Every part of my homemade pasta with fresh spinach, yellow bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes was Hillsdale County Farmers Market fresh.
The farmers market offers fresh produce, baked goods, meats, flowers, and more, yet most students rely on Kroger or Walmart for their everyday grocery needs. As eating locally grows in popularity, I decided to make a meal using only what I purchased at the market on Saturday morning.
To make my farm-to-table dish, I boiled the pasta in a pot of lightly salted water for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I combined the spinach leaves, yellow bell pepper slices, and halved red and yellow tomatoes in a sauté pan with salt and olive oil over low heat, and covered it until the spinach wilted and the tomatoes softened. Once the noodles were cooked, I added them to the pan with the vegetable mixture, stirring them together so the tomato juices coated the pasta.
Allison Grimm, one of the sellers at the weekend market, has been making pasta from scratch for around seven years. The farm-fresh egg noodles get their colors from pureed vegetables from Grimm’s garden like beets, spinach, kale, and asparagus, which she mixes into the spelt flour and egg yolk dough.
“I do everything by hand,” Grimm said. “I roll the dough out in pieces and then I have a hand crank and it cuts the noodles in the strips in a consistent size.”
The bell pepper and pear-shaped cherry tomatoes came from Larkin Dash ’19’s garden less than 10 miles from downtown Hillsdale. She said they are her favorite things that she grows.
“I never sell out of them, but they’re so fun,” she said.
Ezra Bertakis and his great uncle David Spence provided me with large-leaf spinach from their greens collection. For nine years, Bertakis has grown greens and colorful tomatoes at Chef’s Way Organic Farms on Cole Road just outside of town. Bertakis and Spence are the only certified organic vendors at the Farmers Market, and since they grow the greens in unheated greenhouses, they can continue to sell their greens during the winter at Hillsdale Natural Grocery.
“Whatever temperature it is that night, the greens freeze like a block of ice every night and come back to life every single day,” Bertakis said. “In doing so you get a higher sugar content out of it.”
The quality of the spinach sets it apart from store-bought produce, Bertakis said. He wants to teach Hillsdalians that all of their food can come from local sources.
“The biggest part is just the flavor and the consistency,” he said. “This isn’t your normal store-bought baby spinach. You get big, giant, gnarly leaves in there that you can do like a lettuce wrap with.”
The vegetables provided color and flavor to my pasta dish, creating a healthy and delicious meal to share with friends. Paired with a slice of freshly baked bread and a dessert of local-grown raspberries, my farmers market haul created the perfect meal.