It’s fair to say that around here the last couple of weeks have been a little something like this:

Lucky for me, my husband knows that the best cure for such times is a roadtrip, so he swept me off to Madison for my first ever (finally!) trip to the Dane County Farmers Market.

The Dane County Farmers Market claims to be the largest producer-only farmers market in the country. I’d heard that it was big, that it was stocked full of fruits and vegetables and flowers and breads and cheeses (Oh, Wisconsin, how I love your cheeses!),  that it could easily take up an entire morning… yet I still wasn’t prepared for sheer size and variety of foods for sale. It was amazing. I was in heaven.

There were stands that sold a nothing but a dozen varieties of garlic. There were pints of cherry tomatoes in yellow, orange, red, and purple. There were raspberries and blackberries and gleaming red Door County cherries. There were peppers and summer squashes and corn so fresh and sweet that a vendor handed out samples of raw kernels. There were also pies and breads and honey and meats and lots and lots of delicious cheese.

Beautiful wildflower arrangements were everywhere, and it seemed that every-other person at the market took a bunch to go. One of our favorite sights (which we were too slow to catch on camera) was a teenager coasting down the street on his skateboard with a bunch of wildflowers in one hand and a shopping bag in the other.

I especially loved the unusual vegetables at the market: the thai eggplants, the black beauty chilies, and my new favorite vegetable, the purple-flecked Dragon Tongue Beans, which we stir-fried for dinner, and decided they tasted like green beans, only sweeter and less “grassy.”

The only thing that was disappointing about these beans is that the purple color disappears when the beans are cooked. They taste delicious, but don’t look nearly as pretty as they do when raw. In any case, if we get around to creating a garden plot in our backyard next spring, I’m definitely planting some of these.

After I’d filled my shopping bag (twice!), we wandered down State Street to window shop and watch street performers. More on that later.