White House Farmers Market

One day while on an outing around lunchtime midweek I stumbled upon the White House Farmers Market. It was quite a change compared with my two regular markets (Penn Quarter and Dupont Circle). The market's medium-sized, a bit bigger than Penn Quarter's. The mix of stands was different than both those markets: half of it was cooked food. I spotted some great looking fish patties and glazed pumpkin cookies. Too bad I didn't have time to try anything, and too bad I discovered this only near the end of my time in D.C. so couldn't return another time.

Eastern Market

Di Yin and I saw Eastern Market in pieces over multiple days: Saturday, November 19, 2011, Sunday, January 1, 2012, and Saturday, January 28, 2012. I took pictures on these visits. Di Yin took a few pictures on one visit. The latter link goes to her first picture of the market (picture #28 in the album). When you see a picture of a balloon caught in a tree (picture #37), you're done with her pictures from Eastern Market. I'll link to her other pictures in that album in other posts.

The market complex has a long farmers market aisle outside. All vegetables have multiple producers selling them. Although some prices at some stands are not reasonable, you can find reasonable prices for any item if you look around. If you do so it's certainly cheaper than my local Penn Quarter market.

Another aisle or two outside has artsy things, fairly decent stuff. There's also a section for jewelry.

Inside has tons of butchers, selling meat of any cut and style from virtually any animal. I saw bison steaks, rabbit, duck sausages, boar sausages, and much, much more. There's also a large fish vendor, a decent-sized cheese shop, a few vegetables stands, a bakery or two, and a place with an astoundingly long line, Market Lunch, that serves breakfast, brunch, and lunch.

Across the street is a flea market, and not a trashy one.

It's a destination area. Hence naturally there are lots of cafes and boutiques in the area.

We didn't often go to Eastern Market; it was a bit too much trouble compared with buying our foodstuffs at grocery stores and our local markets.

Maine Avenue Fish Market

One day when three friends (B, C, and E) were in town, we followed a tip to explore the Maine Avenue Fish Market. It's a bit more than a mile walk from my apartment down to its location on the waterfront.

The fish market is outside. I took pictures. Di Yin did many more. The market is apparently one of the last remaining open-air seafood markets on the east coast, and one of the oldest such markets in the United States.

We ate lunch there. I tried the fried red snapper special, a huge chunk of fish (with bones) served on white bread. It was decent but plain. I was given every possible topping: tartar sauce, tabasco sauce, cocktail sauce, and ketchup. It came with a sub-par coleslaw of finely diced cabbage in mayo.

The highlight of my meal was hush puppies, deep-fried balls of corn meal. Those brought me back to my childhood.

I also tried some items my friends bought including large raw oysters (good) and ceviche (bleh, not really ceviche or sashimi for that matter).

For cooking later, we bought flounder (which Di Yin steamed Chinese style) which we discovered wasn't as good as sole cooked in a similar fashion, mackerel (broiled Japanese style) which we declared good and put on our regular rotation*, and sardines (broiled, already on our regular rotation). In later visits, we bought more seafood including squid and more mackerel.

I find it interesting that the prices for all the fish are the same between different sections/wings of the market. It's not clear to me whether all these sections are the same vendor. I'd be surprised if they are because then the displays would be rather redundant.

The fish market provides inexpensive cleaning/gutting. Given the ambiance, it's exactly what you'd expect: men in a small room with big knifes, big counters, big sinks, nozzles for spraying down all surfaces, and buckets for unusable parts. No pictures allowed.

Over the next year, we revisited the fish market multiple times, Di Yin many more than I. We often got shrimp or squid. Sometimes we bought fish. Two of those times we decided to clean and gut the fish ourselves. We learned it's pretty easy and fast if you're willing to make a mess and have scales fly everywhere. Once we bought live Maryland blue crabs, which Di Yin cooked Singapore-chili-crab style. Gosh, crabs are a pain to eat. They're also a pain to kill. I tried to many techniques, all too gruesome to describe here.

* at some point we removed most species of mackerel from our regular rotation due to their high levels of mercury

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.

Penn Quarter Farmers Market

I went to a farmers market on my first full day in Washington D.C. Its awesomeness is that it's a mere block-and-a-half from my apartment! This means I went pretty much every week or at least every other week I was in town.

