A Produce Poker Run

Fresh cut flowers accompany produce at a family farm stand.

It was a perfect August Saturday afternoon… warm breeze, sunny skies and the chores for the day were done. It was time to get out of the house to enjoy this moment from an otherwise rainy summer of 2009. Early August welcomes the harvest of Finger Lakes grown garlic and if you’ve never tasted truly fresh garlic then you’re missing out on a real treat. Firm texture, oily flesh, crisp aromas, and depending on the variety, you will experience flavors of sweet, spicy, hot or mild.

We keep a box of specialty booklets handy for such days so today we dug out our Guide To Yates County Fresh Produce. With this in hand and a GPS booted up and programmed for our first destination, we hit the road. We traveled the land between the lakes, back roads leading to small family farms and large home gardener’s front lawns. Many of the stands are operated by Mennonite farmers who feature along with their produce baked good selections made from the recipes brought with them from southeast Pennsylvania.

As we motored along from stand to stand we failed to find the prized garlic, but we did manage to pick up a few other goodies: peach pie, patty pan squash, peanut butter cookies, eggs, zucchini, tomatoes, a loaf of bread, eggplant, cantaloupe, and green beans. The car was filling up, but still no garlic. For fear of  not accomplishing our mission we decided to take a change in course, a plan “B” if you will, and drop by the annual Fox Run Winery Garlic Festival. A garlic lover’s heaven, the festival features booth upon booth of vendors selling a myriad of garlic varieties, sauces, dips, veggies, jams, and more. We now had in hand nearly a year’s supply of garlic (and the good stuff will stay fresh that long), and oh yeah, a bag of shallots too.

Photos of our adventure are available here.