An Earth Day Scavenger Hunt!
Get the kids to explore the market and learn what’s in-season fruits and meet our farmers. Answer or draw the questions for a special Market prize! Download and print at home or grab one at our Info Booth at the market.
Get kids exploring the market, learning about fruits and veggies, and our farmers at the Market for Earth Day.
Write or draw the answer for a prize from our Info Booth!
Find a purple fruit or vegetable. Name it or draw it!
Find a green food that you have not tasted before. Name it or draw it!
Find something that grows underground. Name it or draw it!
Ask a farmer what time they woke up this morning & how long it took them to get to the market. Answer in time or distance:
* Fact: The average supermarket produce travels 1,500 miles!What booth is the Take a Bag, Leave a Bag basket next to? *Fact: 160,000 plastic bags are used globally every second!
Download the scavenger hunt here and print at home, or get one at the info tent!
Brothers Products : Notes from a Hummus Snob
Authentic hummus in LA? You can get it at the Hermosa Beach Farmers’ Market!
I didn’t use to buy pre-packaged hummus. Ever.
Don’t get me wrong, I love hummus, but after five years of living in the Middle East, the region spoiled me. It turned me into a hummus addict and a hummus snob. State-side, I find prepackaged hummus to have an off-putting, acidic tinge. The chickpeas are stale, the garlic is strong. In the middle east the chickpeas, tahini, lemon, olive oil, salt, and garlic are whipped until the individual components are almost undetectable. You’re less aware of any one ingredient, and the resulting dip is more compelling. Authentic hummus is deceptively simple, and surprisingly hard to come by in America.
Those of us who have tasted the genuine article in its region of origin, are left condemned to make our own, or live with an unrequited longing for this simple salata.
...Or so I thought before I tasted Brothers hummus.
When I moved to LA this past August, I left my food processor in storage. I was new in town and needing a hummus fix, but I didn’t have the tools to make my own. So when I saw the Brothers Products stand at the Hermosa Beach farmers market, I sampled out of desperation.
And what I tasted brought tears to my eyes. For a brief instant, I was transported to a little stone cafe in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. I could almost hear the call to prayer.
Emran, the man behind the Brother’s booth, saw that I was moved and began to reminisce. He'd first sampled Brother’s hummus five years earlier and said the taste, “took me back home.” No restaurant or store-bought product compared. “Brothers is the best in LA,” he said. I have to agree.
It’s now been six months since my move to LA. I’ve had my food processor for months, but I haven't yet made one batch of hummus. I don't have to. I get the real deal every week at the Hermosa Beach market.
You can try a sample any Wednesday, from 1pm-6pm on the Hermosa Beach Pier Plaza.
Aubrey Yarbrough manages the Playa Vista, Westwood and Hermosa Beach Farmers' Markets for Farmer Mark. Before moving to LA she ran her own organic farm and cooked on the garde manger station at the award winning Elements restaurant in Princeton, NJ. She has contributed to Edible Jersey and her poetry will appear in the forthcoming issue of New American Writing.
Just a Teaspoon of Honey
What is the value of a teaspoon of honey? Robin of LSG Honey increases our appreciation for honey with one surprising fact.
How much honey does one bee make in its whole life? The answer may surprise you, unless you’ve met Robin Ghermezi, the apiarist and educator behind LSG Honey.
Robin Ghermezi, the apiarist and educator behind LSG Honey
Robin Ghermezi became a beekeeper after retiring from the tech industry. He’s now been collecting honey for six years, but he still exudes the zeal of a recent convert. At the market, he’s generous with his honey samples, and if you linger long enough at his booth, he might convince you that bees are among the most fascinating creatures on earth.
When I approached his stand at the Playa Vista market on a recent Saturday, he was handing a spoonful of honey to a dazed looking customer.
“Wait,” the man said, “you’re telling me one bee makes a quarter teaspoon of honey…” he looked to the woman by his side in disbelief, “in its whole life?”
Robin grinned as he nodded.
“That means,” the man went on, “that the honey left on my spoon each morning…that’s like, one bee’s whole life’s work?” Robin was still smiling as he reached into a jar, producing a sample of honey for me to taste. It was buckwheat, the color of weak coffee and just a touch bitter: a perfect pairing for stinky cheese. I popped the sample in my mouth and for just a moment, I felt luxurious.
Robin produce more samples for me to try—avocado, wildflower, and a mesquite honey that tasted herbal and faintly smoky—and I lingered in his stall, eavesdropping on the customers beside me. They were strategizing. Robin’s story had transformed the honey in their hands into something valuable-verging-on-precious. They were determined never to waste another drop. Should they use a spoon or a wooden honey dipper? Should they leave the dipper in the honey jar permanently so it wouldn’t need washing—but what about ants?
