We're in the home stretch with our huge remodel. The new stairs are almost done. Half of the rooms are painted. There's a toilet. It flushes. There's a new gas range. It's in the dining room. We're so close.

Up until the last month or so, I shopped at the West Seattle Farmers' Market pretty reliably. But once the pace of work on the remodel really picked up, I just couldn't swing it. But last week Joe and I dropped in just to get some eggs, and ended up staying to listen to the music and just soak up the market vibe. I left with my dozen eggs, marveling, yet again, at how good it feels to shop there.

I heard an interview on the radio last night with Bill McKibben who talked about how attaining "more" (money, stuff, etc.) does not lead to greater happiness. In fact, Americans are less happy now than they were in the 1950s, in spite of the fact that our standard of living has nearly tripled. His new book, Deep Economy makes the case that doing what's good for the planet makes people happier.

One likely explanation for feeling so good after shopping at a local market, McKibben explained, could be the fact that, on average, folks are something like ten times more likely to interact socially with vendors and other shoppers than when they shop at a grocery store. As Gordon Orians, a biology professor friend of mine, once told me, when it comes down to it, we are essentially small-group primates. We need face-time. The older I get, the more I realize how true this is. I need to connect with friends, family and neighbors to feel happy.

And in late April, by God, I need asparagus and rhubarb. It's been a year now that we've been trying to buy local food, in season, and so we haven't had asparagus since it disappeared from market vendor tables last June. And with my entire garden (including the asparagus and rhubarb patches) decimated, I'm especially grateful for the market and for PCC, where they identify all produce items with the point of origin.

When I saw Washington asparagus at PCC last week, I felt like doing a little dance. And I'm feeling that tingly feeling of anticipation, as I think of all the good things to come. I'm dreaming of cherries...

I've been meaning to take a moment to revisit our farm fresh Thanksgiving experience. I'll keep it brief (yeah, right).

We moved out of our house, into a small apartment, the weekend prior to Thanksgiving as we prepared to begin the remodel that has now taken over our lives. So, there was no way we were hosting this year; not that we ever have. Our mothers have a tight grip on the holidays as yet, and we're not arguing with them just so we can have a chance to do the dishes.

So, while we liked the idea of a farm fresh holiday, we couldn't count on it. I offered up the idea to family, and as a result there may have been a farm fresh pumpkin in the pie, but I figured I'd do my part to procure a local turkey. This idea came to me, as most ideas do, a bit late in the game. But following a tip, I found Paul's Pastured Poultry on the Web and managed to get to them in time to secure their last turkey for our table.

In my search for answers to the "Why say no to conventional turkey?" query, I read no more than one-third of Patrick Martin's 2003 New York Times piece, About a Bird, before I was convinced.

Paul's delivered their frozen birds, recently harvested, to Tom Douglas' offices in downtown and we picked it up a few days before the day of reckoning. Mom cooked up our first Bourbon Red on Thanksgiving and served it to many compliments, but she couldn't resist a whispered concern: "That was one old bird."

I found the flavor fantastic and the meat was moist and flavorful, but Mom found strong sinews in the meat that she hadn't experienced with conventional birds. I suspected that the turkey wasn't a feathered senior citizen, but I decided to get the facts from the experts. I sent off an inquiry to Paul Dye, owner of the farm where our bird was raised. He confirmed that our bird was just 7 months old when harvested. His explanation is better than any I can craft:

"What you experienced is the combination of pasturing a turkey and the breed. The heritage breeds retain the ability to fly, jump and run. They can easily outrun me and can jump 3 feet into the air. This takes strong muscles and good strong tendons -- something that has been genetically bred out of the commercial breeds. When we haven't seen these tendons we forget how birds looked not that many years ago. I remember the tendons when I was young -- it made eating a drumstick challenging. The dark/white meat distribution is more evenly distributed on a heritage bird. The legs look slender and the huge breasts are not there. Strong legs and a healthy body aren't necessary if your lifespan is 3-4 months and all you do is walk in a circle with 5,000 of your buddies. It is amazing how drastic a difference there is between 2 birds that are essentially the same -- except for a little human intervention."

