The Ann Arbor's Farmer's Market

Christine Liu  

This Saturday I was fortunate enough to go to the Farmers Market in Kerrytown with a group of West Quaders (I definitely would have gotten lost trying to get there by myself!). Armed with a small Nikon, a green pen, and a community center brochure whose back I could take notes on, I went around all the stalls observing the fresh, vibrant produce, the unique, wholesome wares of the locals, and just generally breathing in the bounty of nature. It’s an amazing place to experience – anyone living in or visiting Ann Arbor should definitely plan an excursion to the Farmers Market!

[Welcome to the Ann Arbor's Farmer Market!]

[Impressive, colorful arrays of varied produce define the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. Each stand owner was friendly and warm, inviting of conversation.]

[I spent the most time talking to a man named Rich Carpenter, one of the stand owners at Carpenter’s Organic Produce, located in Allen, Michigan. For Rich, farming had been a favorite hobby of his family for about 55 years. His grandfather started a small family farm, which soon expanded to 30 acres of over 30 kinds of certified organic produce. Rich had been taking care of the farm with his dad and grandfather since he was young, but as much as he enjoys farming he wants to pursue a career in graphic design. As a result, the Carpenters have made plans to significantly reduce the variety of crops raised since both senior Carpenters are nearing old age – Rich’s grandfather is already 87 and still running a farm!]

[When I asked Rich what he thought would happen to the farm when he finds work in graphic design, he smiled sheepishly and gave a slight shrug, saying, “I don’t really know.” Standing next to him is a 14-year old the Carpenters hired from their church, and Rich’s father, in the hat.]

[Several stands sold floral arrangements. There were chrysanthemums, sunflowers, pansies, and much more. This stand specialized in roses of all kinds, complete with a small glass vase for added style.]

[I never knew there could be so many varieties of eggplants! There were at least 5 types of eggplants being sold at this stand.]

[The Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market is also home to an assortment of baked goods. Even if you don’t buy anything to taste, the aroma is free and just as mouth-watering!]

[Homemade hickory syrup - I have never heard of it before but when I tasted it I liked it better than maple syrup. It's got a distinct (hard to describe) taste and seems less sweet that maple syrup. What amazes me though is that the Beretons, the stand owners, decided on a whim to try making hickory syrup one day, and have built a successful side business since then.]

[An wide assortment of homemade fruit preserves. The temptation to purchase the whole collection was too strong.]

[It’s strange to think of vegetables as beautiful, but many of the stands at the Farmer’s Market show just how stunning the vivid colors of fresh produce can be.]

[There may have been a variety of products at the Farmer’s Market, like coffee, flowers, vegetables, beeswax, photography, and pastries, but the smiles were the most abundant commodity there.]

[The hands-down, absolute best olive oil I have ever tasted. The man leaning over in the picture was actually convinced by his friend, who couldn't make it that day, to start making olive oil together. They import some of the best Kalamata olives and create their personal mixture from that. It's been almost 10 years since they started coming to the farmers market.]

[The Farmers Market boasts carved beeswax candles and pocket jars of honey.]

[The warm sunlight complements the fresh smell and natural vibrance of the produce, creating a feel-good atmosphere that is hard to replicate.]

[The lady who owned this ceramics stand was so nice, and when I told her I loved taking Ceramics 1 in high school, offered the name of her local ceramics club. She has been making and selling her own plates, magnets, earrings, and etc. for 37 years at the farmers market! I ended up buying one of her hand-crafted, unique magnets that hold enough water for a small wildflower to be placed in.]

[And here it is, stuck on my microwave next to my Michigan sticker and cuddling pandas. It displays a Gandhi quote: "Be the change you want to see in the world."]

[Dogs aren't allowed in the Farmer’s Market, but the poor puppy very clearly wanted to get in. There were quite a few dog owners sitting just outside the farmers market for that reason - but eager puppies are just another attraction of the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market.]

