 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. And welcome to another episode of Vegetables in Great Abundance, or VEGA. Now those of us in New Mexico know VEGAS as the large poles that hold up the major weight of an adobe house. Well, vegetables serve the same kind of role in our own diets. They're one of the foundations for good health. And that's the reason that we've created this series. My name is Carrie Bachman, and I work with the Cooperative Extension Service. And in this series, we're going to be visiting different farmer's markets around the Albuquerque area. Now don't worry if you don't live near Albuquerque, we've got farmer's markets all over the state. Large and small, on weekends, during weekdays, you'll find a variety of growers there. And I really encourage you to go to the markets when you can. Now this market that we're going to visit for this segment is actually pretty interesting. It's the first weekday market this season for this Corralis Grower's Market. And so it's pretty small. And when I went, I really didn't know what I was going to find. And so what we've got here are some really kind of interesting discoveries. And I'm pulling together a very interesting meal, which you may not normally think of seeing at a farmer's market. Now remember, if you are on WIC, you can also use your WIC farmer's market coupons at the farmer's market to buy fresh produce. Produce is something that we may not be used to eating or serving much to our family. But once you get the hang of it and become accustomed to the interesting flavors, I think you'll find that they really do become family favorites. Kids may take a little bit of time to get used to vegetables, but if you give them to them every few days, then they'll have a chance to get used to the flavors. Don't worry if they don't like them right away. But over time, I'm sure that they will develop some favorites. Now also, if your kids don't like a certain vegetable, don't force it on them. It's natural that people have their likes and their dislikes. So let's go ahead and continue now. We're going to visit with the market manager at the Corralis Growers Market, Jim Fahey. And we'll discover some very interesting produce that he and his colleagues have for sale at the market. Some surprising things that we'll use in a breakfast. You may not think of vegetables for breakfast, but actually they're quite tasty and very nutritious as you might guess. Now the thing with vegetables that's also great is they really fill us up with some healthy nutrients so that we're not going to be too hungry later on in the day for other foods that may be not quite so healthy. So let's go ahead now and let's visit with Jim at the farmers market. We're visiting today with Jim Fahey. He's the manager of the Corralis Growers Market. And Jim, we're so glad to be here with you today on the first Wednesday of the market for the season. Well we're glad you're here. Thanks for having us. Tell us a little bit about the market and how you became involved with it. Well this market has been here not in this location but in Corralis for probably 15 years. We've probably been in this location for about five years. I became involved after moving here and continuing to grow produce at our house and reaching a point where my wife actually said you need to get rid of some of the stuff. And fortunately there was an outlet where I could advance my hobby and actually use the monies obtained here to do more work at my place, to improve my place. Wonderful. So over time in order to keep it a safe environment and to keep it running you get involved and so now this year I'm the market manager. Okay. Well that's great and farmer's markets are really interesting collections of people. You've got growers small and large who come here with all different kinds of produce and we're going to see a little bit of what Jim's market has to offer in a second. Jim, I understand you're also a medical doctor. How does that impact your interest in vegetables at all? None. None? Well as a nutritionist that's one of the things that we try to do is make the connection between agriculture and the health of the human beings who are actually eating the food and that's one reason we're featuring farmers markets as a great source of healthy produce. Do you eat a lot of produce yourself at home? Yes, yes, sweet. Everything we grow and most of our purchases at the grocery store are things like milk and cheese and occasionally eggs, meats. But we've pretty much grown our own produce for many years. Our kids grew up on this thing. No, I use this as an outlet. This was my method of relaxation. It wasn't developed or I didn't get into it because of my medical practice. Okay. It was just something to do to keep me busy and to get away from the medical practice. I mean the stresses of it. Well the stresses of many of our jobs are something that we need to be aware of and also balance with healthy activities like gardening which is something, it's healthy to eat the food but it's also really healthy to actually go out and grow the food and prepare it yourself as well. So thanks so much Jim. We're going to