Interestingly, the family members most pleased with our Bourbon Red were my cousin Jana and her husband Jeff, who have raised their own Bourbon's at their home in Skagit County. They already know to expect these differences, and to them for the flavor and the good feeling you get from eating a bird raised in your own back yard, those differences are a point of pride, rather than reason for concern.

Take home message for me? As I've learned cooking with pastured beef, a pastured turkey is altogether different from one raised on a factory farm. It may require a bit of a learning curve as we learn to cook it. I'm hoping to have a chance at one again next year.

When I received the invitation more than a month ago from Erinn Hale of Good Food Strategies to come to the Columbia City Farmers' Market to enjoy some woodfired pizza I said yes -- barring sickness and inclement weather.

So, as I drove across the West Seattle Bridge in the dark, in the pouring rain, with at least one child in the backseat running a fever, I thought to myself, "What the hell am I doing?"

This evening brought out in sharp contrast why so many people don't visit their local farmer's markets. Oftentimes, it is less than convenient (my local Thiftway: 5 minutes away from the house, any time of day, any day of the week; the CCFM: 20 minutes away, only four hours a week) and less than comfortable (my local Thriftway: a cool 65 degrees; the farmers' market on this particular evening: damp and finger-numblingly cold).

However, things soon started to look up. As soon as I emerged from my parked car in Columbia City, I could smell the aroma of freshly baked pizza. I got the kids loaded into and onto the stroller and made a beeline for Veraci Pizza's sheltered booth.

Erinn quickly offered each of us a slice of pepperoni pizza, hot from the oven, and introduced us to Marshall Jett, the pizza man. They were working together on this particular evening, in an attempt to bring attention to Stone-Buhr's newest product, all-purpose flour milled from Northwest wheat.

You may not realize it, but even though Washington and Oregon are the fourth and 12th largest wheat producing states in the U.S., respectively, about 85% of all the wheat grown here has traditionally been exported outside the U.S., making it astonishingly difficult to buy locally grown flour. Stone-Buhr, itself rooted in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, is now offering it's new "Shepherd's Grain" flour. Stone-Buhr purchases a special blend of all-purpose wheat from Shepherd's Grain, an alliance of 16 progressive family farms in Washington, Oregon and Idaho dedicated to practicing sustainable agriculture and certified "environmentally and socially responsible" by Food Alliance.

As we filled our bellies with all varieties of pizza, topped with market fresh ingredients, we were warmed by the oven. Tearing myself away from that warmth, I was excited to discover black truffles on the foraged edibles table. While I haven't a clue what to do with them, I bought two and they are stored in my freezer until someone enlightens me as to how to do them justice. Marshall gave me excellent feedback that has energized our now weekly family pizza night. Maybe I'll get adventurous and get those truffles into the pizza eventually.

And so, I ended the evening with a feeling of great satisfaction. Yet another farmers' market experience to top any I can have at my local grocery store.

In today's P-I is a great article for anyone who wants to try to add more local ingredients to their Thanksgiving feast. Reporter Rebekah Denn has done her homework, breaking down many holiday dishes by ingredient and telling us where we can find many of the essential items, grown locally.

I for one was hesitant to take Puget Sound Fresh's Eat Local Thanksgiving Pledge, until I learned that all they were challenging us to do was produce just one dish this Thanksgiving that was locally grown or produced. That's easy! And even easier with the help of Denn's article.

We're moving out of our house to an apartment this weekend as we prepare to start a major home remodeling project, so I'm grateful that we're attending the family get-together hosted by my folks. I don't plan to cook anything. But that didn't stop me from needling my relatives to rise to the challenge. I got very lucky and managed to get my mitts on a heritage Red Bourbon turkey grown in Rice, Washington by the small operation that wins the prize for the most adorable name for a turkey farm, Paul's Pastured Poultry. My mom said if I could find it, she'd roast it. We've been hearing great things about the heritage breeds. I'll report back after the holiday.

