Reports from the farmers market and about seasonal food are common today: for example, KCRW’s Good Food has a weekly farmers market report, the San Francisco Chronicle covers seasonal produce in the Sunday Food and Home section, there are apps about seasonal produce for your phone, and guides printed on paper. I have been following these reports for a long time, and I’ve never seen or heard anything quite like the market report that I found in an 1886 edition of Good Housekeeping. The beginning of the report, titled “Seasonable Table Supplies (Gathered from New York Markets…)”, could be mistaken for a reports from last week, starting with a summary of the best items in the local markets (“Grapes of many varieties made a luxuriant show”). But when I got to the “poultry and game” section, it veered into foods that aren’t sold in any markets that I know of: wild ducks, shorebirds, and other game birds.
Zucchini is the bane of many gardeners — it grows fast, seemingly doubling every time you turn around, quickly turning from flavorful to bland pulp — and so it has a slightly bad reputation. I have memories of huge home-grown zucchini and the struggles to use them. These days, though, my source of zucchini is the farmers market, where the vegetable is far more petite, and sometimes even the tiny “baby” kind, so I actually look forward to zucchini season, which means 
One of my summer dessert favorites is zucchini bread, something that could be called zucchini cake if it was baked in a shallow cylindrical pan instead of a loaf pan. It’s something I seem to only bake in the summer when zucchini is at the farmers markets, even though it would take an exceptionally skilled taster to determine that the zucchini was at its peak when I baked it, so imported winter zucchini would be fine.
Kale salad — superfood in a bowl, a nutritional powerhouse, a bold canvas for bold flavors — has been a major trend in recent years. A recent article in 
One of my favorite posts featured a set of 
