here with the tomatoes garlic and tomatoes is one of my favorite combinations now traditionally this dish would also have cucumbers in it and I've chosen to leave those out and sort of substitute the collard greens for them and you can just like me if you like try using other ingredients in here as well it's really kind of one of those salads that you can do whatever you'd like with now I like to keep the garlic pretty big here sort of a robust fairly non-fancy type of salad and we'll also add now some red onion which I've already cut a piece of off here again depending on how much you like raw onion that will determine how much of this you put in the salad and how big you'd like the pieces to be I like long slivers because I think they're very distinguished looking but you could certainly mince it if you prefer it's up to you ok so we've got some garlic, we've got some onion we have our wonderful market tomatoes and now what we've got missing is our dressing I've already tossed the epazote in here just sugar and then we'll toss it when we come back after this final visit to the market while 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 was the green chili goat's melt cheese pretty unique in flavor and texture there and it's local and so we stopped and visited and tried it out and it's quite tasty well good, do you think you'll be coming back to the market in the future sure, yeah we'll 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 coming by and getting to know the market so thanks so much I mentioned last time in the studio that I wanted to add a little bit of sugar to our dressing it seemed a bit tart to me when I tasted it so just a tiny bit a little bit of sugar goes a long way and it's not that we want this really sweet we just want to take add a little another flavor dimension to it so here's our vinaigrette and I didn't make as much as I intended to so I actually ended up taking out a little bit of the red here, you can see this sitting on the side that's just because I didn't want too much bread and the salad compared to the tomatoes and the collard greens so now we're ready to assemble and assembling is kind of a false term with this salad because it's really more like throw it all together toss it then you're ready now some people will do fancy things with this they'll layer the bread into a large pan and then pour some of the vinaigrette dressing over the top and then put the tomatoes and the cucumber and then let it sit for an hour I find you really don't have to go to all of that problem, you'll see what's happening some of the bread chunks are going to get more dressing than others some of them will stay chewy some of them will turn a little bit soft that's the idea, you want there to be a variety of textures in this salad so now let's go ahead and plate it and again you can let this rest for a little while if you like the flavors to blend a little more let's get a few of those tomatoes in here they seem to have sunk to the bottom there we are, look how beautiful that is and the bread provides a nice kind of balance to the collard greens really in a sense could be a very light summer entree particularly if you were to serve it with some cheese be a very delicious picnic it's certainly quite easy to do and something that is very adaptable like most of the recipes that we make here on the vegas show quite adaptable to different ingredients and in fact that's one of the things that I like about farmers markets you never know exactly what you're going to find when you go, you may be looking for cucumbers and all you find is squash well that's kind of exciting, you get back to the kitchen and you have a change in plans and that's one of the things that's really joyous about cooking is being able to experiment with different ideas and new things we go to the supermarket and we pretty much know what we're going to find and to be honest it takes a lot of fun out of food and eating and learning that your food actually comes from somebody that you know in your own community who you're supporting with your own dollars at a farmers market so I encourage you all between now and the next time you join us for our next vegas show get out to your local farmers market go out, see what you can find vegetables or fruits take them home with you, experiment make a salad like this or some other fresh dish and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised you and your children both how much fun it is to eat healthy vegetables and fruits so join us next time on our vegas show we'll see you then