Now is the time.

We have so many good things in the cooler right now.  If you want to make a spring salad, go for it: peas and favas abound, and we also have Mapleline Dairy buttermilk, if you’re inclined towards a ramp and buttermilk dressing.  If you’re thinking asparagus, you should be: jumbo and standard grass from King’s Crown in Stockton, CA are here and sitting right next to the fresh Oregon morel mushrooms in our cooler.  Topped with fresh cage-free duck eggs from Hershberger Farms in Maine?Solid move.

86/Gapping: Paul’s Greek Yogurt- expected mid-April; Baby Artichokes very sporadic availability- will remain sporadic for the season; Carolina Coarse White Heirloom Grits- expected mid-week; Red Flint Floriani Grits- expected early next week; black trumpets done for the season; County Line Chicories done for the season.

Coming Soon:  If you’ve been thinking about upping your grain game, we’ve got good news: we are bringing in some excellent, stone-ground organic wheat and other grains from Maine that are milled to order, for us, starting in mid-April.  Why do you care?  Because you want your loaves to be beautiful, nutty and special.  Because you want to put as much thought into your flour as you do your other produce.  Because you want to try making pasta with things like rye, buckwheat and spelt flour.  Because a triticale berry (think wheatberry, but a rye-wheat hybrid) salad sounds like just the thing to change up to from farro right about now.  Stay tuned.

Soom Tahini, also expected in mid-April.  What makes this tahini special?  If you’ve spent any time in the middle east, you know how seriously good tahini is over there.  But in the same way that hummus in a plastic package will never live up to freshly-ground hummus you can get in the streets of east Jerusalem (preferably chased with some Moroccan mint tea), the leaden tahini here doesn’t hold a candle to the super-fresh, pure taste that Soom tahini already has straight out of the jar, before you do a damned thing to it.  Already the proper consistency, it’s not a paste so much as a sauce–that you’ll want to start using on everything.  If you’ve ever looked at a jar of tahini and thought about adding a touch of it to something and said “nah, it’s too pasty and I’ll have to thin it out and re-emulsify it and it’ll be a whole thing,” get this stuff.  You can now be spontaneous with your tahini, and don’t have to worry that the new garde manger cook is going to burn out trying to re-emulsify it.

NOW IN SEASON

Still going strong