The Afternoon market is my favourite. Simply for the attention to detail that most of the vendors put into their stalls. They drew you in. Made you want to linger, sample, smell, touch, taste their wears. The wholesomeness of it left you just standing grinning.
Wendy Baxter has a stall that brought me in like a bee to the most delicately fragrant flower. Her daughter who is a clothing designer has designed all of packaging for Wendy's organic tinctures and the sheer talent that exuded from the place made me just want to stand there and soak up some of the rays of creativity and goodness. Avocado leaves, hand drawn labels, wonderful scents and packaging. An interior designers flair for display and the humbleness of the artist in question made her organic lotions and potions irresistible.
She specializes in organic herbal soaps and creams and tinctures which are generated from her own organic garden. However my favourite purchase from her stall that day was her hand drawn and written cookbook. It is a collection of favourite vegetarian recipes of Susie Shaw and herself and was first published in 1996. It is self published and only available at her stall but it was worth a trip to Gisborne from the Akatarawas just for this. Every page is hand drawn with love and there is no type in the entire book it is all carefully handwritten and hand illustrated. What a find!
I pretty much had be bodily removed from her stall, Sam was pulling on my shirt begging me to come to the next one, (for some reason a 10 year old boy just is not as enthralled with lotions and pretty bottles as I am...go figure. ) The next space was loaded with organic artisan breads. Sam's own little personal heaven. The stall belongs to Mike, of Morell's bakery. He sources organic flour and grains for his breads and like us prefers the Australian Kialla brand of organic flour for his baking. However the supply is not always consistent as we have also found for our small blueberry bakehouse. We purchased Mike's Rewena and later in the day paired it with Nicky's homemade Dukka and organic olive oil. This was one of the simplest but most satisfying lunches I have had in a long time.
The next stall was a surprise for me. I have spent my years in New Zealand balancing a career working as the lactation consultant for our local district health board with developing our organic family farm and bakehouse. Apparently I am not the only one drawn to this odd mix. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw Judi Murphy, a lactation consultant colleague of mine, sitting with her daughter at their Olio Organics stall. The call to the land hit Judi and her family and they bought and organic orchard which Judi and her husband are managing. Their daughter Tess is using the products from the farm to make some of the most delicate desserts. They remind me of the desserts that Sam and I used to eat in Japan that were so delicately constructed. Tess is a self taught cook and her darling little creations are a result of many tasty hours experimenting in the kitchen. Judy focuses on the preserves and has a large variety for sale at her stall. Sam if given his way would have had one of each of Tess's treats but instead picked a fruit tart to which he gave the big smiling crumb faced grin. He was also delighted to see Judi's tree ripened figs. Sam and I tasted figs for the first time on this trip. We don't have any on our farm and for some reason we have never had the opportunity. We did not know what we were missing. Fresh fig from the tree is my new favourite pleasure. Sam was given one and kept begging me to put in a Fig tree on the farm.
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