In-Dorm Improviser

Abby Miller  

We all know that in college, especially in a big town like Ann Arbor, it’s hard to find a way (or the time) to get to the grocery store to make our favorite meals. Because of this, us in-dorm chefs have to find all the handy alternatives we can, so that we can find food in between the visits from our thankfully car-endowed parents. Here’s a guide to making one simple, very attainable item go a very long way.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “I have all the ramen and Easy Mac I need until my parents visit in three weeks!”, but is that really how you want your college dining experience to be? In between the fattening trips to East Quad, your stomach grumbles should be soothed not by liquid sodium heated in your microwave, but by something with at least a little substance. For starters, we all wish we could just grab a loaf of bread at the store every week, I know you’re missing grilled cheese, pb&j, toast, and sandwiches. So here’s a trick that not many people know about; Jimmy John’s will sell you a loaf of their bread for a mere $0.50! It’s not only a perfect cabinet staple, but at the perfect college student price.

You’re intrigued now, I can tell - you’re thinking “alright, well… now I have this bread, great. But what can I do with it? I can’t exactly stick my easy-mac on it to create a gourmet meal?” You’re right - you can’t, but I’ll bet you have many other simple things in your stash of food that can help you amp up that wonderful loaf of bread. For you tea drinkers - look around! I bet you have a container of honey sitting right near that Keurig… Am I right? Now, take that honey and spread a little on your bread. Right there you have an absolutely delicious concoction; but wait that’s not all! If you don’t have peanut butter, one of the people in your immediate radius definitely has some; smear some of that on the bread too, and grab a banana from the dining hall and voila! You now have a home-kitchen worthy sandwich right in your dorm room!

“What else can I do with this bread?” you might ask? All it takes is simply looking around! Eat some with that microwave soup you have, the Nutella sitting on your shelf, find someone with some hummus and use it like pita bread, or get some microwave bacon and make yourself a breakfast sandwich!

Whatever the use, I know you’ll do something great with it, and remember to be creative! One 50 cent loaf of bread can open up a world of opportunities in your in-dorm kitchen!

Comfort Delivery

Talya Ehrenstein  

“Ma’am, you do know that that lobster tail is market price, don’t you?” The waiter stood over my friend’s mother with a stunned face, while the rest of us examined the menu for the rest of our absurdly priced options.

“Yes, I do. I’ll take it, please.” The waiter closes his pad and thanks us, once again, for dining out that night and promises to bring the chef out to greet our party. There are beautiful people at every other table in the restaurant, iPads for menus, and an elegant air in the room of people who know they were chic, yet effortlessly cool and absurdly wealthy.

Five hours, a ridiculous price tag and twelve full bellies later, the birthday party made their way out of the restaurant, still overwhelmed and excited about the meal and experience we had just had, thanking our hosts profusely. The setting: an ultra chic Miami Beach restaurant, frequented by the city’s most exclusive crowd; and the patrons: wide-eyed seventeen year olds celebrating a birthday by going on the culinary ride of their lives.

Growing up in South Florida, fabulous, pricey, sophisticated, and exclusive restaurants were everywhere I went. What we never did well, though, and what I never got to experience, was good old-fashioned comfort food, food that has some history and cult-following behind it.

My first few weeks in Ann Arbor have consisted of enough Hill Markeplace at MoJo entrees to make your head spin, Panera Mac and Cheese to feed an army, and the occasional sneaky midnight Cheez-it and almond snacking frenzy.

Yet, slowly but surely, I am starting to discover the food in this town that is almost as deeply ingrained in the Michigan psyche as football Saturdays at the Big House are. Chipatis, late-night cookies, sandwich shops that seem to never stop delivering, and my personal favorite: fast food Thai dishes that can rival any Thai place at home have become my culinary staples. (Shoutout to No Thai! Drunken Fried Rice with beef and mild sauce FTW.)

My roommate and I have already had so much food delivered to our room that we know which places stop taking delivery orders when, the dishes at each place that we like the best, and the restaurants that deliver quickly (very important for desperate 2 AM queso cravings—this has happened more than once.) Every time we look at each other with those now familiar smiles and silently agree to forgo the dining hall once again, we embark on a different culinary adventure.

College is supposed to be about those late night eats that are delicious, cheap and delivered in a brown paper bag. I’ve experienced restaurants that many aren’t lucky enough to; with snooty waiters, black napkins and portion sizes smaller than a midnight snack. Here, it’s all about quality. I can honestly say that some of the best food I’ve discovered in Ann Arbor isn’t on Main Street, but delivered by a tired-looking delivery man at ungodly hours of the night and eaten on my cold linoleum dorm room floor.

