Darry is on vacation this week and we have been traveling around the area visiting gardens and markets.  We got an early start on Saturday and drove to the City Market in Charlottesville.  The market is located in a large parking lot a block from the historic Downtown Mall which means that if you plan accordingly, you can shop the market and then walk a block to Main Street and shop, have lunch, visit a coffee shop or have some ice cream.  City Market is a producers only market and each week, approximately 100 vendors come to sell produce, meats, cheese, flowers, hand-crafted goods, bakery items and more.  We started off with donuts, freshly fried and rolled in cinnamon sugar!

So many tents, so much to see, we will have to go back as the seasons progress to see what is available.

Romanesco cauliflower; I haven’t had much luck with it in the garden but looking at this basket, I must try again.

Our peas pooped out on us a while back but the climate in the Charlottesville area is a little cooler than ours here in Williamsburg and peas were still available at this market.

Our carrots are not as large as these, but they are getting there!

Free range chickens are pretty common but have you ever heard of free swimming ducks?  We laughed at that one!  Duck eggs are such a pretty blue color.

Spring potatoes!  It will be months before we have any to harvest.  When I harvested them last fall, I missed some and now, we have potatoes growing randomly in the beds.  This week, I did plant some seed potatoes and hopefully, we will have some russets to go with the reds and golds that have been sprouting in the garden.

Swiss chard is so pretty to look at, I love the colors of the stems.

In one booth, peppers were being flame roasted-it smelled so good!

It is almost tomato season-I saw the first tomato blooms in our garden just this afternoon!

What’s in season?  Beets!!!  Love beets and I have red and gold in the garden.

These look perfect for roasting, although, pickling them would be pretty tasty too!Lacinto Kale is another one of those plants that hasn’t been a good producer for me in the garden.  Considering how much we like it, I will have to try again.

If I hadn’t started off our visit with a donut, I might have had an almond croissant!

Love the stenciled loaves, they were eye catching and very tempting!

Every where we went, there was food to eat.  These ladies were cooking crab cakes.

The bagel ladies had sandwiches on the grill and bagels to take and bake at home.

Feel like tacos?  In this booth, they were pressing fresh tortillas and making tamales.  If only the line wasn’t 20 people deep, we might have had tamal for lunch.

Remember those donuts I mentioned?  In this booth, they fry them and then coat them with a sugar and cinnamon mix.

The batter gets poured into a hopper and it is portioned and dropped into the hot oil.

Feel like an omelet?  Chef Tony has your back!  He was cooking them to order on a grill.

We decided to have some fresh Filipino style noodles.

Thin rice noodles with chicken and vegetables.

We haven’t had much Filipino food since we left San Francisco and it was a nice change from the usual Asian fare we find here in Williamsburg.

Fear not, they are also a green market!  Food scraps can be composted and recyclables are collected separately from the trash.

We enjoyed the trip and look forward to going back!