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Saying goodbye to Eugene. 25 August 2009 7:08 am

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,CSA,eating,eggs,eugene,events,fangirl,friends,fun,garden,good news,local food,meat,Morning Glory,news,not even vegetarian,nyc,oregon,seasonality,summer,writing , trackback

I wrote this piece for an assignment on personal essays and memoir in my food writing class last fall, and it isn’t exactly true anymore — I have had a few more last Saturdays in Eugene since the one described here. It’s still emotionally true, perhaps more so than ever now, and it’s appropriate, since Peter is saying goodbye to Eugene this morning and coming home to New York City, at last, with his shield, not on it. Congratulations, love. See you soon.

* * * * *

My last Saturday in Eugene, Oregon was pretty well perfect, thanks to a chance encounter with some carrot greens. I spotted them in the totebags of a pedestrian on the bike path south of the Lane County fairgrounds. She was on her way home from Saturday Market; Peter and I were riding our tandem to coffee after a morning of blueberry picking with Kevin and Laurel. It was August second, and thanks to those greens, I remembered it was our last chance to go to Saturday Market before our move. So after coffee, pastries, and a stumper of a New York Times crossword puzzle, we said goodbye to Kevin and Laurel. They rode south, and Peter and I went north, to our last Saturday Market for a long time.

The only things I can write about Eugene’s Saturday Market that haven’t been written before are my own specific personal experiences. Anyone who knows about it can tell you it’s the four blocks around the intersection of 8th and Oak streets in downtown Eugene — farmers market in the northwest, hippie crafts in the southwest, more crafts, a food court, and performance stage to the southeast, and in the northeast, a designated free speech zone, complete with hacky sack players and hippie drum circle. (All those hippies sound redundant until you remember it’s Eugene, where every string of adjectives contains a silent “hippie.”) It’s every Saturday from April to October, rain or shine, and if I’m in any state to enjoy other people, it’s a damn good time. That Saturday I was determined to enjoy it, and succeeded.

Eugene’s Saturday Market makes me believe all the locavore clichés about farmers markets creating — or at least providing a venue for people to create — community. Although I first experienced farmers markets in Laguna Beach, CA, at the time I was fresh out of college and recovering from a major depression, and I didn’t live there long enough to ever stop feeling like a tourist. Still, I discovered avocado honey there, and it warmed me to the markets in Eugene, even before I felt part of the community there.

Peter and I had been living in Eugene for less than three months when we spotted a sign about a winter CSA, but we were already eager to keep a bit of the market coming home with us after the outdoor season was over. That was in the fall of 2002, and the CSA was Rojo’s Farm, in the last season before they became Groundwork Organics, and they rocked our veggie-loving world for five glorious years, until 2007.

Some combination of forgetfulness, thrift, and my trip to Nepal prevented our signing up for the winter 2007 Groundworks CSA, but it wasn’t until January 2008, when we started our last months in Eugene in earnest, that I realized we wouldn’t be participating in their 2008 main season CSA, either. The reality of the coming move hit literally in the guts. I felt then, and I still feel now, like I owe Gabe and Sophie a long letter, in part an apology for missing those last seasons, but mostly in gratitude for five years of amazing food. (This essay is in part based on thoughts I wanted to put into that letter, which I never wrote.) I digress, but not much, because on arriving at the Saturday Market that last time, we made a beeline for the Groundwork Organics stand. I won’t lie or even hold back a bit of the truth now: I choked up.

Maybe it was the smell: Groundworks co-owner Gabe Cox loves growing strawberries. They’re a specialty of the farm, and for much of the summer season, berries are front and center at their market stand, so ripe that you can smell them before you see them, ten, twenty, maybe thirty feet away, in a crowd. It’s fantastic. Next door to the Groundworks stand was their usual neighbor, Deck Family Farm, proudly advertising chicken, but also ribeye steak.

We’d had Deck top sirloin for Peter’s birthday in July, and they were so delicious that even the gristle tasted good. There was something so rich, an almost salmon-fishy flavor in the taste of the meat — perhaps the much-vaunted omega-3 fatty acids all the nutrition-savvy carnivores are celebrating in grassfed meat these days. Whatever. With that memory, the thought of a Deck ribeye was irresistable. I broke out the tips from my last days at Morning Glory, handed Peter steak money, and after a brief discussion that came to “yes, I want one of each veggie, too,” headed for the Groundworks stand.

I bought:

The grand total came to $17.50, and I would have gladly paid more.

Next, we made our way west through the rest of the farmers market, Peter walking on the street with the bike, me through the sidewalk crowds in search of Happy Chicken eggs. The capitalization is not a typo — that’s what these eggs are called. They’re from Raynblest Farms, and they are so good it’s almost a crime to bake with them (though we often did). I love eggs, at least in part because a neighbor kept chickens in the backyard of the house across the street from where I grew up. I was much older when I realized how lucky that makes me, and that maybe a lot of people who don’t like eggs have only encountered the ones sold in supermarkets. Anyway. Raynblest’s eggs may not have the sentimental value of gifts from Herb Kaplan and his “girls,” but they’re the best eggs I’ve ever paid for, by far. So I was sad when they weren’t available that day, but consoled myself with dried porcini mushrooms for $6/pound.

Peter met me at the corner of 8th and Park, and we turned towards the back northwest quarter of the market. I wanted to check out the offerings from the fishmonger, a relative newcomer on the Saturday Market scene, but that idea evaporated when I discovered that Sweet Briar Farms were running a grill next to their usual back-of-the-truck market stand. It’s hard to overstate my love for Sweet Briar. They have never sold me anything even close to bad. With them, I don’t think such a thing exists. I wanted the “Top Hog” sandwich of grilled pork sirloin, mushrooms, peppers, and onions, until I learned they’d put all the veggies on one of their quarter-pound sausages, on a bun. Sold! I got Peter their last spicy beer sausage with all the fixin’s recommended by the enthusiastic woman working the grill, and a linguisa with the works for myself. We ate on a park bench just past the market’s north- and west-most edge, eventually trading sandwiches because while Peter thought the sausages were equally good, I liked the beer sausage slightly better. Both were wonderful. Bellies full, and with a backpack piled to the brim with some of the best food the Oregon summer has to offer, we rode home. It was a beautiful last Saturday Market day.

We finished the bell pepper at our going-away party that night, with hummus seasoned in part with the cilantro. The strawberries lasted until the next morning, but only barely — Gabe and Sophie send them to market so ripe that it’s less than a day before they start to turn funky. The beefsteak tomatoes became lovely late lunch sandwiches two days in a row, and the cherry tomatoes lasted until Sunday’s light supper of raw veggies, cheese, and crackers. The zucchini went into Madhur Jaffrey’s shrimp recipe, as planned (bless Peter for remembering it when I was busy being emotionally overwhelmed), and the steak became a celebratory dinner that Wednesday night, after the escrow document signing. We ate that dinner on our back porch, and toasted many things with pinot noir: the sale of our house, the cows sacrificed for our meal, the late sunset, the summer evening, our life in Oregon, and better things to come.

  • mom

    It has been a long, long summer for both of you. But now he is here, on to bigger and better things. Welcome home Peter .

  • cj

    I would prefer to label this “pleasantly involved” (describing it as “long” implies less pleasant adjectives).