go ahead and take a look at some of the vendors here today and we'll be back to visit with you in a bit. We really appreciate you being here. Thanks so much. Thank you. All right, well we're here with Bonnie Gonzalez and I'm really excited to see the radishes that you've got here for us. Tell us a little bit about these beautiful radishes. These are called a French breakfast radish and they're very mild radish and you can slice them up and eat them with toast and butter and a little salt and they're very good. So the French really do eat them for breakfast then? They really do eat them for breakfast. Wow, you know as a nutritionist we like to say breakfast is an important meal and it doesn't really matter if you're eating leftover pizza or cold cereal. You just need something in your stomach. Radishes is one thing I'd never really thought about. And do you also cook with the radish greens? I like the radish greens and salads actually. And especially when they're this young, they're very nice and they're not quite as prickly as they get when they get a little bigger. Well this is wonderful. We're going to go ahead and get a couple of these. Now Bonnie is also very involved in Corralis agriculture and there have been some really exciting developments recently. Can you tell us a bit? Very exciting things going on and things that have been worked on in the village for a good 10 years now and just recently that came to a culmination I guess when our council approved our first three agricultural easements where the development rights are going to be sold off of these properties and we're very excited about that. The community has supported this with a very large bond election and won the bond election. The community came out and voted in favor of this. And so we're selling bonds and we have been awarded a natural resource conservation grant USDA and between those two things we've been able to preserve some of our farmland and perpetuity. So basically what an easement means then, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you basically purchase the development rights and then that land will stay in agriculture? It will stay in agriculture, correct. The development rights are removed and that goes with the land not with the land owner. So if the land owner sells that property the easement remains on the property. You know a lot of people think of Albuquerque as a big urban sprawling city and in many ways it is but right on the outskirts we have smaller communities where agriculture is still happening and people like Bonnie are really helping make sure that it will continue to happen. And that's very important. I think having farms close to our markets and close to our urban areas is a good thing again because food security is important and that's one way we can get food security into the local communities and make sure that food's available and good food's available. Well thanks so much for visiting with us and congratulations. Thank you. We'll go ahead and take a couple of those bunches of radishes if that's okay. These are just beautiful. Well we're back in the studio now with the beautiful radishes that I bought from Bonnie. You'll notice that these radishes here have a special label on them that says New Mexico grown with tradition. The NMDA or New Mexico Department of Agriculture has a special program and this lets us know as consumers when we're buying produce that has been grown in New Mexico. So that's kind of a nice thing to look out for when you're in the regular grocery store. Certainly when you're in the farmers market you're going to know that those products were grown in this state. Now you can look at these radishes they are so small and tender as Bonnie was saying when the greens are this young you can even use them in a salad. When you store the radishes what you're going to want to do is actually remove the greens you can just pop them off like this and put them into a separate bag and keep them separate from the roots. That will keep both of them fresher. Now we'll go ahead and wash some of these roots here just to show you how that works. Again the method that I like to use most is just putting them into a bowl of water and just kind of dipping and swishing them to get any of the loose dirt that's still on them. These are pretty clean. Bonnie's done a really nice job with them. Then to prepare them if you'd like cut off the tip and then cut off what I call the tail and you've got a really beautiful radish that you can just put right onto a relish tray and eat it with a dip if you'd like. Radishes are really high in vitamin C and when they're this young they're so crisp and tender and they don't have that real strong flavor that you might associate with the radishes you buy in the grocery store. That's one thing that kids love about radishes and in fact kids can grow radishes really easily at home. They're one of the vegetables that grows most quickly of all. And you may think it's kind of funny that people would eat these for breakfast but you'll see it with the other vegetables that we combine here in a few minutes and then our final surprise that I found at the farmers