Oct 29 2008
Baltimore City’s Farmers’ Market
The Baltimore Farmer’s market happens every Sunday morning, under the JFX expressway downtown, just a short walk from the Inner Harbor. It’s big, crowded, and very urban, with lots of food vendors, pamphleteers, and street musicians. The stalls feature only Maryland produce, which was at its peak about three weeks ago. We’ve seen the last of the leafy greens and are now into root vegetables, like turnips and onions, and hardy cruciferous, like cauliflower and Brussels sprouts . I love the latter, by the way — steamed and slathered with butter
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It’s not picturesque under the freeway. If there weren’t so much activity, the place would be gloomy. Traffic rumbles overhead like bowling balls down a wooden lane. If it’s cool outside, it’s more than chilly here in the shadows. The homeless camp nearby and there’s always somebody asking for a handout. They get apples from me.
This time of year, that’s my thing: apples. Sometimes I bring home a bushel of them, usually a mixed pile of imperfect fruit. I’m a sucker for a bargain, which always makes Jill roll her eyes. We’ll be peeling apples for hours after I come home. We’ll be eating apple pie, apple cobbler, apple sauce, and apple crisp for weeks. Red peppers were cheap and numerous as late as last Sunday. Predictably, there’s now a lot of squash of various kinds. Autumn flowers – mums, especially – are abundant. The health guru Andrew Weil says we all should buy ourselves flowers once a week.
The market opens at eight, is crowded by nine, and stays thronging until its close at noon — at which time you can get some bargains as the vendors pack up. The produce is varied and high quality. But prepared food is more notable, there’s so much of it and it’s so damned good: sautéed mushroom sandwiches, pit-cooked beef (a Baltimore specialty), macrobiotic veggie wraps, fried “lake†trout (a city favorite), kettle corn, hand-made donuts (no trans fats), Vietnamese stir fry, smoked salmon, artisan breads, Thai dumplings . . . . If you come to the market hungry, you’re in for a world of trouble.
I don’t eat a heavy breakfast and so don’t understand how people can chow down the way they do at the market. How about a pit-cooked beef sandwich heaped with onion and mustard at eight in the morning? White smoke billows from the beef grills at one end of the market but doesn’t seem to bother the hungry as they stand in line. Second only to the pit-cooked beef line is, oddly, the line for raw lima beans, ladled from big plastic tubs. I like beans just fine but not enough to stand in a block-long line for them.
Though the countryside isn’t far from downtown – twenty minutes will put you there – it must be a novelty for the farm folk to mingle with us city folk. Farmers who sell at markets like these run small, family enterprises. Farming is one of the hardest jobs on the planet and, statistically, one of the most dangerous. My father wanted to be a farmer in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he grew up. I’m not sure what shape this dream took in his head. I suppose he pictured owning a large ranch, being self-sufficient, working with his hands. He was a do-it-yourselfer all the way, building and repairing just about everything we needed around the house. He even fixed our television sets and radios.
But his farm, that dream, failed when his first crop – cucumbers – went under. He refused to eat cucumbers the rest of his life. Had he been successful, I might never have left that dusty valley. As it was, Dad came east with my Mom, and so I grew up in North Carolina, her home state, not far from the little farm her mother ran in the Appalachian foothills.
I like working in the dirt well enough, but I’ve never been a fan of vegetable gardening. It’s not the kind of making that holds my interest. I don’t have the patience to watch and wait. I’d rather ply through the Farmers’ Market crowd.
Click here to see my video of the farmers’ market
It’s not the flaking paint I have to worry about, I’ve realized, it’s the things I can’t see under the paint. Rain gets into cracks smaller than I can see. Moisture rots wood fast. The paint may look fine until you touch it with a scraper. Then – surprise – the wood gives way like tissue. I’ve found several surprising pockets of wood rot on my porch. Here’s the irony of it all: rain compromises nails faster than wood. So the nails rust and give way first, then, as they corrode, they let water get at the wood. In other words, the things that hold your house together — nails and screws – are the very things that undermine it. The ideal building, therefore, should have no nails or screws on its exterior.
I couldn’t do this work without a helper. Not if I expect to keep my job or my health. I’ve hired many helpers over the years, usually guys who see me at a task and ask for work. None of them was serious about it, except Will. He arrives when he says he will, works hard every hour, learns quickly, and keeps his humor no matter how messy the chore. Three years ago, he showed up when I had four tons of dirt to dig from the backyard — work that would have discouraged a lesser man. I consider myself lucky to have made his acquaintance.
Will’s story is a classic inner-city tale. His mother is an addict. He didn’t graduate from high school. He’s been on his own since he was a teenager. But he’s self-possessed, well-spoken, and well-mannered. He’s working nights polishing floors for an office-cleaning company. A few days a week he comes over to help me. I’ve taught him some stuff, but he doesn’t like working with power tools. And I never ask him to work from a ladder. If he’s too tired to work, he’ll tell me. At one point, he was holding two jobs and working for me as well. But it’s not like he can save any money. He doesn’t make enough for that. (Is anybody saving money?)
Last week Will mentioned that he’s been having frequent headaches and a bad taste in his mouth. “Could it be my broken tooth?†he asked. He revealed that he’s had a broken tooth for five years – a molar that broke off at the gum. Jill called the Maryland dental school clinic. I advanced him some cash for the appointment yesterday. When he arrived today he announced that he’d overslept and missed his appointment. Later, he told me he’s scared of the dentist. That’s natural, I said. But taking care of teeth is something like taking care of an old wooden porch. You can’t ignore it when things start falling apart.
