2/16
I love San Miguel’s artist and farmers’ market. If you want to get close to your food, this is the place to do it. Today’s pickings were handmade gorditas filled with black beans, fresh sheep’s cheese from the woman that actually owns the sheep, an avocado and a bunch of cilantro, cactus flower buds, and homemade chili sauce. I brought my gatherings back to the casa to construct a terrific lunch.
The cactus buds are new to me and grown totally wild. They taste a little like unripe kiwi fruit or a strawberry eaten way too soon, tart along the edges, but sweeter toward the pink center. In the summer the buds turn red and are sweet all the way through.
The trick to eating fresh produce from the market and not getting Montezuma’s revenge or a host of other gastro-nasty ailments is to wash all fruits and veggies in Microdyn. Microdyn comes in a 15m dropper bottle and is an antimicrobial disinfecting wash. The magic potion can be purchased at any pharmacy or at a stand in the market. Just 8 drops in a gallon of water and a fifteen minute soak kills the things that can kill you.
So, how can organically-grown fruits and veggies be dangerous? Organic fertilizers are often poop-based. The poop can come from any living being, even untreated people poop. It’s not uncommon for treated human wastes to be pumped on fields in the US, but we are not talking about treated poop here. We are talking poop-in-the-raw, Poop Fresca.
As a chicken hobbiest, using poop on my garden beds is a no-brainer. I mean, why would I waste such a nitrogen-rich source? But I can’t imagine using people product or even dog doo. I just can’t. I’m not that thrifty. But it begs the question, why not? Poop is poop, and all poop carries potentially infectious and deadly bacteria. Poop snobs must consider the sources of mad-cow and salmonella.
Okay, well I suppose that is enough about poop. Time to clear the mind and enjoy my market creation, Gordita a la Christina. Yum.
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