Only in Madison can you get something this good…

Everyone should rush next week to the Capri stand at the Farmers' Market (it's at the south central end) and coax Felix into selling his private cache of espresso goat milk ice cream. Throw a couple of Harmony Valley strawberries into the dish and you ‘ll get this fantastic dessert for dinner:


Goat milk espresso ice cream with strawberries 

Market colors

Of course, Saturday means L'Etoile market buying for me. Not much text today and just a small handful of photos. Why? No, not lethargy, my arms and fingers are still sore from my rooftop tree chopping of yesterday. The spoils of my labors:


so many branches 

I did take photos of the early morning sunshine hitting buckets of fresh flowers. I have always liked it when sellers put great masses of flowers in buckets -- it's the way I remember flowers being sold in the Old Country (I like the associations I have with the term the 'Old Country'). And the delicate early sun makes the pastels even more appealing.


in the early morning 

There is such wonderful variety in color at the moment. Even within the blue range, you can pick shades that are exactly perfect.


marching blues 

And the pairings -- how terrific to see irises against the puffy purple balls.


puffy next to slender 

Colors are fantastically coordinated, even in the food groups. During my first run I picked up the goldenrod tomatoes, red currants, yellow gooseberries, and yellow and orange carrots.


yellow orange red 

The day at the Market always ends for me with a bouquet for the kitchen table. This one will see me through the week.


a bunch for home 

Do I have enough strength to pick up chopsticks?

Tonight I went back to our pan-Asian restaurant of the moment, Firefly. First I had a ‘working’ meeting there in the lounge (how the momentum can change from day to day! Big projects? Yes! Bring them on! I am ready!), then I stayed for dinner. I have to say that it is a place that you love, or you don’t, depending on what you order. The tofu mushroom spring rolls? Yum! The kung pao seafood? Wonderful! Let’s leave it at that.

My table had the bottle of Firefly white Chardonnay along with the meal. Now that is unique! How many Madison restaurants are there with their own private wine label? (answer: none.) It turns out that these guys have independently found an Australian producer with the same name, willing, obviously, to sell at rock bottom prices. How clever, I thought. And then my cynical side kicked in: what if the restaurant proprietors (an enterprising lot as we know) first found the wine and then named the eatery? What a scheming bunch!

But, I am not cynical. I am reveling in the fact that you can have tasty fresh Asian food in Madison and wine to go with it and not walk away feeling that either 1. the chef desperately needs to sign up for one of those evening cooking classes around town, or 2. the kitchen has a pipeline to the MSG depositories of the world, or 3. the diner needs a secret investment to pay for the inflated tab that hits the table at the end of a lousy meal. [Big Bowl is in this same league of fresh and honest eateries and I do not mean to exclude it from my nod toward good Asian fare. But you have to arm-twist people of the Isthmus to go to a place such as Big Bowl because it is on the Far West side of town, whereas Firefly is homegrown and within spittin' distance of the Capitol and thus one of the emergent local heroes.]

Enough on food. The evening is getting on, I have to get up early for Market, and I haven’t yet begun my daily ritual of checking in on the various blog posts of the day. Instead, I am sitting here staring at my arm muscles, wondering why they buckled under the heave-ho of the saw this afternoon (see post below). Why am I so sore??