Portland Farmer's Market

I didn't plan to have pizza again but I found this wood fired slice at the Portland Farmer's Market this morning. It was even better than it looks. I gasped on the sidewalk when I took the first bite and spent the rest of the day talking about it. Why don't we have this at the markets in the bay area?

The Portland Farmer's Market is hands together the prettiest I've been to anywhere. It's held beneath a canopy of huge trees that I may have thought to identify if I hadn't been awestruck at the displays of stain glass colored peppers, ears of corn that clearly never harbored a worm, eggplant that shone like gems and fifteen kinds of squash set amid hundreds of monochromatic buckets of dahlias so perfect they became cliche'. These weren't only farmers, they were masters. There were generations of families, scrubbed up hippies, dirt farmers and college students who all created a peice of a temporary mandala using produce as intricately as if they were Tibetan monks using colored sand.

Like the Pt. Reyes farmer's market there was a starting bell and the buying began. I was the first customer for the last of the season blueberries which I shared at the finish line of my darling sister-in-law's marathon (she came in smiling!) and people were still talking about them at dinner tonight; childhood stories, recipes. I would have liked to have bought gnarly celadon squash and long crooked cucumbers but settled for three perfect apples for the road and a bag of green figs for the cute guys Dad.

And I would have liked to have bought another peice of pizza or three!