The Penn Quarter Farmers Market happens in late afternoon on every Thursday. It's small, yet manages to cover every type of ingredient one may want want to buy. Although the list of booths changed a bit week to week, in general there are two general vegetable stands, two more that mainly specialize in fruit, a mushroom specialist, a stand that only sells salad greens of various types, two cheese/yogurt stands (one also sells skin cream and soap), a bakery, a prepared food stand, an empanadas stand, a pasta-and-soup-and-jam stand, a cured food stand (pate, sausages, duck confit, etc.), a fresh meat stand (free range chicken and pork, grass-fed cow and lamb), a gelato stand, two flower shops, and an artisan soap stand.

The fruit stands mainly sell a huge variety of apples--more than I've seen in the bay area, including many I hadn't heard of--as well as an assortment of pears, including multiple Asian varieties. I got in the habit of eating apples and pears every day. Indeed, when the market closed in late December for the winter, I was in such a habit that I stocked up, buying 13 pounds of fruit to last me the following three or four weeks. Over the winter I then began going to the Dupont Circle Farmers Market--which is open year-round--for my fruit and other needs.

In the spring I became a regular visitor to one flower shop, regularly bringing a single flower stem home to brighten up our studio. I really enjoyed this. It cost only a dollar or two (depending on the flower). I'm sad I can't do it anywhere else in the country: no other places I've seen sell individual stems; all sell bouquets for $10-15.

The bakery sells bread and pastries, including scones, muffins, and croissants. Oddly, it sells chocolate, almond, and ham-and-cheese croissants but no plain ones. One day I tried the pain au chocolate and found it decent: buttery but not flaky. I also tried a physically-heavy almond croissant, which was good. Like the pain au chocolate, the dough had the right flavor even if it wasn't flaky, and the almond paste inside added just the right amount of flavor without adding too much sweetness. Later, I tried the almond macaroons, which tasted like the sweet almond-paste that made the croissant so tasty.

On other days I tried a blueberry muffin, a pumpkin-apple-something muffin, a cherry-almond muffin, and a carrot-apple-pineapple-and-some-sort-of-nut muffin. I thought the first three were fairly good but sweeter than I like. The latter was simply good; it was naturally sweet from the carrots but didn't feel like it had extra/excessive added sugar.

I also tried one of the bakery's small cheddar-and-bacon scones which turned out to taste more of cheddar than of bacon. It was more like a crumbly (buttermilk?) biscuit than a scone. Alright, but not really my thing. I enjoyed the currant and macadamia nut scone more. It was more scone-like, though I don't think the nuts went with it. Even later I tried the fig (& something) scone and found it the best yet. The figs, cut in sizable chunks, were good and went well with the crumbly, scone-like dough that had a bit of a toasted flavor (whole grain?).

I bought a loaf of the bakery's extraordinarily expensive tasting bread for a dinner party. A sweet bread, it was densely filled with unidentifiable masses of dried fruits (supposedly cherries and currants) and hazelnuts. I toasted it as recommended and served it as an appetizer. Everyone enjoyed it; it was neat and tasty and festive.

The empanadas stand has surprisingly many flavors: tilapia, crab, chicken, beef, mushroom, etc. The stand is often sold out by the time I arrive. My verdict on the mushroom empanada: the crust was good and buttery and with a dash of salt. It was remarkably thin--thinner than other empanadas I've had--making the filling the focus. Good. The spinach empanada I had on a different visit was similar, with a thin crust and heavy emphasis on the filling. Another time, I had a crawfish-and-mango empanada. It was good, with the definitive taste of shellfish and some sweetness from the mango. The smoked salmon empanada was similarly good. The smoked salmon wasn't like lox but rather like whole salmon, smoked, then flaked. The empanada was full of it. Incidentally, the stand also sells crab cakes, some soups, and, at times, savory scones. I bought a savory scone with prosciutto and some sort of slightly spicy cheese. I liked it quite a bit; not just the ham-and-cheese taste but also its texture. I bought it once or twice again.

At times I bought items from the pricy pasta-and-jam stand. Di Yin and I tried the pulled pork tortellini and duck confit ravioli. Both were good, with the flavor of the main ingredient shining straight through (i.e., they're exactly as described), yet the tastes were somehow unsophisticated and therefore not great. By the way, in case you're wondering what kind of jams a pasta shop like this sells, I wrote down one flavor: strawberry vanilla bean.

In case my comment about apples and pears didn't convince you that Washington D.C.'s farmers markets have some appeal even when compared with California's, I should mention I spotted a vegetable I never saw previously: pole lima beans. I've seen lima beans for sale in California but never the type grown on vines/poles.