Robin was unfazed. “One solution,” he said, shrugging, “is to drill a hole in to top of a honey jar, and poke the handle of the dipper stick through it.” Then he handed me a spoonful of lavender honey and began to laugh, conceding that they weren’t the first customers to respond to his fact with awe. At one point, so many customers were concerned about wasted honey, Robin was bringing a drill to the market, tricking-out honey jars so dippers could live in them.
A queen’s cell is noticeably larger in size because her body is much longer than the drone's and worker's especially during the egg-laying period!
The price of honey had not risen during this exchange, but it had, for me, grown vastly more valuable. For just one taste of honey, a foraging bee spent her days sipping nectar from flowers. She ferried it back to her hive in her tiny crop and, mouth to mouth, passed the nectar to a processor bee. In turn, the processor bee passed the nectar to another processor, mouth to mouth, in an intimate fire-line. Along the way, enzymes from each bee’s crop, mixed with the nectar making it shelf-stable. When the nectar was finally packed into a waxy cell, the bees fanned it with their wings, evaporating excess water, and nectar became honey. Robin tended the hive, carefully, skimmed off just enough honey, to share with us. We can put it in our tea, use it baking, or simply taste it by the teaspoon and marvel.
LSG hives are never treated with chemicals. Their bees collect nectar in nature and produce honey in their hives, one teaspoon at a time, as bees have been doing for a very long time. You can meet Robin and sample LSG honey at the Playa Vista Farmers’ market every Saturday from 9am-2pm.
Aubrey Yarbrough is the Community Development Manager for Farmer Mark. Before moving to LA she ran her own organic farm and cooked on the garde manger station of the award winning Elements restaurant in Princeton, NJ. She has contributed poetry to New American Writing and prose to Edible Jersey.
Can Great Salsa Change the World?
Dina Feldman, chef and creator of Feel Good Salsa, makes mouth-watering, restaurant-worthy dips, but she’s not content to rest on the laurels of flavor alone. She also employs innovative, environmentally-conscious business practices .
If the sauce in question is Feel Good Salsa, the answer just might be yes.
Dina Feldman, chef and creator of Feel Good Salsa, makes mouth-watering, restaurant-worthy dips, but she’s not content to rest on the laurels of flavor alone. Dina wants her salsa to be good. Like, ontologically.
“I want to be the Patagonia of salsa!” says Dina. I want to prove that sustainability and profitability in business can coexist.”
Her fledgling company is only nine months old, but it has already taken big steps to ensure a small carbon footprint. For starters, her salsas don't travel far. Made in the South Bay, they are sold at Farmers’ Markets in Playa Vista and Costa Mesa. The produce is local too: grown between Riverside and Ventura: a 60-mile radius. This both limits their miles-to-market and provides sales for local farmers.
“I don't haggle with them,” Dina says. “Whatever price they give me, that’s the price I want to pay.”
If sourcing is important, Dina also thinks about where her produce will end up. In an effort to reduce her production scraps, she took cilantro stems, something normally tossed out as food waste, and turned them into a delicious dip.
“That’s been a huge hit because—obviously—it’s really awesome to use the entire cilantro.”
As for the onion skins, tomato cores, and pepper stems, the inevitable, inedible by products of salsa making, Dina composts them through the Bay Foundation’s “Table to Farm” composting program.
“We’ve [prevented] 200 pounds of food from going into the landfill,” she says with pride.
Instead of waste, these scraps become soil-enriching compost for Los Angeles-area farms and school gardens.
To Dina’s thinking, sustainability means carefully considering every step of production. The salsa is sold in biodegradable plastic containers. Dina’s market banner is made from recycled paper and eco-friendly ink, and her business cards are seed packets she made from recycled paper.
“I’m looking to find biodegradable gloves,” she says of the food service gloves required by the health department. “Being in business, you're going to create a footprint,” she concedes. “It’s almost inevitable, but I’m really focusing on lowering the carbon footprint as much as possible.”
Many entrepreneurs assume that sustainability will hurt their bottom line, but Dina is convinced that the opposite is true. She believes her standards give eco-conscious customers the opportunity to choose sustainability—or as she puts it, “vote with their dollars.” After watching customers flock to her stand, I think she’s right.
Feel Good Salsa flavors include (but are not limited to):
roasted chili de arbol
cactus pico de gallo
peach salsa
salsa verde
cilantro sauce
And all are available to sample. Containers are five dollars each. You can cast your vote Saturdays from 9am-2pm at the SoCo Costa Mesa Farmers Market inside SOCO & The OC Mix.
Aubrey Yarbrough is the Community Development Manager for Farmer Mark. Before moving to LA she ran her own organic farm and cooked on the garde manger station of the award winning Elements restaurant in Princeton, NJ. She has contributed poetry to New American Writing and prose to Edible Jersey.