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The Market:
Thursday
Evening Farmers Market
Broadway and Third Street
Chico, Calif.
Thursday, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. (April-Sept.)
(530) 345-6500
Market-Goer: Mark
Thompson
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The
Thursday evening farmers market in downtown Chico,
Calif., is part of a full-fledged street fair that
stretches for three blocks on Broadway, spilling over
onto several side streets and into a municipal plaza
near city hall. |
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| As part of the street festival, there are musicians scattered about,
rides for the kids, lots of prepared foods, and several
dozen artisans selling crafts. The farmers market fills
a block and a half at one end the street fair. There
were about a dozen farmers on hand today selling fruits
and vegetables. About two-thirds of the farmers in the market
today were Southeast Asian, reflecting the growing population
of Hmongs and other immigrant groups from Indochina in
California's Central Valley, where many have taken up
farming. |
Stone fruit from market at municipal
swimming hole
in Bidwell Park on Big Chico Creek
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What I Bought:
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white
and yellow nectarines, white and yellow peaches,
plumcots, apricots and two kinds of plums
Chico is
surrounded by mile after mile of stone-fruit orchards.
It's nice too see that it hasn't all been trucked off
to packing houses and sent to supermarkets far away.
The region's bounty of
fruit is on full display today in the downtown Chico
Thursday evening farmers market.
I could have picked up several dozen different
varieties of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and
various combinations of those fruits. But since I'm on
the road, traveling with a small ice chest, I can
only handle samples of eight or nine varieties.
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I was taken by the dusky, translucent purple color
of the plumcots. Luther Burbank created the plumcot, a
plum-apricot hybrid, more than a century ago, when crossing those two
fruits was believed to be impossible. Since then,
other plant breeders have produced other variations,
including the aprium, which is roughly 75 percent apricot and
25 percent plum, and the pluot, a combination of the
two fruits in approximately opposite proportions.
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plumcot (upper
left) and other stone fruit
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The latest, wackiest sounding stone-fruit hybrid is
the peacotum, a peach-apricot-plum combo that supposedly
tastes like fruit punch. I haven't seen one in a
farmers market yet. I'll be on the lookout. In the
meantime, I'll commence by summer exploration of the
stone-fruit-hybrid family tree today with the plumcot, the
granddaddy of them all.
Recipes: *
Ten recipes featuring
apricots
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Dead ripe
stone-fruit
vinaigrette
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Five ways to preserve peaches
Price: $1.50-2/lb. for stone
fruit
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Armenian
(top), Southeast Asian, Slicing and Pickling
Cucumbers
Recipes:*
Six recipes
featuring fresh cucumbers
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Dill Pickles
Price: $1/each for Armenian
and bunches of Southeast Asian cucumbers
$1/for three slicing cucumbers
$1/for five small pickling cucumbers
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