Eating local while on the road can be challenging, but visiting the local farmers market is one of my favorite things to do while traveling. As mentioned below, we stopped at the Port Washington Farmers Market on a recent trip to New York, on our way out to some wineries on Long Island’s North Fork.

A Local(ish) (NY) Picnic Lunch: After some terrific wines at Roanoke Vineyards (recently mentioned in the NY Times), it was on to my in-laws’ pick, Palmer Vineyards, where we enjoyed a mostly-local picnic lunch of fresh goat cheese on organic baguette, procured from the market that morning, dried fruit from home, and North Fork potato chips (sweet potato and sour cream & onion). The toddler danced to the live music while we took in the vineyard views from the porch. A lovely summer afternoon!

A Local (NY) Breakfast: On the way back to Queens, we stopped at an organic farmstand, with lovely strawberries and some actual Long Island goat cheese, which we ate for breakfast the next morning. These little berries have a firmer texture than our Virginia berries, and the goat cheese was some of the creamiest I’ve ever tasted. Delicious!

A Local (VA) Dinner: Back at home, we again had garlic scapes in our weekly CSA bag. My new favorite preparation is to toss them with a touch of olive oil and kosher salt, then throw them on the grill. The grilling mellows the flavor, resulting in the perfect complement to some fresh (Fauquier County VA) beef burgers on locally-baked, garlic-rubbed Italian bread. (Then I put non-local organic ketchup on it…homemade ketchup is on my to-do list this summer!)

I got thrown off my food blogging game by our two-day power outage followed by a weekend trip to NY. But we are back and slowly refilling the fridge, so it’s time to catch up!

I wrote previously about our June 1 Del Ray (VA) Farmers Market dinner for Week One of One Local Summer. The star of that dinner was the fresh WV morels. We were a little late to market that week, and as I got in line behind a couple at the Mushroom Lady’s stand, I noticed one last box of morels labeled “Sale! $15.” I waited anxiously as the couple in front of me debated which to pick, and remarked “$15??” when looking at the morels, clearly unaware that those same morels had been $20 the week before. After what seemed like an eternity, they settled on something else and I snatched up the box. Mushroom Lady kindly topped off my pint with a few last stray morels from the box. Per her instructions, I simply cleaned them and sauteed them in butter. They were without a doubt the most intensely flavored mushrooms I have ever eaten. The deep, earthy flavor is hard to describe … suffice it to say that I will not hold off until the end of morel season next spring to pick them up again!

The following weekend we checked out the Port Washington Farmers Market, on Long Island, NY. According to the Local Harvest listing, it is the only all organic market in NY. It was not, however, all local. There was a booth selling Croatian olive oil, and a failure to read the label carefully led to us later opening our “all local” lunch spread and discovering the goat cheese was in fact from Massachusetts. I believe the market was just getting going for the season though, as most of the NY seasonal markets don’t open till June. There was a great Nordic organic bread booth, where we got wonderful cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and the one true farmer had a basket full of beautiful garlic scapes. Here she’s trying to convince a hesitant customer to give them a try.