I'm looking forward to being settled into our teensy tiny apartment so that I can get back to the farmers' market. I had to shop exclusively at PCC last weekend because of time restraints. There are just always things at the markets that you can't find at the supermarket, not even at PCC. Local lettuce, asian pears, black truffles! I've gotten so dialed into food miles that it bugs me to buy lettuce from California. Especially when I know just down the street there's someone selling lettuce they cut that same day.

At PCC I found myself thinking how grateful I am that the West Seattle market continues through the last Sunday of the year. And then, after that, if I get desperate, I can make the haul over to that haven for farmer's market devotees, the University District market which is open all year. Ahhh...a lifeline...

Nick and the kids and I are preparing to vacate our house by the end of the month so that it can be made livable for us far into the future. We have accumulated a lot of stuff in the eight years that we've lived here, and so we're very busy sorting and boxing up stuff. There is no time for blogging, or any non-essential activities, for that matter. Which partly explains why I'm doing this at 5 o'clock in the morning, when I should be sleeping.

I can't sleep. I woke when Joey lost his pacifier in the dark, at 4:45 a.m. Joe is a good little sleeper and immediately dropped back off to dreamland when the errant device was extracted from the lost toys and dust bunnies under the bed. I, on the other hand, lay in bed, hearing my friend Liz say, over and over in my head, "We should be in the blog. You need to put this dinner in the blog."

Liz and Brian are living the life we hope to be living in a year's time. They are happily planted in their northwest Seattle house, wisely remodeled before they had their two boys, with their vegetable garden thriving in the backyard. They are growing, among other things, a gigantic patch of potatoes (their harvest from one 18-inch square portion of potato patch yielded a large colander heaping with 4-7 inch red potatoes). They are still harvesting impressive zucchinis and at least one kind of winter squash. They have a large patch of kale which will grace their table through the winter, very likely. And did I mention the beets? I'll give them their own paragraph (one more exciting reason to keep reading).

All of this bounty and more comes from their city lot back yard in spite of the fact that they are not master-gardeners and have never waved down Ciscoe Morris, who lives just down the street and who whizzes by on his twice daily dog-walking circuit. From their garden and their freezer they came very close to a 100% local presentation on the dinner table last night. Our contribution to the table actually added some miles, mostly due to the ice cream (Alden's) which came all the way from (gasp!) Oregon.

Brian is one of those home cooks that just seems to have been born with great culinary intuition. Or maybe he's made a lot of mistakes and gained wisdom by trial and error, but at any rate, when we eat at their house, I can always count on begging for a recipe that's not written down anywhere or for a lesson on how to, for example, carve a turkey. As usual, Brian was chef last night. Read on for the highlights.

The main course was an eye-of-round roast, born, raised and grassfed at Skagit River Ranch up in Sedro Wooley. He pot-roasted the meat in a heavy lidded pot on the stove top (because a slow cooker would inevitably cook too hot, he claims), adding the vegetables late in the process. So, the Red Thumb potatoes and carrots from the garden weren't reduced to mush, as they may have been had I cooked them. These vegetables were delicious. If he writes it down for me, I'll include his recipe. The accompanying gravy for these two items was light and nicely seasoned.

Enough about the beef. On to the beets. I, like most people I know, have hesitated about beets, but I'm coming around to them, as I am with kale and collards. And it's all due to Brian's cooking. My two favorite beet recipes I first tasted at Brian and Liz's dinner table. The first was a fabulous beet salad which converted me 100% into a beet-eater (boil one bunch of whole beets, one inch of leaf stems attached, until cooked through - maybe one hour; allow them to cool, then peel and slice into large julienne; pour on a tablespoon or two of red wine vinegar; in a separate bowl mix together equal parts olive oil and plain yogurt; add one clove of minced garlic, some salt and pepper; fold in the beets and some chopped pecans or walnuts). This salad jumps off the plate, with a wholly natural but astonishingly unnatural-looking vibrant fuchsia color.

