Columbus Foodie

It was a beautiful spring day yesterday morning. We got up before 7am, picked up my mother, and managed to make it to the North Market before 8am. Still, everybody was pretty much already set up, so I got to shopping. Wish Well Farms had the last of the morels of the season, so I gave in to temptation and picked up about a half a pound more, to saute up in a little butter for my family, who has never had them. I also picked up some pretty cherry tomatoes and a bunch of aspargus too.

And Elizabeth Telling Farms was back for the season, finally, having mostly greens at this point, like this lettuce.

Over at Comb’s herbs, they had the first peonies of the season – suffice it to say, I cleaned her out. I’m not one to buy flowers, usually, but peonies are so beautiful that I can’t resist.

And Toby Run was back this week with his fantabulous mushrooms, so I bought another pound. Yum. No definite plans for these yet, but believe me, I’ll figure something out.

We headed right over to Worthington, and got there a little before 9am. There were flowers as far as the eye could see. This bunch of irises are representative of what beauty I saw every 10-20 feet or so.

There was no shortage of meat to be had for grilling out, so we picked up some natural casing (huge!) wieners and some pork tenderloin from OMC Farms.

After a few more items here and there (some more Gretna Grilling Cheese from Blue Jacket Farms, for example) it was off to Clintonville.

Slate Run Historical Farm was there today with a couple of lambs, that kids were petting. I love this picture, even though it’s a bit off center. Kids were loving it until the person manning the stall mentioned that they were going to be lamb chops soon. Talk about traumatized kids.

And the chives are finally blossoming! I can’t wait to experiment.

Since we’re planning on cooking out today, and making a Frogmore Stew, we were on the hunt for live crabs (not to be found at all in Columbus). We figured they might have them at Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati, so we took a trip down there. They didn’t have the crabs (I ended up getting frozen snow crab clusters, hopefully it will work). I did end up spending way more than I wanted to there, but what else do you expect to happen when you go to the foodie equivalent of Disneyland?

A quick restaurant recommendation. On our way back from Cincinnati, we were starving, so stopped along the way at the first thing that looked interesting – The Spinning Fork on the Dixie Highway in Fairfield. It’s family owned, and has really good Italian comfort food, and extremely reasonable prices – we’re going to come back on our next trip too.

Well, off to start cooking. We’re grilling out today, and I’ve got tons of prep work to do.