market what a delicious breakfast we're going to have. Remember you can eat these raw. You can even if you'd like to saute them or put them in soups. They're wonderful however you fix them. So do get to the market and try them out. Well we're back here with Jim after looking at those wonderful radishes and what I'm going to purchase here for the rest of our meal are some beautiful peas. Now spring is generally the best season for peas and we're kind of right on the edge of that. Am I right? Correct. Well you can actually get some peas in the fall. What we have here today are two varieties of peas. Okay. They're edible potted peas. This variety is what's called a sugar snap and you can look at it and it's kind of fusiform, a nice contour firm and when you bite into it or break it it's very crisp. Okay. And the other variety we have here is called a snow pea. Right. And you look at it, it's a flatter pea. You can actually see the peas inside. The third variety of peas that people commonly see are your English peas. Right. The ones that are shelled and then you eat just the pea rather than the whole thing. And that's basically when you go to the grocery store and buy frozen peas. That's the type of pea that you're getting. You can grow those. Okay. It's a lot of work to shell them. Right. So most of us do these because they're simpler and I think they taste better. These are very sweet. These are more what you see in your stir fry dishes. Exactly. Okay. These you can eat raw in your salad, slice them up, half of them are eaten before they ever get to the house. That's right. There can be a bit of a string as you can see here and we'll talk a little bit more about this when we're actually preparing our peas for eating. But in general they're pretty much entirely edible and that's a really nice advantage because you've got all that fiber from the pod. You're not throwing that part of it away. Well Jim was telling me earlier that in fact most of his yard is devoted to gardening and it sounds like it's probably a beautiful place. Well, it probably depends on your perspective. Sometimes my wife is critical. But yes, we've tilled most of the yard in order to gain on space because I have a lot of things growing. We grow a lot of things now on trellises. All the cucumbers, the melons are up on trellises. The peas, the beans, they grow up and there's no methanol. Well you know and that's a tip that home gardeners can use as well especially if you're living in a small apartment or a place where there's not a lot of space. Gardening up actually increases the space that you have to use and you can grow more vegetables in a smaller area. Well Jim, I'm really looking forward to working with these peas here. Can I go ahead and take a couple of boxes of them? That's wonderful. You wanted one of each. I'll take one box of each. That sounds great. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. We're glad you're here. Well we'll enjoy these, you can bet. Well here we are back in the kitchen with these wonderful sweet peas that we've gotten from Jim. Now we've got here the two different varieties that he showed us. These are the snap peas. You can see they're a slightly rounded, larger, more plump shell and these here are the snow peas which you can see are a little bit flatter in shape. These peas have gotten a little bit bigger and you can actually see the bulges a little bit. Let's see what they look like inside. I've cut open here a snap pea and you can see what's inside of these look actually quite a bit like the peas that we would normally get in the grocery store. If you look over here, in fact what I've got are some green frozen peas in a bag and I'll put them here and you can kind of compare. They don't look much different. The thing with these snap peas though they're so much sweeter and of course much fresher. One of the critical things with peas is you want to try to eat them as soon as possible after they've been picked and at the growers market you can really make sure that that's the case. Frozen peas actually are a good substitute for fresh peas if you can't get them because they've been picked and then processed at the point of freshness and so if you put them into recipes without cooking them like a salad they're actually going to maintain some of their nice texture and flavor a little bit better. Now of course you know you can also buy peas in this form in a can and this is in fact what the English peas look like. English peas or the ones that we use here for green peas are a different variety. The pod that they have is not edible. It's actually very woody and something that you wouldn't want to try to eat and people don't grow them as much anymore because they're a little bit harder to process. You have to sit there and pick all of the peas out of the pod. So in essence we've in our country become more accustomed to at least in eating fresh peas seeing the snap peas and then the snow peas as well. Now another form of pea which I think is really wonderful and very underused is actually this one. It comes in a dry form and you can see these have been split in half and you can find it at the store