Last night's preparation, now my second-favorite beet recipe, was a beet roesti, or rösti. This recipe was from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything cookbook, which I bought because Brian and Liz told me to, and which is soon guaranteed to be dog-eared and stained on the Beet Roesti page. It is essentially a shredded beet pancake, crispy carmelized sweetness on the outside, creamy garlicy sweetness on the inside. All hesitant readers, sure that they don't like beets, should round up this recipe. Even the kids in Brian an Liz's house, who are just as suspicious about the food they are served as any other kids, love beet roesti. Just think of those amazing betacyanins, those cancer and heart-disease fighting pigments that give beets that amazing color.

They finished us off with sautéed zucchini. Very simply cooked and delicious, sprinkled with salt and pepper. Joining a long line of home gardeners, Liz and Brian made the mistake of cultivating six zucchini plants this year. They can hardly stand to eat another bite of the stuff, and so they jumped at the opportunity to get rid of some by feeding it to us. I loved it and felt strengthened in my determination to include space in my future vegetable garden for the minimum (two) number of plants necessary to make fruit viable.

Nick took the call earlier in the day announcing what time we were to arrive and what we were to contribute. The arrival time was relayed in a timely manner, but unfortunately, Nick forgot to tell me until fifteen minutes before we drove off toward their house that we were asked to bring dessert. Mild panic set in. I know Liz. She is concerned about the wellbeing of all things dessert. I wanted to make her happy. She is also very tuned into our local-eating experiment. So, whatever we arrived with, I wanted to know it's provenance. But, needless to say, it also had to be quick and easy.

For my great success in the dessert category, I must thank Chef Gabriel Claycamp of Culinary Communion cooking school, now of Beacon Hill and the folks at Tiny's Fruit (at almost all of the Seattle markets). Gabe taught me how to make peaches poached in red wine. I could eat this every night for the next seven months and be a happy woman. We poached two of Tiny's peaches on Friday, and when I wanted to do them for Liz and Brian, my search for peaches at PCC was a bust. The nectarines, although local, needed about a month to ripen. The new crop of Washington pears, however firm, at least smelled like pears. So poached pears it was.

While Brian finished up dinner, I peeled four Bartlett pears, cut them in half and cored them while equal parts red wine and water were brought to a boil with about one cup of sugar, two bay leaves (from our backyard) and one cinnamon stick. The pears were added and simmered over medium low heat for 30 minutes. Once these were removed, the poaching liquid was reduced by half, whisked with ample amounts of sour cream from Duvall (Organic Valley), and then poured over portions of pears. This warm combination was then topped with vanilla ice cream. Mmmmm...

All in all, a meal to remember, missing nothing. So I'm done. That was cathartic. And now I'm feeling sleepy again...time to go back to bed, just in time for Nick and the kids to wake up. And just in time to start thinking about what's for dinner this week and what should be on my farmer's market shopping list.

(yawn)...must arrive at the West Seattle Farmer's Market this morning in time to get some eggs...

(stretch)...hope to see you there...(zzzzzzz)

We're celebrating Clayton's fifth birthday on Sunday with our local tribe of neighborhood girls, and so to prevent an overstuffed schedule that day, I opted to visit the Phinney Farmers' Market today. It's a great market with lots of easy parking.

Joey was crazy about the bright yellow melons at one of the stalls, and so I bought one for him. Unfortunately, he was devastated when I didn't let him throw it. He's just crazy about balls and in his opinion, anything that is round like a ball was clearly made for nothing but launching. Anyway, this melon is some kind of honeydew. Like the good reporter I am, I recorded neither the name of the vendor nor the name of the fruit.

But if there's anything I've learned about shopping for local food this summer, it's that part of the joy of it is the element of surprise, the charm of foraging. If you go to the market with a strict shopping list, you will go home with some very good produce, but you might miss the magic. The magic for us today was this astonishingly sweet, juicy and fragrant melon. By Sunday it might be something entirely new.

