Best Produce Stand EVER!

Is this one . . .
. . . in Suisun Valley, California, and a mere 20 minutes from us. It's AWESOME.

I first heard about Larry's from one of my Jazzercise instructors, Jennifer, and then I heard mention of it by a few other people as the June arrived. Seems Larry's is only open during the summer months, and when Larry's opens, people get excited.

Mike and I are always on the lookout for fresh, picked-at-the-peak-of-flavor, produce at reasonable prices. We eat a LOT of fresh produce. Our favorite produce stand for a long time has been Pedrick's in Davis. Unfortunately, Pedrick's is a 45-minute drive from us so we can't just pop over there anytime we want. We also like Food 4 Less in Vallejo for good prices and a big selection. But Larry's has them both beat hands-down for both variety and the BEST prices we've seen in years.

AND guess what? You get to do your shopping with a wheelbarrow!

Yeah, it's perfect for us. Mike had no problem filling up that wheelbarrow! Just look at the selection:

And the prices! Vine-ripened tomatoes for $ .99/lb. :

Cherries (huge and sweet) also for $ .99/lb. Lettuce, any type, one dollar a head. Cantelopes - $1.00 each. Peaches, plums, nectarines, etc., mix and match, $1.00/lb. Bananas, .69/lb. All kinds of peppers, some we'd never heard of:

And look at the view out the back door!

We'll be weekly regulars at Larry's this summer. I'm just sad we've already missed the first few weeks! And even if the great selection of fresh-picked LOCAL produce at the best prices in the bay area wasn't enough to get me out there at least once a week, I'd go just to see sights like this:

Soooo cute!

Have YOU had your 5 servings of fruits and veggies today?

Growing Sprouts and Juicing Carrots & Apples

My friend, Judy, wanted to see pics of my sprouter, so here it is! It was made by NK Lawn & Garden, and I don't believe they even make them any more. I just happened to find this one at Raley's Supermarket in Benicia, CA., near the racks of garden seeds. There were three of them in very dusty boxes. Inside was a coupon that expired in 2000 so you know these things were sitting around in a warehouse for years until someone came across them and said, let's just put these out and see if they sell.

Well, I bought two! One for us and one that I sent to Michael in China. I had been looking for a sprouter for several years. They are hard to find these days. Sprouting seeds at home seems to have gone out of style along with the rest of the 70's fads and fashions. I had to go online to find seeds to sprout. I found the greatest website: Sprout People. Check it out; they have all kinds of seeds and sprouters, fast shipping, and reasonable prices. Besides that, ANYTHING you want or need to know about sprouting seeds can be found on this website.

Anyway, Judy, this is my sprouter. You can see it's got three stackable trays for seeds. The topmost white tray is where you pour in water to rinse the seeds. The water is siphoned down into the first tray of seeds, then onward through the successive trays until it ends up in the bottom white tray. It's an easy way to rinse the seeds in all three trays at once. You can use one tray or all three at once. I most often just use two trays, but sometimes I do like to start several trays of the same seeds (my favorite is red clover) on successive days so that they are ready to eat on successive days.
Here are the trays partly taken apart. Each tray has a little cap in it, under which is a drain hole. The caps siphon off the water in the tray and then pass it down to the tray underneath.

This tray has seeds from Sprout People's "French Garden" mix. It contains red clover, arugula, cress, radish, fenugreek, and dill. We love this mix, though we do wish it had more radish seeds as we like the zip of radish sprouts.
This tray is "Beanie's Awesome Mix" also from Sprout People. It contains lentils, 3 different peas, garbanzos, and adzuki. Yeah, I don't know what adzuki is either. But this mix is great when sprouted and used in salads. Mmmmm!
Here are the seeds as they arrive from Sprout People. To the right side of that photo you can see the sprouter with the steamy looking sides. The seeds are busily soaking up water, giving off some condensation, and getting ready to sprout!

Sorry I don't have any photos of the seeds actually sprouting. We ate them too fast. I will try to get some soon, though. I'm putting some seeds in to sprout this evening so I should have pictures in a few days. A note here about rinsing the seeds: once mine have begun sprouting I usually run each tray under a running faucet to rinse them instead of using the siphoning method. I find each tray gets a more thorough rinse that way and I can jiggle the tray around to keep the sprouts loose and not clumped up. Just my preference

Bottom line is: sprouting seeds is super easy. Stick em in the trays, run the water through twice a day to rinse them, and eat them when they're at the length and maturity that you prefer. A lot of people soak the seeds before sprouting. We experimented and found it didn't seem to make any difference so now we just skip that step ('cuz we're lazy).

Here's another thing we've started doing as part of our new, slower-paced lifestyle. Our boys gave us this juicer several years back and we generally get it out in the summer when produce is plentiful and cheap. We've got it out early this year and have been making carrot/apple juice and is it ever yummy

So easy, too, all we do is make sure the produce is cut small enough to fit into the opening; we don't bother peeling or taking cores/seeds out of the apples, or peeling the carrots. I love the juice best when it's ice-cold right out of the fridge. I can drink 2 or 3 glasses in a row. We're hoping if we drink enough of it our eyesight will improve! Most likely we'll just turn orange. Oh well, it still tastes great.

Between the sprouts and the juice we just may get healthier in spite of all our efforts otherwise!

Amazing Produce at Food 4 Less

Can you guess what this is? Here's a hint; it's in the produce department, and you use it in cooking and especially in salads.

Give up?

It's celery! What makes it hard to recognize is that you are looking at the bottoms and the tops of the celery bunches, neatly arrayed in precise verticle rows. Not quite the way I'm used to seeing celery in the store!

This is the Food 4 Less store in Vallejo, CA. Mike and I like to shop here because they have good prices, awesome selection, and we can find stuff we can't find at Raley's or Safeway like cotijo cheese and Campbell's Bean with Bacon and Tomato Bisque soups. We stopped here last week to pick up a few things. It was shortly after the store opened for the day and when we walked into the produce department I just stared.

All the produce was lined up perfectly, piled in meticulous pyramids, or stacked tightly in vertical cubicles. It was so amazing that we went back today, camera in hand, to take photos.

I have never seen produce arranged this way before. I don't know if this is something new that Food 4 Less is doing, or perhaps I'd never shopped there first thing in the morning, before hordes of shoppers had made a shambles out of the painstakingly organized fruits and veggies.

Following are some of the photos we took this morning:

Carrots, cabbages, and celery.

A pile of cauliflower surrounded by carrots, radishes and lettuces, amongst other stuff. Note how vertically, and tightly, the vegetables are stacked!

Broccoli, loose carrots (64 cents/lb!), and several types of lettuce.

Squashes, purple eggplant, artichokes, beets and asparagus.

Artichokes, close-up, all neatly facing the consumer.

These tangerines almost look messy! Next to them is a bin of plums, in neat lines.

Pineapples presenting their bottom-sides. Such an interesting way to display them.

Lovely oranges.

Carrots flanked by broccoli and spinach.

A close-up of the carrots. How long does it take to stack loose carrots this way??

Several types of lettuce bunches.

Orange and yellow bell peppers, mushrooms. The colors are amazing!

A long view of potatoes, peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes.

The white sections are the bottoms of green onions; in the middle are green onions again, this time with their tops facing forwards. Radishes and cilantro fill the bins on either side.

It was really a feast for the eyes and definitely a novel (to me) way to arrange produce!

One final photo: we also stopped at Wal-Mart which has a McDonald's inside. Ronald McDonald was there, just waiting for someone to sit down and have a little chat with him, so I did! (I think he likes me.)