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The Market:
Laguna Beach Farmers Market
Lumberyard parking lot next door to City Hall
Saturday, 8 a.m. to noon
(714) 573-0374
Market-Goer: Mark
Thompson
I had not visited this market since December
15, 2001. Back then, I wasn't terribly impressed with a
market that I thought should have been bigger and better
patronized, given its setting.
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There was a bigger crowd this time, and
a better selection of farmers -- befitting a farmers
market sitting within about an hour's drive of the sunny
highlands of northern San Diego County, where there are
still a number of small ranches, farms, orchards
and nurseries holding out against encroaching urban
sprawl from the north and south. |
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The dry, brown hillside looming over the market site is a
testament to the record low rainfall of less than 5 inches over
the past year. Hopefully, enough rain will fall this winter to
turn that hillside green, but not so much that it will send it,
and the houses perched on its brink, sliding towards the sea, as
sometimes happens here.
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What I Bought:
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Pluot varieties including
Dinosaur Egg (upper right), Flavor Queen (lower middle) and
Flavor King (lower right)
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Pluots aren't my
favorite stone fruit, but they sure are pretty. A
cross between a plum and apricot, with the former
accounting for about 75 percent of the fruit's
parentage, the pluot was developed in the late 20th
century by fruit breeder Floyd Zaiger.
Floyd, his wife Betty, two sons and a daughter are
a "family organized to improve fruit
worldwide," proclaims the Web site of the
family's Modesto, Calif.-based business, Zaiger's
Genetics. The company is renowned worldwide for
its fruit varieties, including new cross-bred fruit,
some of whose names the company has trademarked
including aprium, nectaplum, peacotum, nectarcot in
addition to the pluot.
Price: $3/lb. for pluots
$.75/grapefruit
$5/lb. for passionfruit
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(above) and sapotes, passionfruit,
kumquats and
Marsh Ruby grapefruit taking it in at Laguna Beach |
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passion fruit,
Marsh Ruby grapefruit, kumquats, sapotes
Compared with new-fangled pluots, the
Marsh Ruby grapefruit is downright ancient for a
modern hybrid, at nearly 100 years old. The variety
was released in 1913, the first pink variety of the
old standard Marsh grapefruit. The Marsh Ruby is reportedly
"the ancestor of all pink grapefruits grown
today."
Recipes:
Two grapefruit
recipes
Avocado-pink grapefruit salad
Poached
kumquats
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wax beans (left) and
Blue Lake (right)
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