Dupont Circle and its Farmers Market

On my first weekend in D.C., Di Yin and I met some friends to visit Dupont Circle's farmers market and to eat brunch. Dupont Circle, as I reported on a visit years before, is a nice neighborhood with a ton of embassies and well maintained townhouses, many with lovely gardens out front. Though some embassies are handsome, some (Sudan, Togo, others) on Embassy Row (Massachusetts Avenue near Dupont Circle) are modest places, normal townhouses fifteen feet wide.

Dupont Circle's regular residences are nice. They're all different. They have character. I could make wandering the streets a habit and I'd never get bored. I never took pictures in this neighborhood because I knew that if I took one I'd want to take another on the next block and another on the next and it wouldn't stop.

Dupont Circle's farmers market is big and first-rate, beautiful and colorful with lots of flowers and vegetables. It's respectable compared to those in California. Indeed, it has much more pasture-raised meat than I've seen at a market in California.

I tried a "tsu li" and "ya li", two types of Chinese pears that I haven't seen before. Interestingly, the farmer says they keep for ten months! The spottier one was sourer. I prefer the cleaner. Di Yin also prefers the cleaner; she says it's crisper.

I returned to the farmers market during the winter when my local one was closed (the Dupont Circle farmers market is year-round) and often during the spring simply because its selection was so large. During one time I visited it was snowing, admittedly with very light, sporadic snowflakes, but snowing the nonetheless. My fingers were so cold--I wore thin gloves--that I was worried they might go numb.

Our most common purchase was various leafy greens: collards, kales, etc. We found these in abundance in various varieties, often organic.

At times I grabbed breakfast from the main bakery at the market. The mixed fruit scones I got were always quite good (and I say this though I'm usually indifferent to scones), as was its ginger scone. The muffins were less exciting: the fig muffin didn't taste much like fig, and the raspberry-almond muffin was a bit weird because the raspberry came in the form of a jam baked into the muffin. Regardless, I liked how its selection of breakfast pastries changed often; one never knew what was going to be on offer.

There was another bakery serving French pastries (breakfast and dessert ones) as well as savory French baked goods (quiches, etc.).

Over time, I also started appreciating the flower stands, which sold single stems at reasonable prices, and the bison stand, which sold every imaginable cut. I bought and cooked bison several times. I also began regularly bringing a single flower stem home to brighten up our studio.

The main thing I missed at the market compared to California is that the fruit-growing season starts later and is shorter in this area. Berries, peaches, melons and the like were rare.