When you have a 12-month-old, getting out of the house might as well be a SpaceX rocket launch for all the logistics and forethought involved. If you’re up for the packing and planning while simultaneously entertaining an emotionally unregulated toddler, frantically scrambling out of the door in a disheveled heap and, well, the Trouble of It All, you’ve really got to make your outing count. For my husband, Josh, and me, the Saturday morning pre-nap field trip is usually a toss-up between our favorite park at the top of a mid-city mountain and the farmers’ market. Both have dogs and fresh air. The park has excellent evergreen trees with a playground, and the market has live music and the allure of good coffee and breakfast tamales.

That morning, the tamales won out. It was mid-October, and I was vaguely hoping to grab a couple of local pumpkins for our doorstep. We needed some basics too: eggs, kale and onions for a butternut squash soup we wanted to make. Goat milk, which we had been adding to the baby’s diet. But most importantly, we needed carrots. My husband had a hot sauce to make that called for earthy, sweet root vegetables as its base. 

Josh, the resident green thumb of our family, had recently harvested the last batch of fresh peppers from our backyard garden. Tragically, they’d been sitting in a wicker basket on the counter all week, losing little bits of their striking midnight-purple, maroon and tangerine orange hues with every passing day. These from-seed peppers were total babes, heirloom babes at that, and he’d been wanting to brine and ferment them before the end of the growing season, but there simply never seemed enough space in the day or a good time to have capsasin-hands with our son, Benton, stumbling from the living room to the kitchen to the breakfast room, putting stray objects in his mouth when he encountered them or climbing the dishwasher door lined with cheerful bouquets of knives. (Note to self: must child proof everything ASAP.) 

Pepper-wise, this was our last chance. It was the absolute end of the late summer garden, this was the very last haul of this year’s from-seed produce we’d grown with our own hands. If we wanted garden-fresh hot sauce in our lives, it was now or never. Or at least not until next year. As it was our kiddo’s first summer in our family, it felt only natural to want to bottle some of the season up and revisit it as long as possible. Maybe that was a mom thing, maybe it was a home cook thing. I was finding that in the Vinn diagram of my momming and cooking, there was a lot of happy overlap and it seemed to be increasing by the day.

Ever since we’d had a baby, we’d become park people because of the stroller paths and playgrounds, but really we’d always been farmers market people. We don’t make it happen every weekend, but when we manage to fit it in its practically a spiritual revelation for me.  These are my people, I quietly think to myself. Why did it take us so long to get back here, I’ll wonder while admiring a box of archetypal pears. Josh and I both have a bit of a love affair with the growing and food arts, each in our own way. 

My dad owned a seafood shop and a restaurant when I was growing up, which I figured had something to do with it. My great grandmother was a Southern Lebanese caterer in Mississippi. That didn’t hurt either. Right out of college, I’d interned for an urban farming non-profit on a history project documenting victory gardens in New Orleans. Later in my career, I helped a regional food bank partner with the farmers market to bring fresh produce to families who lacked access to healthy food. That’s when I’d become friends with a lot of growers and local culinary types. I was a long-time reader of the Farmer’s Almanac, which is a properly nerdy confession. I read recipe books in bed like they were literature, and eventually drank from the font of Alice Waters and the farm to table movement. I became a devotee of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara’s Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle. Though it was true that I was more a home cook that was inspired by the garden than I was a gardener. Luckily, Josh was gardener enough for both of us. When he came into my life, the only podcasts he listened to were about gardening and plants. Which I’m pretty sure makes him a pure being. The first summer of our relationship, he grew tomatoes, melon, beans, squash and peppers, just to name a few. His gardening talents were the perfect complement to my love of cooking. When it was clear things were getting serious between us, I gifted him a crisp linen apron with navy pin stripes and a wooden gnocchi board. We’ve been a team in the kitchen ever since. 

