This Week at the Smart Markets Bristow Farmers' Market

This Week at our Bristow Market
Sunday 10:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Piney Branch Elementary School
8301 Linton Hall Rd.
Bristow, VA 20136
Map

This Week at the Market

Turkeys are still available! Order your fresh, free-range turkeys with no hormones, antibiotics or GMO feed. See our website for more information on ordering from B&D Poultry.

Uncle Fred’s BBQ is back this week and will be with throughout the winter. He will let you know what his schedule will be. You will be able to plan ahead for your in-home tailgating parties and know when he will be on hand to serve you.

Doug Linton and Lauren Forsythe will also be on site with the Goodness-to-Go truck -- I am calling it that while they think of a name for their joint venture. All you have to know is that the burgers are the best you will ever eat. Period.

Valley View Bakery will be with us with their breads, breakfast pastries and soups of the day. They will be at the market every other week and hopefully will rotate with Great Harvest through December. Pablo at Great Harvest is having trouble finding someone to send to market since they have opened the bakery on Sunday for the holiday season. If you know someone looking to earn some Christmas cash, call the bakery and talk to Pablo.

The selection is dwindling at this time of year, but our hearty farmers are still bringing wonderful fall veggies, and Max Tyson will continue to have apples, greens, and canned goods all winter long. We will have recipes for sides and desserts that utilize market produce so you can still buy locally and eat seasonally on Thanksgiving Day.

From the Market Master

Do you have your list, and are you checking it twice? No, not your Christmas list, but your Thanksgiving grocery list. Whether you are preparing the entire meal yourself for one family or more, or whether, as I do every year, you are contributing to a potluck feast, I thought you might benefit from some sage advice.

If you are planning and preparing the entire meal yourself, buy a bigger turkey than you will need for the day and plan for great leftovers to get you through the next month, when you will be busier than ever with less time than usual to cook up comfort food on the fly. If you are concerned that the extra size will add significantly to the time your oven is devoted to the turkey, remember that the turkey can be completely roasted and carved early in the day. The turkey itself does not have to be hot from the oven; the gravy will warm it up sufficiently. And if you buy a fresh, local, free-range turkey from the farmers’ market, the bird will spend considerably less time in the oven anyway.

We will have handouts this week and next with delicious recipes for kinds of leftovers, so as long as you are dicing, slicing, chopping, mashing and carving, you might as well make enough for a few more meals. Any soup or casserole that you make can be frozen too, so you can bring out that turkey again and again through the holiday season.

Speaking of all that work that goes into the Thanksgiving meal, this month’s Eating Well magazine contains a chart demonstrating that the more cooking you do, the more calories you burn. Using their own Thanksgiving meal menu and Mayo Clinic research, the magazine calculated that you can burn 700 of the slightly more than 1,000 calories that their meal contains just by creating it in your own kitchen. No fair counting as your own workout what your helpers do for you, but it can only help your digestion knowing that the hard work contributed something more than just gluttonous enjoyment.

A family gathering is always a great opportunity to demonstrate how your commitment to eating seasonally and buying locally can result in a delicious meal from soup to nuts. Start with squash bisque, then select from the greens and cruciferous veggies, potatoes and other gorgeous root vegetables, and then for a main course, turkey or another meat from the market. And don’t forget a locally sourced dessert, which this year could include local pears and apples or some lovely black walnuts. You really can make a meal of all-local ingredients with maybe just cranberries and some citrus thrown in for color or acidity.

Whatever else you undertake this Thanksgiving, add something new to the mix and see where it takes you. The kitchen is a wonderful place to experiment, and hardly ever does anything blow up.