Two Discoveries

I got to the farmer's market late on Saturday and found it pretty picked over, but I did walk away with butternut squash, a bag of turnips and a sweet potato. Shefali was out of town for the weekend and I had a couple hours free that afternoon, so I went exploring, hoping to uncover another hidden gem in the foodiest small town in America.

I'd heard about a fresh fish market in Carborro, just west of Chapel Hill. After driving up and down Main Street three times I finally saw the sign for Tom Robinson's Carolina Seafood Market. It's a tiny place, stuck between two restaurants, but an array of local music concerts and interest group fliers taped on both sides of a squeaky screen door keeps the shop's decor consistent with the rest of the town.

Each Wednesday, the store owner drives to the coast every, picks up the fresh catch and then sells it to customers in Carrboro Thursday through Saturday. What they don't sell on Saturday they offer to local restaurants.

When I got there Saturday afternoon the store's display case was about half full. I bought two Spanish mackerel, and the owner gutted them for me on the spot.

On my way home I also picked up The Silver Spoon Cookbook. According to the publisher, it's "Italy's best-selling cookbook for over 50 years." Filled with over 2,000 recipes, the self-proclaimed "bible of authentic Italian cooking" is different in many ways from the other self-proclaimed "number-one cookbook in America since 1930" sitting on my bookshelf. The Silver Spoon organizes its recipes by ingredient instead of courses. Its first 24 pages offer no recipes, only cooking terms, definitions and diagrams. The recipe instructions, regardless of length, are all one paragraph. It's an Italian cookbook but more specifically a cookbook for Italians, because not all recipes (like "Carrots in French Sauce," "Creole Rice" and "American Chicken Salad") come from Italy. The final 75 pages feature recipes from prominent Italian chefs from all over the world, such as Mario Batali (US), Giorgio Locatelli (London), and Gianluigi Morini (Italy).

The Silver Spoon is a textbook - something I'll reference when cooking with specific ingredients, but not a book I'll sit down and read. It's a great resource when I buy veggies at the farmer's market that I've never cooked or eaten before, and it has recipes for virtually anything Walking Fish can offer. For example, it has six different recipes for turnips bulbs and five for mackerel.

That night, I ended up boiling the turnips, seasoning them with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, and dusting the whole mackerel with flour, pan-searing it in butter and topping it with lemon juice.