Sunday is market day and it starts very, very early.  My husband rises at about 5:30, makes breakfast and packs up his truck.  I wake a little later, get our child ready for the day and pack my car and we head down to town together.  From there, we unpack the vehicles and unload everything onto the street: signs, paperwork, goods for our popular free tent, tables, brochures and promotional materials, first aid kits, camera and other assorted odds and ends.  We mark the street, direct traffic, network with vendors and otherwise spend the rest of the day working, working, working.  I usually come home early with our little guy in tow and my husband finishes the market and its breakdown by himself – coming home at about 6:00. (Check out how we grow our market from an empty street to a vibrant festival every Sunday.)

After all that work to ensure great access to the beautiful local foods that Colorado’s western slope offers, we come home too exhausted to cook.  And, I struggle to admit it, we find ourselves heading out to eat at a local bar or grill that offers little more than burgers, fries and pizza – none of it from Colorado.  Therein lay our biggest shame: hypocrisy born of sheer exhaustion.

So when I learned that one of our favorite restaurants would offer a farmers market table every Sunday evening, I was elated.  No more greasy chili cheese fries after a 12 hour day working to ensure access to pastured meats and sustainably grown heirloom vegetables.  After this Sunday’s market where we fortunately enjoyed the help of visiting relatives, we celebrated the market with a truly special meal at one of our favorite restaurants: Timberline.

Each week throughout the summer, the Timberline’s chef and owner visits the market – selecting the very best from the market’s many growers and ranchers to offer at his restaurant’s new farmers market table.  The idea is so simple and so classic that it’s almost new: prepare and serve real food when it’s in season.  There’s a single table with several seats and a single menu with several courses.

The food is served the way it was meant to be served – fresh, simple and slow.  There’s no rush to this leisurely dinner and guests are encouraged to converse with their table mates and to savor each of the dishes as they’re brought to the table.  Good food can’t be rushed – not in the field and not in the kitchen and certainly not on the table.  It should be savored so that each nuance of flavor can be appreciated in its own right.

This week, we started the meal with a beautiful early summer salad of tender and beautifully speckled heirloom lettuce studded with fresh peas and peppery nasturtiums.  The salad was dressed with lemon, mint and just the perfect amount of salt.  The speckled lettuce is an heirloom Dutch variety that dates to the mid-17th century and the nasturtiums were hand-picked the day before by an elderly woman who lovingly tends beds of edible flowers at the farm she shares with her daughters in Montrose.  We had visited with her the morning before the market on one of our many farm visits.

Tim followed up the salad with a beautiful, simple soup of chicken broth, fresh sweet turnips and turnip greens.  Turnips, you see, are an under-appreciated vegetable.  They’re loathed instead of celebrated which is quite unfortunate given their simple, humble flavor.  The turnips, like most of the food at our market, came from the Paonia-Hotchkiss area just over Kebler pass. I usually serve my turnips braised with parsley or fermented for sauerrüben, so this simple soup offered a pleasant alternative.

Two  more savory courses followed: a hand-spiced elk sausage served with roasted sweet onions and skewered beef with a roasted potato salad and beautifully cooked greens.   I know firsthand that the meats are clean.  The animals are well-raised and grass-finished which ensures a healthy life for the animals by comparison to grain-fed cows and elk; moreover, healthy animals produce healthy meats.  The nutrient profile of grass-finished meat reveals higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids, retinol and beta-carotene as well as conjugated linoleic acid.  Besides, I’ve seen the operation and I know that the folks who produce this meat do it right.

Lastly they served beautiful, fresh rainier cherries topped with a touch of balsamic vinegar in all its sweet complexity.  I love rainier cherries.  While I certainly adore bing cherries too with that purple-black juice that stains your mouth, rainier cherries win the prize for their beauty.  Bright yellow and blushed with red, they’re a remarkably pretty fruit.  Throughout the meal, we enjoyed a charming riesling from the market’s micro-vintage winemaker out of Olathe.

It was a beautiful, simple meal and a pleasure to share among new faces and good conversation.  What a blessing to end the work day with such a well-composed meal.  The Sunday Farmers Market Table will be a staple throughout the summer season and we hope to attend many a supper.