Bisbee Farmers Market:

This Saturday: Desert Spirits 4H Club of Palominas will demonstrate goat milking. Pick up some great-tasting food for breakfast and lunch at the Bisbee Food Co-op's Bistro at the Market and enjoy it while listening to market favorite, Vince Robel, play his guitar and sing at the market's shady outdoor eating areas.

Upcoming Events: Bring hula hoops and your children to the World Hoop Day Celebration on July 7 at the market when Master Hooper, Melissa Gethin, will lead everyone in this healthy and fun practice, part dance, part exercise. The mission of World Hoop Day is to promote an active lifestyle for children around the world. Melanie makes sturdy hoops out of irrigation tubing and colored tape that last longer. She is raising money to make hoops to give away to children who cannot afford them.

Great soups (Yukon Potato with Chiles & Cheddar & Tortilla), breakfast and lunch burritos, enchiladas, Roasted Red Bell Pepper Quiche, Ranch Egg Salad (using local free-range eggs) and Tempeh (made fresh in Bisbee) Salad sandwiches, 3 Cheese mini pizzas and Garden Salad from lettuce and greens grown by chef Keith Parker with home-made salad dressings are available from the Bistro at the Market.

To quench your thirst try fresh lime, orangeade and lemonade made from fruit squeezed while you wait by Allie Bodkin at the café under the big tree. She also makes great popsicles from fresh fruit and last week had strawberry, lime, and pineapple ones.

What's Fresh This Week: White sweet corn, peaches, blackberries, watermelon and cantaloupe, new red potatoes, sweet (yellow, white and red) onions, lettuce & chard, orange, yellow and red greenhouse tomatoes and the first summer squash. Pinto beans from Bonita Bean Company are a bargain in the 10 pound burlap sack. Some rarer items include carrots, shallots, (a milder onion), garlic, romaine lettuce and "nopalitos" or cut up cactus pads from Emma Montoya. Several vendors carry local nuts including pistachios and pecans along with locally roasted macadamia nuts.

Sierra Vista Farmers Market

Welcome back to rancher, Anya Owens, who offers grass-fed beef from her A Bar H Ranch in San Simon along with a grass-fed cookbook She will offer specials on baby beef back ribs and short ribs great for the BBQ or solar oven. She will also have beef liver (good with caramelized sweet onions) as well as heart and tongue.

Both Anya and Jackie Watkins (San Ysidro Farm) will have "real", old-fashioned chickens raised outside on pasture by young Mennonite rancher, Joshua Koehn. If you've been to the markets last week you'll have watched and smelled them roasting in my solar oven as a pre-view for the Solar Cook-off. They are truly delectable, tender and juicy, and full of chicken flavor. When I eat them I feel very grateful to Joshua for pioneering this return to raising poultry that live the lives they were designed to live, foraging over green grass.

To usher in the outdoor cooking season, the jelly lady, Barbara Wiley, has created a Mesquite Grilling Sauce from mesquite pod juice, mesquite meal, molasses, brown sugar, garlic, peppercorns & spices which is both a marinade and a barbecue sauce for chicken, pork, beef, or fish. To compliment grilled meats try some of her Bread and Butter pickles or Hot & Spicy Jalapeno pickles.

It's the first Thursday of the month so Joe Moran of Little River Nursery will be coming with a truck load of decorative cactus and other desert and drought resistant plants great for adding a sense of place to your landscape.

To quench your thirst at the market try some Prickly Pear Punch or Iced Coffee made with fair-trade, organic coffee. To make your own prickly pear punch at home, pick up a bottle of pure prickly pear nectar from Alice Coleman. Arizona Cactus Ranch has a new refreshing product for an unusual iced tea made from green tea, prickly pear juice, agave nectar and fruit concentrate.

Grammie's Garden will bring the first sweet corn of the season along with juicy peaches (that you have to eat over the sink), watermelons, and tomatoes. Try Lemon Pepper, Schezuan Orange Spice and other gourmet pastas made in Tempe.

Mama Llama's will return with a wide variety of Take & Bake frozen empanadas which include meat, vegetarian and dessert filled pastries. Also available will be already-baked empanadas ready to eat.

Fresh, just-laid, free range eggs are available from several vendors.

For folks who aren't eating eggs because of their cholesterol, Mother Earth News had eggs tested from four flocks raised on pasture. The results revealed that compared to supermarket eggs (from hens raised in cages), free-range eggs contained only about half as much cholesterol, were up to twice as rich in vitamin E, two to six times richer in beta carotene (a form of vitamin A) and averaged four times more essential omega-3 fatty acids (vital for optimal heart and brain function) than factory eggs.

In fact the magazine now has a Chicken and Egg Page on their web site (www.motherearthnews.com) and invites farmers who raise free-range eggs to participate in a mass testing where their eggs are sent to a lab as part of a study to gather more evidence.

These results confirm research published in the New England Journal of Medicine: that eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, (and mostly LDL, the good cholesterol), as well as more vitamin E, beta carotene and omega-3s than their cooped-up counterparts. The more time on pasture, the greater these differences.

You can also taste and see the difference in eggs from chickens that spend their life on pasture. The yolks are orange and stand up firmly and they definitely taste like the real thing.

Fiesta Growers and In the Garden Nursery will return with vegetable and herb seedlings for the garden.

Two backyard gardeners will bring lettuce mix and "shiso" leaves as well as French purple garlic, large Red Holland shallots, creeping thyme, chives and mint plants, lavender iris rhizomes and a used heavy-duty composter.

Recipes

Cuban Garlic Butter Sauce

(Priscilla Tabar of Circle T Emu Ranch)

1 cup butter, softened

1 large clove garlic

1 small habanero pepper

2 limes

? navel orange

1 shallot

1/3 package or handful of fresh chives

Peel and dice garlic and shallot. Chop up chives. Place garlic and shallot in food processor or blender. Add squeeze juice of limes and orange. Chop up habanero pepper (or two for more heat.) Blend all ingredients with butter. Great on meats, fish, corn, potatoes and almost everything!

Kathy Robbs' Fantastic Onion Pie

(The Robbs are a 3 generation family of farmers who raise onions near Willcox.)

1 ? cup crushed crackers

? cup melted butter, divided

3 ? cups sliced onions

1 cup milk, scalded

3 eggs slightly beaten

1 tsp salt

1 pound sharp cheddar cheese, grated

Make a pie crust of crackers and half or ? cup of butter. Press this mixture around bottom and sides of a 10 inch pie pan. Sauté onions until tender but not brown in other half of butter. Add milk, eggs, salt and cheese. Pour this mixture slowly over crust. Bake 50 to 60 minutes at 300 degrees until pie is golden brown.