Who knows if we would have had just as much luck at the park that Saturday, but I’m glad we chose the market in its peak autumnal glory. Let’s just say that the gourd was having its day. Trusty butternuts, wholesome pattypan, magazine-ready acorn squash. And there was, of course, the delicattas that I will always associate with the first time Josh and I ate shakshuka-brazed delicatta at Saba, an Israeli-inspired spot in uptown New Orleans. Mid-October weather in the Pacific Northwest is unpredictable, so most everyone had over-dressed and wore heavy coats just in case the pleasant weather became fickle. Huge pumpkins lined the stalls and kids lined up to get their free mini pumpkin at the arts and craft table. Similarly weathered and sleep-deprived parents toted reusable bags stuffed with foraged mushrooms and heirloom corn in one arm and third wave espresso drinks in the other. In a word, we were home. 

One of the surprising features of new parenthood was just how isolating that first year could be. Caring for a child that dependent on its parents is tough enough, but the real hardship is how our modern society has propped up the nuclear family to the near extinction of communal life. With an emphasis on single family dwellings and a cost of living so high that many workers are forced to relocate far away from extended family for professional opportunities, many of us have experienced weakened kinship bonds and the loss of intergenerational spaces. In other words, we’ve lost what the anthropology nerd in me considers the village. This is particularly damaging for young parents who desperately need the help of extended family and friends in the early years of their child’s life. But everyone, not just new parents, needs their village. The need for kinship and belonging to a wider whole is so strong in us humans that we carry this yearning for connection wherever it is we find ourselves. Online in the Instagram reels of influencers, to the dating apps, to workplaces amid colleagues with whom we spend the majority of our days. But I’ll let you in on my little secret: the farmers market is the closest thing I have found to the village in this life. As a third space, it’s intergenerational, down to earth, unpretentious and teaming with the simple joys of a perfectly grown tomato and handmade herbal soaps. It’s an important departure from mass-scale production, the anonymity of the increasingly internet-based economy and chock full of artistry and folks who generally want more connection in their lives. Connection with the people in their neighborhood, the people growing their food and to the land that’s sustaining them and their families. Simply put, it’s a place you can get fed. Both physically and psychosocially. In my book, the farmer’s market is one of the few places still in existence that helps us remember what it means to be human.  

The start of that particular weekend had been rough with an especially mind-numbing sleep battle and possibly teething-induced fussiness. It’s safe to say we needed the market’s humanizing influence more than the average shopper that Saturday. Josh and I were just beginning to realize that our kid was more “spirited” than lots of the babies in our peer network. Benton’s unique mix of traits were high confidence, an excruciating need for independence, very physical, very active and what some online forums describe as “determined”. These all code for some wonderful, successful adults in our rough and tumble world, but parenting a barely-walking toddler with these traits had already proven daunting. If this life was a video game, Josh and I were parenting on Hard Mode. 

I think the necessity and therapeutic value of the farmers market became apparent that morning when we finally sat down in front of the music stage for a blessed moment with my very good latte and the above-mentioned breakfast tamales. The musician that day was a brunette woman who wore a long, flowy red dress and played the guitar, the bells, the violin and the flute interchangeably. Before songs, she’d say what year we were all visiting by way of her music. She played “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” and other tunes from the 80’s that seemed odd but Portland-charming on her folksy instruments. It was during “Wake Me Up” that we finally dared to let the kid out of the stroller, which seemed like an illogically high-maintenance and potentially chaotic thing to do at the time given he was content to sit harnessed (a rarity) and hold his bright orange mini-pumpkin. He’d been taking little nibbles out of the raw flesh with his six new teeth despite my best instructive Yucky. No eat. and grimace face.