Mooching in Michigan: Free Food, Avoiding Eye Contact, and Marginally Subsidizing Your Grad School Education (Vol. 1)

Karry Lu  

In life you can count on two things: tuition never stops rising, and business schools always look nicer and have nicer things than the rest of the university they're affiliated with. With that in mind, and with news of a recent $100 million donation for the venerable Ross school coming at the same time as an invoice from the university bursar, I decided to pay a visit to the campus' paean to modern capitalism. It loomed in front of me like the ancient Colossus of yore, proud and stately, sunlight from the bluest September sky flooding through an ultra-chic glass facade and off rows of starched collared shirts hunched over laptops. Sure, I thought to myself as I passed three separate people manning a desk entitled “Technology Concierge,” they might have these fancy new classrooms and a tastefully decorated, wood-paneled interior hallway, but let's drill down to the core issues. What was their free food like? And would anyone care if I rolled up in my jeans, T-shirt, and bike sweat and helped myself to some?

Fortunately, there just so happened to be a “Healthcare and Life Sciences” Forum to answer my queries. Presumably, one works up quite an appetite when discussing the finer points of selling life-saving medicines for $500 a pill, so working on a hunch, I headed downstairs... and eventually found myself on a buffet line in the cafeteria, plate in hand, examining the day’s offerings with an experienced moocher’s eye. Lunch featured an admirably cosmopolitan yet hopelessly focus-grouped stab at cultural synergy: Mexican/Cajun for people who've never been below the Mason-Dixon.

I sampled the rice first, which looked a bit like jambalaya, cooked by someone who hadn’t the vaguest idea of “rice…but with spices” and tried to compensate by going overboard on the tomatoes. Still perfectly sufficient, but what do I know, I'm from the north. Next up was a “build your own taco” station, with all the classic ingredients for white-people tacos: flour tortillas, refried beans, a choice of chicken or steak, and an array of fixins'. I like variety, so I did both steak and chicken, topped with iceberg lettuce, pre-shredded orange cheese product, a smattering of salsa, and a few healthy dollops of non-store-bought guacamole (the most pleasant surprise of the afternoon).

Every so often I have to relearn that flank steak that has been sitting in a steam tray for a whole morning tends to be disappointing, and today was that day. Biting into the first taco was an experience akin to what a cheetah must feel if it ever bit into a gazelle made of rubber bands. I felt a distinct self-awareness creeping over me as I emerged with a strip of steak hanging out of my mouth, eventually tearing it apart with my hands and then eating the rest of it with a plastic fork. I looked around. No one noticed. Grace under pressure and all that...someone get McKinsey on the line.

The chicken taco fared better, because cold breast-meat chicken hours removed from the flame tends to be brittle, and this one even had a grainy, gritty quality. At some point I think the guacamole just overwhelmed the chicken itself, and I ended up polishing off half a mashed avocado taco, which actually turned out to be fairly decent. Having polished off the main course, I went back for a bite of dessert, which was a small roll of cardboard caked in sugar, but if you were an enterprising marketing type and you told me that it was actually a Mexican churro, I might've believed you for a second, before questioning the value of your education. And to wash it all down, a cup of Tazo “juice tea”, which tasted like Hi-C, but hey, I was at a b-school luncheon, so something about upmarket branding right? Shift that paradigm.

By then, the buffet had been packed up, the finance bros in their networking faces had begun to stream out leaving a trail of discarded resumes behind, and I was left alone to contemplate my meal. In terms of quality, I'd rate this two stars, with the chicken being pedestrian, the jambalaya being decent “bulk food,” and the steak being not fit for human/mammalian consumption. As for quantity, five stars; it was de facto all-you-can-eat, assuming of course, you were there for the food and not there to discuss strategies for patent trolling with execs from Genentech.

While I stood in line I chatted briefly with the catering guy who was idling there. I asked him who this was for. He shrugged and replied that these bonanzas happen on a near nightly basis. We locked eyes briefly; a tenuous kinship forming in that moment; him, probably making $10 an hour, me, actively losing money by the second just by being in school, both of us ready to blithely feast on banker largesse. Go for it, his expression seemed to say. I nodded. Steal from the rich, give to yourself; that's the grad student way.