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Earlier this year I did a week-long blog at eGullet. Unfortunately I was scheduled to blog in January … not a lot of fun when you live outside Boston and there’s not a farmers’ market scheduled for months. But I think I did okay.

I overheard my husband comment to my son about my cookbook collection. I believe the phrase “too many” was used. Sacrilege! There is no such thing as too many cookbooks.

This weekend I pawed through a few of them, and it’s sad to say but out of the (ahem) several hundred I have, I cook from 20 of them, tops. The rest just kind of sit there, gathering dust.

Most of them are wonderful books, don’t get me wrong. I bought them with the full intention of using them, but for one reason or another, didn’t get around to it. Or I cooked a thing or two and moved on.

I was thinking for the blog it might be a good idea to pick a book and cook a minimum of five recipes from it. If things don’t work out, then off to the library book sale it goes.

Right now, I’m leaning toward Debra’s Natural Gourmet Cookbook. Debra’s Natural Gourmet is actually a nearby market in West Concord, MA, that I frequent. It always smells so yummy in there, so of course when I saw they had I cookbook, I snapped it up. Unfortunately, I’ve never cooked from it, but that’s about to change. Flipping through it over the weekend I saw dozens of recipes that looked really good, as well as healthy. (I’m back on my triathlon training diet!)

The Boston Globe ran a story on my CSA in last week’s food section. Check it out!

Indeed, our CSA newsletter prints many recipes of Mike’s, and they’re all damn good.

After finishing work at 4, I got The Oyster in the car and rushed to Lexington in time for the Lexington Farmers Market, which runs from 2 till 6. I was very keen to get my mitts on some goat cheese, which tends to sell out early.

We were wandering around the market by 4:45 and lucky for me, Crystal Brook Farm hadn’t sold out of their chevre rolled in cracked black pepper. It’s heavenly (I’m eating it right now with hazelnut crackers) — lots of pepper, and you can practicaly taste the sweet grass the goats nibbled on. Double lucky for me: no one else in this household likes goat cheese, so it’s mine. Mine, all mine.

The other stuff in the photo: I picked up the red tomatoes and blueberries from the Charlton Orchards Farm table, and the honey is from Niemi’s Apiary in Athol, MA. As much as I wanted it, the fresh mozzarella I had to pass on — my cheese drawer is overflowing. I also wanted to get some grass-fed aged beef from River Rock Farm, but by then I was running out of both cash and checks, so we passed by. Instead I used my last $2 to buy The Oyster a fat brownie from the Hi-Rise Bakery table. (Oy, the prices they charge for breads I make for many dollars less! But they do have very good bread.)

On the way back home, we stopped at Verrill Farm in Concord. The Oyster was quite happy to head to Verrill’s because they have a pretend tractor he likes to drive. This is where I got the yellow tomatoes, the quart of red potatoes plus the lone spud, the corn (we shucked it ourselves at the stand), and the bag of baby spinach. Then it was a quick stop at my favorite Indian market, Kolava Market in Westford, for the chick pea puffs and homemade yogurt. These two ingredients I needed for a raita my friend Sonika served for lunch a few weeks back. It was very yummy!

So, how will I use these ingredients? The corn we ate for dinner tonight, and I used a yellow and a red tomato for a salad caprese. I’ll have the remaining two tomatoes for lunch tomorrow, the blueberries for breakfast, and roast the red potatoes for dinner. The baby spinach and lone spud are for my Babe challenge, which I hope to complete tomorrow. And the honey is for our stash.

Hope this isn’t boring y’all. I just post this stuff because I’m nosy and curious why people buy what they do and how they plan to use their ingredients.

A peek at some of the yummy vegetables I picked up at an organic farm down in Lincoln, Massachusetts. On top, some small onions, then down to the right about a pound of small potatoes. The ferny things you see at the far right are two fennel bulbs, along with stalks and fronds. Then to the bottom left, some beautiful okra, which is extremely hard to grow in the northeast. They also had some pretty purple okra, which I’ve never seen before.

The okra will be used for a seafood gumbo I’m making in a couple weeks; the fennel went into a pasta salad for Sunday lunch (photo forthcoming).