Field Notes: Coastside Farmers’ Market

By Erin Tormey, organizer of the Coastside Farmer’s Market. In Half Moon Bay, the market is at Shoreline Station (at Kelly and Highway 1), Saturdays, 9am to 1pm

If this morning is any indication, then it may just be the weather folks are right, and the Coastside is in for a glorious set of bright, bright sunshiney days coming up. Here’s hoping that you are sticking around to enjoy it.  Lots of folks I know are heading to Burning Man for a hygiene holiday and I say Happy Trails.  Some of the usual suspects are heading out for a last summer blast in the hills, and I hope they find peace. But if I had my druthers,  I would stick around and revel in the just plain insane beauty of it all, sleep in, noodle around in my jammies watching the day unfold and have pie for breakfast at least one morning of this lovely long weekend ahead.

Peach pie. Uh huh.  Or perhaps a raspberry - peach crisp.  Oh, yes.

After a nice piece of pie, you can imagine doing anything.  Even cleaning your garage.  Your garage, I said, not mine.  Mine is beyond recall these days, full as it is with canning jars, box springs and my great grandmothers washing machine. I think it’s because every time I make a pie, everyone else eats it, and there is none left for breakfast, so I lose my nerve, and just put the box of my nephew’s cast-off ski gear down in some forsaken corner, shut the door on the whole thing and head for the beach with a bodice-buster.

But some people simply have a deeper strength of character when it comes to these kinds of endeavors, and if you are one of those folks, I have a tip, and a request, for you.  On the off chance you are contemplating cleaning out your garage this weekend or any time soon, consider this -

On September 15, there is an EcoFaire - Solar Home Tour here on the coast.  At the Half Moon Bay Market along with our pals from Reece Computer Systems, we are sponsoring an Electronics Recyling event. Outdated TV’s, CD’s, cell phones, chargers, old computers, monitors, laptop batteries, and the like can all be recycled but it does need to be handled carefully, and we seriously don’t want it to land in the landfill - especially since the land fill in this county is right in our backyard.

So - if a rousing round of Domestic Reclamation is on your radar this weekend or next, and you find yourself with a collection of outdated electronics that have reached the end of their functional life, please consider swinging it by the Farmer’s Market on September 15.  Then go on the Solar Home Tour and check out how some of our neighbors are making their PG&E meters run backwards.  It’s a pretty neat thing to see.

Last week I made a peach and raspberry number that I was sure would be the fuel required to get my garage under control, and I was partially right.  The only problem was the pie was eaten the night of the wingding where all sorts of hale women and hunky gents promised they’d be back in the morning to help put the garage to rights. I have now learned that the trick is to make the pie-like item and use it as bait.

If you get about 10 of Santiago’s peaches ( get the yellow ones) and two baskets of raspberries from Tina you’ll be on your way.  You might want to invest in some tapioca flour - not the weird little ball-y things, mind - while you are downtown, and some really good vanilla -get it from Toque Blanch. I’ll have a recipe for you at the Market for my favorite cobbler/crisp - but here’s a tip in the meantime-

Bearing in mind that everyone who is into pies has strong opinions about certain aspects of the process, I submit this observation carefully.  For my money, I use tapioca flour in the filling of all my fruit pie-like items.  When you sub out flour or cornstarch for tapioca flour in your filling, you get a really nice, glisteny juicyness that is not gummy or pasty at all.  The other thing I have noticed is that when you toss up all your fruit with the tapioca, about half the sugar most recipes call for and some lemon juice, fill the pie pan, then put just the fruit in the oven for the first 25 minutes or so of the bake time, then toss the top crust on and shove it back in the oven for the last 20 minutes , the heat from the fruit along witht he heat from the oven crisps your crisp from the bottom up and top down, the topping neither burns or gets a soggy bottom.  And no one like a soggy bottom, especially not for breakfast.

Thanks to Sierra West Builders, Reece Computer Systems and the Coastside Eco-Tourism group for their support of the market, and endeavors to make all things as green as possible, here, in California, where the hills turn brown in the summertime.  ( Yes, that was a little nod to Kate)

Erin Tormey
Coastside Farmers Markets

In Half Moon Bay
Shoreline Station ( at Kelly and Highway 1)
Saturdays, 9 am to 1pm

In Pacifica
Rockaway Beach
Wednesdays, 2:30 -6:30pm