Del Ray Farmers’ Market and Marcela’s Bakery

Saturday morning: Wake up! Let’s go to the Del Ray Farmers’ Market. Want some coffee to drink as we walk? We need to get things for dinner tonight with A, P, & E. They used to live in Naples, too. Let’s make a Neapolitan-style dinner, but with whatever we find at the market. Steve the butcher will have sausages. Let’s do a pasta with grilled sausages and a salad.

Strawberries! That’s dessert. Easy.

Mixed greens salad. Today our regular yogurt guy has homemade mozzarella. We’ll do a Caprese salad.

I need some more herbs for the planting bed in the front yard. Dill, more parsley, never enough parsley, basil, they have Genovese basil. I’ll get Japanese eggplant, too.

Ask the lady at the “Ask a Master Gardener” table when to plant tomatoes. She says we have time because the soil has not warmed up all the way. Next week would be a good time to put in tomatoes. Wanna have breakfast?

Photo: Salteña from Marcela’s Bakery, 3856 Mt. Vernon Ave, sold at the Del Ray Farmers’ Market. The salsa is heavy on the cilantro.

The salteñas are good, yea? A bit large and unwieldy, but tasty. Today’s filling: beef and potato with celery, hardboiled egg, peas, and olives. Missing the raisins. Sometimes they put cilantro in the filling—not authentic to Bolivian salteñas—but today there wasn’t much. The crust is good, perhaps a bit too flaky.

Such a talented young girl playing the violin, some local orchestra is having a bake sale. Look at that puppy at the Humane Society booth. He’s six-months-old? So cute. A Pit Bull mix? So sweet, but he’d tear up our new back garden. Sorry we can’t take him home… I love this place.