Well, AC is old enough to join us now on a full-blown, all day, food extravaganza. Thanks to her daddy, she has a food vocabulary and palate that would rival any adult's. She is also very aware of what is and isn't good to put in her body, though she will happily stuff her face with junk if you offer it. ;)
We love taking her to the Nashville Farmers Market. Vendors are constantly impressed that she can name just about anything they have set out to offer, and that she will try and like most any sample they give her.
I love Anna Claire's response when we ask her what she wants to buy at the farmers market. She actually helps dictate our menu many weeks based on the answer to this question. Yesterday, she picked out squash, zucchini, red pepper, corn, and peaches. And I mean she literally picked out produce. She knows what a good squash looks like and put perfect ones in the bag. In fact, I find she's pickier than I am. Any little imperfection, and she's not having it!
Is there any other way to make your way through the farmers market, than to eat your way through? This need not cost money. Samples are abundant. Yesterday we indulged in fresh watermelon, kettle corn, goat's cheese, homemade ginger cookies, mustard slaw, plus one vendor gave AC a complimentary banana.
And we couldn't make it out of there without sampling some of our purchases. Anna Claire sure did make her peach look good, and I suspect she sent some business to that vendor.
When it came time to actually eat lunch, Larry and I split a yummy Greek plate of falafel, tabouli salad, flatbread, and hummus. AC had a hot dog and fries, and sampled some off our plate. :)
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| Tired from all that walking! |
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| Picking out squash |
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| Best looking peaches I've seen all summer. |
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| Watermelon sample! (Notice free banana under her arm) |
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| So much to see! Loved all the colors. |
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| Hot dog and fries for lunch. |
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| Loved banging on this tomato sculpture outside the market |
While the farmers market was definitely the highlight of our food excursion, it wasn't the end of it. We hit an Indian food market to get Larry a small bag of coriander seed. I also bought some naan and dal. Can't wait to put that in my mouth!
Next up was the Japanese food market. Anna Claire loved all of the colorful packaging and sweets they had to offer. Hello Kitty is big in Japan, so she was super excited about their HK display. Larry and I had our own agenda: find our favorite snack...ikura (salmon roe). We stopped off at this market pretty regularly before AC, and would just sit in the parking lot outside the store and inhale a container of ikura between the 2 of us. I thought surely Anna Claire wouldn't be interested, especially with Hello Kitty snack in hand. I was dead wrong. She loved the "salty boba!" Boba are little miracles of molecular gastronomy that she loves to put on top of her yogurt at Berry Bear. They are little balls bursting with fruit juice, much like salmon roe which are bursting with ocean flavor. She held her own, easily taking out a third or more of the container. Proud. :)
Finally, we went to Anna Claire's favorite, Trader Joe's. Everything is labeled large and clearly there. She loved reading and trying to read the labels as we made our way through the store. She points out "Trader Joe's" on all of the packaging and knows lots of food words. "That say 'chocolate!' That say 'blueberry'!" Gets so excited when she sees one she knows.
She loves seeing the employees walk around the store with the big "?" sign. She always asks me to explain what they're doing. "Why do they have the sign?"
"Where is Trader Joe?"
If it's a man with a beard, "Is that Uncle Clint? No..."
It's always important to go get a sample in the back of the Trader Joe's, and she loves picking what yogurt flavors we buy. She was also a good helper at picking out produce and cheese.
What a perfect day, and we still have all of this yummy food to look forward to later this week.
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