A small Possession ever is the best, / And fewer Mischiefs such a State infest --Jabez Hughes

The take from this Saturday's market: I elected to feature plastic bags in this week's image, partly because I couldn't be bothered to un- and then re-bag everything, and partly because the plastic bag seems fitting in a contemporary farmers' market still life. The garlic isn't from the market. Marc Eisen, Kenneth's boss, grew it and provided it in preparation for the garlic fest at his house next weekend. I have a recipe for garlic ice cream that I'm kicking around. Another option would be a savory garlic ice cream, scoops of which are dropped into vichyssoise or some other cool soup. Excepting the garlic and the cucumber, the motto of this week is more of the same: more shelled peas at $2/lb. ready to be whirled into a creamy summer soup, more sour cherries because the pie I made was just terrific (as was the vanilla marscapone ice cream made to accompany it), haricot verts (more string beans of one kind or another) with a mid-week salad nicoise in mind, and more sorrel which I will incorporate in something other the Chez Panisse Vegetables sorrel soup-- not due to any flaw in the recipe but rather because I need to expand my sorrel repertoire. The farmer who sells the sorrel is fantastic; during our transaction, we constantly gush about just how fabulous sorrel is...

Mike, I've done a little reading in an effort to respond to your question about vegetables and size. I hoped Alice Waters would have something to say in Chez Panisse Vegetables, but no real dice. She repeatedly celebrates the small vegetable-- "boxes of radicchios with leaves like tulip petals...buckets of tiny watercress...an assortment of tiny lettuces...the most beautiful and flavorful tiny green beans any of us had ever seen outside France..."-- but offers no generalizations regarding vegetal smallness. The conventional (or conventional organic) wisdom is that smaller vegetables are sweeter and more tender. Truly huge vegetables become woody, filled with more water than flavor, and so forth. Smaller, though, doesn't always equal better. Years ago, I bought asparagus from a farmer who declared, "Everyone wants the tiny little asparagus, but this variety is supposed to be larger, is very tender and filled with flavor." He was right: the stuff, which was about the diameter of a nickel, was amazing. Also, my market basket has featured so many small vegetables because it's still early in the season. Farmers harvest small potatoes to take to market until the crop gets bigger (at which point small potatoes become quite expensive). I delight in small vegetables because they contrast with the supermarket culture of my youth where the biggest, most perfect looking apple was considered the best, even if it lacked all flavor whatsoever.