On a different topic, if you aren't hooked into Grist Magazine, www.Grist.org, then perhaps you haven't heard of Tom Philpott. Philpott is the founder of Maverick Farms, a sustainable agriculture non-profit and small farm in western North Carolina. His latest column to catch my eye addresses the recent news claiming that local food diets may be more harmful to the environment than global food systems. If you're interested, read The Eat Local Backlash.

Let me start first with apologies to "my readers" for my long silence. We have been ridiculously busy this summer and not being one who handles stress well, my response has been to simplify wherever possible. Unfortunately, that means I haven't been taking time to write.

We have been away more than half of the weekends this summer, so we've not been able to go to the West Seattle Farmers Market as much as we'd like.

To illustrate how busy we've been, I wrote the blog about paying more for local cheeses and working them into our life, and the very next Sunday Nick took very seriously his job of rounding up those wonderful cheeses. Then, our week was so busy, we forgot to eat them. So, the next Friday, when I was packing us up for a weekend at Grandma Loretta's place at Catfish Lake, I quickly grabbed the cheeses and threw them into our cooler.

That weekend at Catfish Lake was a local food feast featuring many of Grandma's garden products - the star of which was blueberries. We made fantastic ice cream. But we forgot to eat the cheese. And finally, we forgot to take the cheese home at the end of the weekend. I was beginning to feel like a local food failure.

Now, we're past Labor Day and my anxieties about having a child in "real" school for the first time are proving false. I thought I'd be more busy, but so far, life seems to have taken a leisurely pace. Here I am, suddenly with time to think and write.

Joseph and I are home together for the first time, while Clayton is at Westside School for his second day of pre-kindergarten. There's just enough time to share my most recent local food finds before I need to pick up my schoolboy:

The Shelton Farmer's Market - when you are out of town, look for the local market. Shelton's market is a Saturday market. There were only two produce vendors but they had great stuff - and their certified organic pastured eggs were only $4 a dozen (which is why I'm so sad I left them in Grandma's refrigerator).

Chanterelle Rice - My latest invention involves onions, garlic and chanterelles sautéed, then mixed with frozen cooked brown rice until warm. I seasoned this with salt, pepper and a little sherry vinegar. Nick, Clayton and I loved this with our lamb chops last night. But it was even better for lunch today in a quesadilla.

Culinary Communion - Just one of the reasons I was so busy for the last few weeks was the offer to participate in Culinary Communion's Techniques course. This local cooking school owned and operated by Chef Gabriel Claycamp is wonderful. I've learned so much in the last six weeks. My only regret is that their new digs mean I will have to leave West Seattle to participate in more classes.

My long lost favorite fennel bulb recipe - nothing in my house is ever truly lost (except perhaps my last set of keys). This recipe resurfaced recently. It's a super easy fennel gratin. The fennel is sliced thinly, tossed in a medium skillet with olive oil and cooked with a lid for two minutes. It is then seasoned with salt and pepper, sprinkled with parmesan cheese and placed in a 400 degree oven for five minutes. This is delicious with oven-roasted pork tenderloin.

Gotta go. More soon...

In my musings on the 100-mile-diet ("some day, not yet"), I've found myself wondering, would anyone notice if my 100-mile-radius had an odd, finger-like extension reaching Southwest in order to capture Tillamook, Oregon? This would, of course, assure me a reliable supply of our stand-by, Tillamook Medium Cheddar.

And then I wonder if that might just cheat us of one of the greatest chances for discovery in such an experiment.

I love cheese. I often shudder to think how could I go on living if one day I woke up and found myself suddenly lactose-intolerant. Perish the thought.