in bags like this. It's called green split peas and it's basically a pea that's grown till it dries on the plant and then it's harvested in a dry form and you cook it up just as you would beans very high in protein, a little less high in some of the more vegetable type nutrients like your vitamins but it's a wonderful, wonderful fiber source as well. Now when you're serving these peas what I like to do is just eat them raw otherwise maybe very lightly sauté or steam them but really raw is the best form. If you're putting them into a salad you can take these snap peas and cut them up like this into little chunks that are a little bit more manageable or even just throw the whole pea in. Some of them will have some strings but you can just kind of take off the end like this and pull the string off and if you notice anything right here all this is is the remains of the flower so you see at the farmers market you really get to know your vegetables. Well we've got some vegetables ready for our meal and what I would like to purchase now is some wonderful bread. You notice here there's a great variety of it and we're visiting today with Soraida and her children, this is David and your other children? Roman. Roman? Robin. Robin, nice to meet all of you. Thank you. You're from the Swiss Alps Bakery then. Yeah, this is my north, my north Luciana. Okay. This is my bacon. It's German sweet. I have to make the bread. It's different flowers. Yes. Yes. Four wheat, red bread. Well you know I was looking at this bread right here Soraida. Can you tell me a little bit about that one? Yeah, this is red bread. This is Swiss Alps and Sankala bread. Sankala. Sankala bread. So that's the name of a town in Switzerland. Switzerland. Okay. Sankala bread is a rye bread and a rustic bread. Yes, a rustic type. And is there any other type of flour or is it all rye flour? It's all the rye flour. All the rye flour. So this is 100% rye flour bread which is something difficult to find in the grocery store and rye flour is a whole grain. So you're going to get those same benefits that you get from the whole wheat. David can you tell me a little bit about what your role is with the family business? How do you help out with it? I help out. I cut the bread. Okay. I make the round or maybe I have to choose like this. Okay. So you actually work with making the bread with kneading it as well as cutting it. That's great. Wow. Breadmaking is something a lot of people don't know how to do anymore. And this is a resource very unique to Albuquerque. And you do the cookies as well. We even have some cookies over here too. So the whole family is involved in this business. It's wonderful to see you all out at the market. Especially selling such interesting cultural breads that we wouldn't normally see in New Mexico. I have Seraida's bread here and I'm just so excited to dig into this loaf. You can just see the kinds of things you find at the farmers market are not the same as the grocery store. This Seraida told us is a 100% whole rye bread. And it's a traditional bread apparently in the German, Swiss part of Europe. And as you see, you can really tear into this and look at that wonderful color. Rye flour is going to be actually naturally a bit lighter in color than wheat. So even though this is whole rye, it's not going to have that dark, dark color and texture that a whole wheat bread would have. Now, you can also, instead of tearing it, you can also cut it. Make sure when you're cutting bread, I don't have a real bread knife with me today, but you want to use a longer knife that's serrated like this one. Not a knife that's just sharp like this because your bread is actually going to get squished by that type of a knife. Now, why do we want to encourage people to eat fiber and types of bread that have whole grains in them? Well, fiber really helps us in terms of our system's regularity as well as helping avert cancer and also helping with cholesterol levels. So fiber and rye in particular are wonderful things to encourage in our diets. Now, let's look at here at a store-bought version of a rye bread. This is not a bad bread to buy, but I just want you to be careful when you're buying breads. You might think, oh, well, this looks like it's got a whole grain in it. It's pretty high in fiber. But if you look back on the label here, you'll notice, actually, this has less than one gram of fiber per slice. And so that's something to be careful of. And you look here on the ingredient statement, the first ingredient is actually flour. It's not rye flour at all. It's just enriched wheat flour. And that's been had the bran and the fiber taken out of it. So what we're going to do now for our breakfast is we're going to tear off a nice hunk of this beautiful rye bread. This is a very European or even Middle Eastern breakfast. You can just serve this with a bit of butter. Butter in small quantities is delicious, and it's not going to kill you. It's when we eat lots and lots of fats that it's going to be bad. And you can just enjoy your bread like this with your peas, your snap peas, and your snow peas. You can see I've taken the strings off of them and your