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Health & Fitness

This Week at Smart Markets Lorton Farmers' Market

This Week at the Smart Markets Lorton Farmers' Market 
Thursday 3–7 p.m. 
Workhouse Arts Center 
9601 Ox Rd. 
Lorton, VA 22079 

Map

Next week: live jazz with local vocalist Lena Seikaly! Don’t miss it!

If you need to know “Where’s the Beef?” as well as the pork, lamb, chicken, and goat, we’ve got you covered. We have grass-fed, grass-finished beef from Holly Brook Farm and grass-fed, corn-finished beef from Winfield Farm, both pastured within 30 miles of the market. Mike Burner of Holly Brook Farm will also bring pork and lamb this week, including a pork bratwurst sausage and a rosemary lamb sausage. Ask too about chicken at each stand.

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And if you have a hard time finding goat, Mike can help. Feel free to ask him about preordering whole goat for a special occasion.

There will be plenty of country chicken eggs at Winfield, Fossil Rock and Holly Brook Farms. Winfield will have rich and lovely quail eggs. If you make homemade mayonnaise, add two or three to the emulsion for richness and great golden color.

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And of course we will have fruits and vegetables! Apples are rolling in. Chester Hess has Honey Crisp and Gala apples; the Honey Crisp are a sweet addition to applesauce and are great for eating out of hand. The Gala are small and perfect for the lunch box.

Ignacio is beginning to pick cool-weather crops; he has several winter squash varieties and still has tomatoes, peppers and sweet corn. Fossil Rock is still bringing their wonderful Silver King corn and heirloom tomatoes. How about some vegetarian chili for lunchboxes? Or gazpacho? Either is a great way to work in veggies and so easy to put in a Thermos to remain cold or warm for lunch before noon.

Throw in a cheese biscuit from Valley View, maybe a cake pop from Kylie, or some Kettle Korn from our Kettle Korn Guy and you’ve got a nicely balanced local lunch with a nice surprise.

For easy-to-heat snacks after school, it’s so easy to have pasties or empanadas on hand. The teenagers in your family will gobble them up. And think about having a bowl of apples out at all times; even without thinking about it, the kids will soon be enjoying an apple a day and maybe getting through the year without the flu.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

We have been working hard with some wonderful partners to find space and times for enough classes to teach more than 400 people who have signed up to take free classes in home canning. I will make time and space to thank each and every one of those partners once we have completed the class schedule because it has taken lots of cooperation, patience, and organization to put this together.

We will end up with enough classes to meet the demand this fall, but I have been surprised and disappointed to learn that so many nonprofit organizations that have the space we need want to charge us for its use to teach their own neighbors. In all cases, the classes will be made up of people who live in their communities, and where we have reached out for help, we have offered to include clients, staff, and/or members of these organizations in the classes.

I know that monetizing everything from the sides of buses to high-school scoreboards, not to mention the Web, is big business, but since when do we need to be paid to do good—or the right thing? I know as a child of the ’60s that I still carry with me lots of that unbridled idealism that led to our activism. Even then, though, I was considered something of a cynic because I was always realistic about projected outcomes. But I never expected to find that organizations that depend upon the good will of the communities they serve for their own success would need to charge for the use of a room—a room that would not be disturbed in any way and would look just as it did before the class when the class was over.

Our needs are simple: tables, chairs, running water nearby, and an electric outlet. We are flexible as long as we have a three-hour window; we are hoping to offer classes at various times of the day and on different days of the week. And many of the facilities we know about sit empty of activity most of the time. So I wonder where this comes from. In the ’60s, finding a location to teach free classes in anything would have been a cinch. It isn’t anymore. And I am sad about that.

If you signed up, watch for a follow-up email to arrive soon with details and instructions. If you did not sign up this year, wait till next spring. We are going to do this again, even without all the supplies we have received from the Ball canning company.

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