Our occasional travels abroad have opened my eyes to the wonders of French and Spanish cheeses. I can almost smell those fantastically ripe discs displayed so beautifully, trying to decide which to sample during the requisite cheese course in France. My first exposure to Salade Chèvre Chaud, in a warm, breezy sidewalk café in Cotingac, France was absolute perfection, marking the beginning of my love affair with goat cheese.

Dessert in Madrid - a thin pie-shaped slice of Manchego, layered with an identical thin slice of membrillo, or quince paste - fueled a five year, back-burner obsession to find the perfect recipe to turn my sister-in-law's Aromatnaya quince into that perfection of slice-able sweetness. My ideal membrillo sits waiting in the refrigerator for a slice of Manchego or some local equivalent.

I own a copy of The Cheese Primer which I have read in fits and starts and carried in pieces on our trip to Spain. With more time and money, I might like to become a cheese geek. And yet I remain a keen beginner, barely dabbling.

What's holding me back? Well, the main cause is probably that I'm a terrible cheapskate. For some items I have come to embrace the notion that you get what you pay for. And so, I'm willing to spend $100 on a good pair of shoes, for example.

I love wine and I'm willing to commit to spending more to get a good bottle. I've worked it into my mental budget. While I haven't worked cheese in yet, I think I'm ready. I'm ready to declare that delicious cheese is worth the price, and that one perhaps ought to set aside $20 a week for something which nourishes the body and, at least in my case, feeds the soul, as well.

And now, I have another reason to stock my kitchen with great local cheeses. I've been reading Katrina Kenison's book, Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mother's in a Hurry, and she advocates what is for me a novel and tantilizingly tempting new model for life at table with young children. She describes how her four simple rules changed dinner time at her house from a frustrating, maddening battle into an anticipated daily ritual for her family. Here are the rules at her table, rephrased and embellished by me:

1. At the dinner table, all conversation should be suitable for and include all present. (Parents: this means this is not the time to discuss the latest breaking news about how X politician - GASP! - took a bribe from Y lobbyist or - GASP! - solicited unsavory favors from Z political aide).

2. You are required to take one bite of everything you are served, without complaint, before passing judgement. Everyone is encouraged to express thanks and compliments to the cook, but negative comments are strongly discouraged.

3. And this is the part that relates to our main topic...If, after these initial bites, you find nothing palatable enough to sustain you to the next meal, you may go to the kitchen and bring back cheese and a piece of fruit.

4. After you are done eating, you should ask to be excused and then leave those aforementioned parents alone for ten minutes, so they can discuss grown-up stuff (like X, Y, and Z indicated above).

As I prepare to adopt this dinner model, I'm hoping to hear from friends, family, and readers with advice and suggestions. How does one learn more about cheeses? My Chesse Primer is getting pretty old - are there newer better books about cultivating a passion for cheeses? Are there classes offered anywhere in town? What are your favorite local cheeses?

In the coming weeks, I personally plan to be heavily sampling cheeses from Sea Breeze Farm, Samish Bay Cheese, and Port Madison Farm - all available at West Seattle Farmers' Market, and other markets around town - and also scouring the archives of "Discovering Northwest Cheeses," a P-I Blog written by Tami Parr.

It's summer time. It's time for the annual gathering of family and friends at the Pilchuck River. The food assignments have been made. We are delighted to have been made responsible for dessert. We're big dessert people at our house. And Nick is our dessert chef.

And so our eyes turned to Nick last week, as we asked, "What should we bring?"

He mulled it over for a moment...

anticipation...

...and then pondered out loud, "Maybe I'll make an apple pie."

Although I know that apple pie is Nick's favorite of all desserts, still this answer surprised me. And days later, I'm still thinking about it. You see, while we are officially the "Farm Fresh Family," I am really the "Farm Fresh Wife and Mother." My freetime, which is not abundant but comes with my three-days-a-week bus commute and the occasional marathon nursing session, has allowed me to begin to immerse myself in the literature of the local food movement.