delicious breakfast radishes. Let's try it and see how tasty this can be. Well, here we are at the Corralis Market and look who we've run into. Actually, these are some of my colleagues also who work for the Extension Service but as volunteers. Jan and Therese are both master gardeners with the Sandoval County Cooperative Extension Service. Tell us a little bit about why you're here today at the market. Well, there's one reason is to get good gardening information to the public. The second reason is as volunteers to keep our master gardener status, we have to contribute 40 hours in Sandoval County. It varies from county to county. But in Sandoval we have to put in 40 hours of volunteer service. So this is our means of getting our volunteer service. Great. Plus providing a lot of really unnecessary information, I think we tend to focus quite a lot on, you know, Zeret Gardening and the correct ways to do things in our climate for water conservation in addition to every conceivable thing one might imagine. And we try to solve problems or we take it to the agent, the Extension agent if we can't do that. But I think it provides quite a useful service. Well, it's really nice to see you all here because again it bridges the gap between buying your food at the farmers market and actually growing some of your own food at home. And that's something that everybody can do. I mean, I'm a gardener but certainly not an expert. I'm sure you all have had a lot more experience than I have. A lot of loss. A lot of failure. And that's part of the joy of gardening. You never know what's going to happen. You know, Extension does so many different things and as a nutrition person, one of the services that we offer in our county offices is nutrition education classes which are called ICANN. And if you're interested in enrolling in these classes you can just contact your local county extension office and also contact your county extension office and find out if they have a master gardener program going on. You can join it and become a volunteer or, as Jan said, you can call up with any kind of question you might have and there are people there ready and willing to help you. Yeah. And in general everybody, you know, if we don't know the answer, we find out. The best part is everything is free. You're never in charge. That's true. That's right. And thank you all so much for donating your time to not only the Coralus Farmers Market, the Coralus Growers Market, but also to all of the gardeners and growers in this part of the state. We really appreciate it. It's our pleasure. Thank you so much for visiting with us. Well, you can see at the Farmers Market there are so many interesting people to talk to. We have our master gardeners who will help us with any gardening questions that we have and they also teach classes to farmers themselves. And when we actually talk to the growers, they know a surprising amount about how to fix the vegetables that we might be purchasing. So don't worry if you're at the market and see something you don't know how to use. That's part of the fun. The other thing about our local farmers markets is it's a way to help preserve our New Mexico agricultural lands and cultural traditions. As Bonnie mentioned, Coralus has done a really excellent job in the past few years of getting some agricultural land reserved and conserved for our future generations. And it's something that other communities around the state are working to do as well. Now, if you would like to get involved with farmers markets, please call the toll-free number that's on your screen. The other thing you can do at the Extension Service is enroll in free nutrition classes. And these are a lot of fun. You'll actually be cooking things with people, getting to know new friends and learning about new vegetables and healthy foods for you and your family. Remember, when you go to the farmers market, don't forget to bring the kids. They'll have a great time looking at all the colors and smelling all of the nice scents and everything of the produce. And in fact, one thing you can also find at farmers markets is real live plants. This is one that I picked up and I forgot to mention when we were talking about the peas. This is a mint plant, which grows like crazy, even here in the dry heat of New Mexico. And what it's really nice with is to just take a piece of mint and eat it along with a pea. Now, you can make a more elaborate recipe certainly, but the mint-fresh-pea combination is just out of this world. So I hope you'll consider going more often to your farmers market. Look at it as a way of getting to know getting to know your neighbors, getting to know some new vegetables that will make your family healthier and also conserving some of the culture and agricultural lands in New Mexico. They're such an important part of our past and we really need to maintain them as well for our future. Please join me for our next episode of Vega, Vegetables in Great Abundance. Until then, I hope you'll enjoy shopping at your farmers markets and eating lots of wonderful vegetables. Thanks for joining us. 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.