Click on this link to play a marathon soundscape (2 mins. 24 secs.) and re-create the giddy mood: 
The professional runners had already sprinted through long before the well-wishers had positioned themselves at our corner, 28th and Saint Paul. They had kicked past at a breath-stealing 12 miles an hour. We were now watching the middle-pack of runners, the average folk who jog the course. From the shadows of our looming brick row-house and into yellow columns of early sunlight, they came in waves. They were delighted by the reception our crowd gave them. Though it was a cool morning and only a short distance gone, some runners looked beleaguered already. I sympathized. 
I used to be a distance runner but never a marathoner. Ten miles was just right for me, though sometimes I went fifteen. I don’t believe any exercise matches the exhilaration that comes of carrying oneself at a fast pace on foot. Running is the most primal thrill. We were born to run, at least for short distances, mostly after something to eat — or away from something that would eat us. When we run, some part of our primitive self must remember this. When we run fast, when we feel the power in our legs and the resilience in our lungs, some part of our mind goes crazy with joy. Endorphin production, scientists tell us. But it’s more than that. 
Though tragic, certainly, it should not surprise us when a runner is snatched by a mountain lion in the rocky highlands of the far West –- as happens about once a year. Runner and cat are playing out a contest as old as our respective species. At bottom, the joy of running is about getting away. When we can no longer run or when we’re stopped dead, we are — at first — disappointed. It’s like your car jerking to an abrupt stop, then you realize you’re out of gas and a long way from a station. What? Is that it? Is that all? That’s how I felt when my knee (just one) gave out. So now, like so many, I am sidelined. Somteims I dream of running. Often I’m running up the steepest hills at remarkable speed. 
If you hope to get somewhere fast during Baltimore’s marathon, forget it. One year, when I had to get to the airport on marathon morning, I found myself diverted in a two-mile backup, going the opposite direction from the airport. Fortunately, I was driving Jill’s four-wheel drive. I gunned the SUV over a traffic island, then raced through the back-routes of the city’s worst neighborhoods, where there’s never any traffic, and made my plane just barely. Another time I had to run an errand on marathon morning (I guess it was important, though I can’t recall what it was). On my return, I was a half a block from my house – I could see my garage a few car lengths away – when a cop turned me back. “But I live there – right there!†I pointed. He shook his head in regret. “Sorry, sir.†The street would not be open until 2:00 P.M. It was now 11:00 A.M. “But I just live right THERE!†I repeated. Again he shook his head. “Move along, sir.†I was so incensed, I gunned the car to the next intersection, tried an abrupt turn, then slammed into somebody’s Volvo station wagon – an accident that raised by insurance rate by twenty percent. 
As a child, the only grilled cheese sandwich I knew was American processed cheese food on white bread lightly browned in a skillet, usually with margarine. My mother always added mayonnaise to the cheese. Mayo gives it a kick and I still use it to this day. In college, I tried grilled Swiss cheese sandwiches, then cheddar, and then it seemed there was no limit to the variations. What cheese wouldn’t taste good between two slices of grilled bread slathered with mayonnaise?
Nowadays Jill and I mix our cheeses. A heavenly combination is parmesan with imported provolone (repeat: imported -– it is sharp and wondrous and tastes nothing like the domestic provolone you’re thinking of). Also try parmesan with extra-sharp cheddar. Goat and feta. Feta and smoked mozzarella. Give it an added kick with a sprinkling of fresh oregano or rosemary. Or lay a few fresh basil leaves in there. And keep the mayonnaise.
The grilled cheese sandwich that we know got its start, probably, in the 1920s, after the spread of two innovations: sliced bread and cheap eateries (most commonly called “dinersâ€). Apparently, they were served open-faced, having been broiled. As a child, I loved a broiled cheese sandwich. The bubbly, browning cheese always seemed extra good. It’s hard to say when cooks started putting the top on the sandwich to make the treat we know so well today, but it seems to have been common by the 1950s. Nowadays I prefer the grilled cheese to the open-faced broiled cheese sandwich.
Technique is important for the best results. Like so: preheat your skillet, add a generous slice of butter (one fat slice per sandwich), then stir in a tablespoon of olive oil for extra flavor. I use thick-crust “rustic†Italian bread. For an extra crunchy sandwich, cook it over low heat. Cover the pan to make the cheese melt faster. I put on less cheese rather than more because I use really sharp cheese (imported provolone, fontinella, regiano, extra-sharp cheddar). Take your time. A good cheese sandwich doesn’t take long, but it can’t be rushed either. Above all, watch that heat. 
Our first fall in the house, I didn’t know where the stink was coming from. I thought someone had puked on the sidewalk. That’s what ripe ginko berries smell like. Nothing comes closer. But then the smell followed me indoors. When I raised my shoe for a look, I saw mashed berries wedged in the waffle-treads of my soles. Later, Jill and I surveyed the smeared, puke-reeking sidewalk and shook our head in dismay. What an awful stinking mess. 
Originally from China, the ginkgo was popular in Japan too and, in fact, named by the Japanese. “Ginkyo†in their language means “silver apricot.†Asians like to eat ginko nuts. On occasion we see a Chinese women gathering the fallen fruit from our sidewalk – an activity that makes us very grateful. By the way, you can NOT eat ginko nuts with abandon. They are poisonous. It’s recommended that an adult eat no more than ten a day and a child eat only five.