Nick, on the other hand, is the "Hard-working, 50+-Hours-a-Week, No-Tme-to-Himself Husband and Dad," who cheerfully joins in for our weekend farmer's market outing if it occurs at a time when Joe is not napping. He also voluntarily takes on one fabulous big weekend breakfast a week, when we lick the syrup off of our fingers and wax poetic about the best French toast or pancakes we've ever tasted. And when he gets inspired, he makes fabulous desserts.

I'm the one making the menus and shopping lists. I'm the one pondering the local food scene. Nick is closer than a lot of people are to this issue of buying local produce in season, but it's not his thing. He uses the fresh strawberries and such when I have them on hand, but so far this really is my experiment, not his. And this question of the apple pie is the first to bring this sharply into focus.

So, I'm hoping that I can find a way to explain to him why I think we should not bring an apple pie for dessert in July. I'm hoping I can tactfully explain why I feel that to make an apple pie in July is unfair to all of the wonderful strawberries, sweet and sour cherries, raspberries, rhubarb and apricots begging us to maximize on their peak-of-ripeness wonder.

It's not about the apples. The grocery store apple selection last week included one variety, Golden Delicious, from north of the equator. Last week I was still able to buy Mt. Fuji apples from Tiny's Fruit at the West Seattle Farmers' Market. These apples represent the tail end of last year's fall apple harvest, kept viable in cold storage. While I resist the rosy, firm Pink Ladies from Chile, I still buy a few local cold storage apples each week. I have nothing against them.

But to my mind, apples are fall's bounty. Somehow, making a summer pie from these last holdouts of a distant harvest seems a missed opportunity as well as a disservice to the apple. Saving that warm, sweet cinnamon-infused fragrance wafting from the oven for October and November changes it from just another dessert into a celebration of Autumn.

And finally, the reign of apples is long, while the reign of the delicate summer fruits is fleeting. We have at most two months with any of them, so I propose to my dessert chef that we save the apple pie for after the first frost and indulge in some peak of summer sweets. Hand-churned strawberry ice cream? Strawberry shortcake? Cindy's sublime sour cherry cobbler with vanilla ice cream?

Suggestions, anyone?

Due to scheduling conflicts, we have yet to meet Gabriel Claycamp, the West Seattle chef-owner of Culinary Communion, who will be helping us become savvy farmers' market shoppers. We have been busy with weekends away at Grandma's house and an upcoming camping trip. In spite of our schedule, however, we probably could have fit him in if he hadn't been so busy leading a cooking tour of Provence. Too bad for him, eh? We hope to rendezvous with him sometime next week.

I must say I am looking forward to his help, if for no other purpose than to explain how the heck to cook pea shoots. Faced with a recipe calling for baby spinach last week, I found myself feeling adventurous. I looked around the tables at the Columbia City market stacked with fresh greens and I spied those pea shoots. "That'll work!" I exclaimed with great confidence.

When the time came to use them, however, I grew timid. They seemed to have magically taken on an air of mystery. I asked myself, "Do I chop them? Do I use the whole sprig? Do I just use the tender tips and blossoms?" I ran to the Web, searching my favorite cooking sites and found particularly useless instructions like, "add the pea shoots." So, I was on my own, winging it. Opting against chopping, I plucked shoots off of the sprigs, both vegetative and flowering shoots, and threw them in the pan.

When it came time to eat my creation I had to excuse Clayton, my 4-year-old, from the usual "eat all of your greens" requirement. I was having trouble chewing and swallowing those stringy pea shoots. But he was really struggling in spite of a valiant effort to swallow them. He chewed and chewed and then gagged and gagged.

So, I must have done something wrong. And I will be sure to ask Chef Gabriel for hints and tips, and perhaps a reader or two will speak up before I even meet him.

This experience clarifies one of the great lessons I am learning. No cook is an island. If you want to keep cooking the same old stuff, then you can probably get by on your own. But if you want to learn to celebrate fresh, local produce when it's at the peak of ripeness, picked fresh that day, then you better start asking questions - ask the farmers, ask the market manager, ask your mother, ask your neighbors and friends.