Welcome to market
Holly!* (Because it’s Christmas, after all).
Slowly I am painting my way through the seasons, in an attempt to reconnect with the root of the matter when it comes to life on this earth-and-water ball of ours spinning through space, which we call home. My goal is to create a kind of illustrated perennial almanac, a diary that celebrates the seasons and becomes a guidebook for living seasonally, even in the city, via gardens, farmers markets, the wilds and the kitchen.
This is a personal project, something I’m doing for myself because I want to learn, but hopefully (if I do it right) it might be useful or inspirational for others, too. With that in mind, I’m sending my ‘almanac’ out into the world, one glorious, seasonal produce at a time, and that’s what I want to tell you about today.
I called this project “A Year at the Market” but in reality, it has been more than two years in the making. The seeds of this idea came while I was living with my children in Dinan, a rural village in France. Shopping in our village was done the traditional way, at the farmers markets each Thursday morning. Here, people from the entire village - and all the outlying villages - would come to buy all the fresh vegetables, fruit, cheese, meat, fish and eggs they needed for the week to come.
I learned to arrive early to get my hands on the freshest produce, (although this came with its own set of hazards because all the French grandmothers likewise got to the markets early, and nobody wants to come between a French grandmother and the best looking leek on the table).
At first, navigating the markets was as confusing as it was frustrating. I’d arrive clutching a shopping list in my fist, all the ingredients for all the meals I’d hoped to cook that week, and make my way in a somewhat haphazard fashion from stall to stall, searching for everything I needed. Only to realise half way into my shop that a third of the ingredients on my list were not in season, and another third were not even grown in this region.
(One week, after the children and I had been collecting chestnuts, I tried to buy Brussels sprouts so that we could pan-fry them together with the chestnuts and some local bacon. When I asked one of the farmers if they had sprouts, she said, “they’re not in season… not for two weeks!” I realised that the food available at the market didn’t change season-by-season, it literally changed week-by-week.)
As the weeks and months went by, I learned that pre-planned menus and shopping lists were all-but useless. If I wanted to shop locally and eat seasonally (and I did), I’d have to learn to accept whatever happened to be available at the farmers market on each particular week, and build a week’s worth of family menus from the best and freshest food I could find.
The problem was that I’m not a naturally confident cook, and certainly didn’t have a ready-made repertoire of meals and recipes that could be planned on the fly, depending on whether tomatoes were good this week, or mussels, or romanesco broccoli, or spring lamb.
I found myself wishing there was some kind of field guide that could help me navigate the seasonal markets, in the moment. Not a recipe book to look up when I got home, but one that could tell me - while I was at the market - how to choose the best of the produce I was looking at, what to expect from it, what to cook with it (so I could plan my meals while I shopped), and what to do with it if I happened to buy too much, and couldn’t eat it all in time.
When I couldn’t find the kind of field guide I was looking for, the idea began to bloom in my mind to create one myself and that, finally (after two years!) is what I’ve done.
I’ve written a pocket-sized guide to shopping seasonally and navigating the farmers markets with confidence, called Welcome to Market, and am in the process of researching, writing and illustrating a new “Farmers Market Field Guide” to complement Welcome to Market, every month. Each new Field Guide celebrates one particular fruit or vegetable, lovingly illustrated in the botanical style of the holly and asparagus you see here, and tells a full story, from when it’s in season, how to choose the best, and what to do with it.
The whole project is called ‘A Year at the Market’ and I’m super excited and inspired by the idea, which is why I’m sharing this story with you today.
If you’d like to come on this journey with me, I’ve created a subscription service through which you can receive a host of seasonal shopping resources, as well as a new Field Guide every month. I’ve kept the price very low - basically it’s what it costs me to produce it (not including my time, which is yours for free) - because this is not a business venture, but something I’m incredibly passionate about, and want to share with likeminded people.
In all honesty, I’m probably tapping into my childhood. When we were little, our local supermarket began selling an encyclopaedia series, month by month. We weren’t a family that could afford the classic Encyclopaedia Brittanica, so, instead, we would purchase a new volume of the supermarket encyclopaedia every month. Over time, we built up a wonderful resource that saw me through almost a decade of school projects on everything from wool to marine biology to a history of electricity, and we gained a sense of achievement as each red-spited issue was released by the supermarket and added to our bookshelf.
I want to create the same sense of value and curation for you, by posting a new Field Guide to you every month.
There are three things I’d love to know from you, if you have the time (if you received this post via email, just click the title or “view original post” to see it on a website and a comment box will be available):
If you have a preserving recipe that you absolutely swear by, I’d love to hear it. I’m testing recipes for my field guides because I want to provide people with ways to use all that wonderful produce if they buy too much at the farmers market, or have a glut in their own garden
Have you come across a fruit or veggie at the shops or the market and you really wish you knew more about it, and what to do with. it? Let me know in the comments here. I’m hoping to cover just about everything over time, but I’ll prioritise requests
If you’d like to join me for A Year at the Market, there’s more information about this 12-month subscription (and all the lovely gifts I’ll personally post to you) in my shop, here. The first issue will be posted mid-to-late January, but there’s also a printable gift certificate if you want to give this subscription to someone as a thoughtful Christmas gift
*ps. I painted this sprig of holly at beginning of winter where I live in Melbourne. Snow season started the same weekend, and holly was sending out bright red berry-beacons of cheer on neighbourhood hedges everywhere. Near our apartment in Dinan, France, there was a famous Victorian-era holly tree with variegated leaves, just like this one. Holly berries are poisonous, but ancient herbalist Culpepper says the leaves and bark are good to heal broken bones (not that I’ll be trying either any time soon).
