Local Bounty

My first job, more than a dozen years ago, was washing dishes for a woman who sold her produce and baked goods at a local farmer’s market. I went to her house across the street every Friday morning and worked all day washing dishes, saran wrapping cakes, and mixing sticky roll dough. She’d get up first thing Saturday morning and pick all the vegetables she’d be taking to the Saturday morning market.

Now, my job once again includes a Farmer’s Market; but this time, I have a completely different role. As a favor to the UNL dietetics student who manages the State Office Building (SOB, lol!) Farmer’s Market, the interns at the health department are helping out with the market. Which means standing in the sun (actually, under a canopy) for a few hours and talking to people about cooking and local food and nutrition. What could be better? I’m not sure. I love it.

And today I remembered to bring my grocery bag and some cash. So I brought home a bounty.

When Anna announced that she wouldn’t have time to make dinner tonight, I ended up with a nice surprise: a chance to make dinner on the fly. So, I put together a quick corn, tomato, and avocado salad (recipe compliments of Megan, the market manager) and tried to think of something to do with the hamburger Anna bought this afternoon.

Here’s what I came up with.

They look like some sort of weird meat with the bone in–but they’re actually meat-wrapped onions. I washed off some of those beautiful long red onions you saw in the first picture, and wrapped them with meat and then grilled them over a low flame until they were cooked through. They tasted DELISH!

A little trick for whenever you’re trying to wrap something with hamburger: Add some salt to the hamburger and then mash it around with your hands really good. The salt causes the meat to stick together better.