Robert's Market Report

More redesign of vendor stalls at the Reading Terminal this past week. Fair Food Project largely completed their re-do. Now customers can pretty much walk through the stand with the register in the middle. Even self-serve out of the meat freezer. And lots more bin space for produce, though one has to wonder how it will look in the dead of winter when local produce is virtually non-existent except for some hothouse items. The Mirai corn was 50 cents an ear (or three for $1,25, iirc), which compares favorably with the other farm stands. Iovine Brothers was selling their farmer's corn at three for a buck. Fair Food also featured lemon cukes at 75-cents each.

Over at OK Lee, the cactus pears are of much better quality than just a week ago, and still priced at 79 cents apiece. The photo at right shows what they look like, before and after skinning. Cactus pears (a.k.a. prickly pears) come in a variety of colors. You want to select firm, but not hard, fruits with minimal scarring. These babies peeled easily with a sharp paring knife and were sweet all the way through. Some pulp clung to the skin, so I scraped it into my food mill along with the main body of the pulp. After going through the food mill, I took unpassed seeds and their clingy pulp and pressed them in a strainer to get every last bit of delectible edible fruit. To dense juice of the five cactus pears I added the juice of two large limes and the equivalent of 1-1/2 cups sugar, in the form of sugar syrup.

Back at Iovine Brothers, both green and black figs were available at $4.99 a half pint. Both lemons and likmes were selling for 25 cents apiece when I visited on Thursday morning

Earlygold has joined MacIntosh over at Halteman's as the first apple of the season. Benuel Kaufman had some blemish-free pears for $1.49/pound.