Once released from his stroller-confines, Benton toddled directly up to the music stage and proceeded to walk back and forth in front of the large crowd of families listening to music. There were other children gathered near the stage but he was the youngest by a lot, and yet he paced the semi-circular dance area with the confidence of a bull-fighter, making eye contact with adults, toddlers, the musician and perfect strangers. As a new walker, he seemed proud to show off his hard-won bipedal status as he almost authoritatively stepped and stomped belly-forward to the music. He walked back and forth taking in the adoring attention from onlookers, dancing by himself when the mood struck, which apparently was often, and generally entertained the whole lot of us with his impressive degree of I-don’t-give-a-damn-what-any-of-you-think-ness. He was at that perfect stage of newly walking spunk mixed with puppy-potbelly-clumsy. Josh watched him from the other side of the stage and shooting me glances as if to say Are you seeing this kid? That was the first moment when I realized my son finally had the gross motor skills to do ..him. Now when he starts moshing in the middle of the semi-circle at library story time or running around the table during dinner, we just say Benton’s Benton-ing. My online research tells me that for many ‘spirited’ kiddos, a part of their short fuse demeanor is the frustration at not being able to crawl or walk or climb. Maybe this child’s new ability to stand, walk and dance to the 80’s like a real Portlander would be a turning point for him, for all of us. Maybe…hopefully…he’d find a little more satisfaction in his day to day now that he could actually move.   

Perhaps the husband and I were both realizing at that moment that the market had been absolutely what we needed that day. The baby needed to feel seen, and not just by us, his everyday, life-weary keepers. He needed a real context to move and use his body. He needed people and 80’s music and dancing damn it because isn’t dancing one of those things that is most fun when others are around to do it with you? As we watched our kid twirl to 80’s nostalgia, I knew Josh was thinking the same thing I was. We were in one of those sunny parent moments, fleeting but profound. The kind that reminded us of the deeper truth here, that being Benton’s parents was more joy than tedium, more wonder than worry. That the love this head-strong 25 pound early-walker brought to our lives would always somehow outweigh the hard parts of parenting. 

That’s when two elderly ladies at my table stopped talking about their gardening plans to coo at the baby’s toddling and dancing. One of them even stopped me as we were leaving, full of tamale and probably over-caffeinated by now, to say how impressed she was with our parenting. I don’t know if she was just being nice, if she had children of her own and really understood the true labor of the early childhood years, but she had kind eyes and seemed genuinely cheered by our little family. I knew we were doing our absolute best on the parenting front, so I took her comment at face value. I felt into the possibility of it: maybe we really were good parents. I don’t know if there is even such a thing, but I let it feel true for just a moment in my body. I let her words melt my chronic anxiety that somehow I was missing the mark as a mother. I let it melt the fear, nestled in my left shoulder blade, that my kid was more than I could personally handle. 

That’s the thing about new-ish parenthood. The pre-toddler emotional rollercoasters and the logistics and the nap schedules, all of that is stressful and hard by any standard. But the real crux of it all, the thing that wears on you the most and is capital S stressful is the nagging question Am I doing a good job? This is the kind of existential angst that really makes you a Tired parent. *Raising my hand. So, yes, post-menopausal ladies at the farmers market dolling out encouragement was not only appreciated but probably exactly the medicine I needed most. We might not have the archetypal village these days, but if we’re lucky and find ourselves at a good farmers market now and again, we can hopefully have village-y moments.

Later that week, I came across a wise saying: You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s a part of the dance. Given our farmers market dance party a-ha moment, it felt fitting as a mantra with which to proceed in my mothering.

So, back to peppers.

Perhaps the luckiest find that day was a pepper that is totally new to me. Josh, true to pepper-hound form, spotted a cheerful row of bright orange peppers called ‘habenattas’, like habanero but without the heat. Have you heard of these? The heatlessness is particularly handy, because we like spice in our food, being from South Louisiana. But I’ve been limiting spice to almost non-existence in my cooking lately because I haven’t been entirely sure pepper was on the baby-friendly list of foods. For me, habenattas have been a revelation. I’d always loved the fruity notes of the habanero but could really do without the mouth-on-fire experience that my husband seems to chase. We used many of them to flavor a pot of white beans, and their smokiness and sweetness completely elevated the humble white bean and ham recipe we used. 

As for Josh’s hot-sauce? He made the most perfect batch of fermented hot sauce that was so good it may not last the month. It’s fruity, floral even, spiky because of the fermentation and rich thanks to the carrot-base. I’ve dolloped it on pot roast, quesadillas – which have been great for my kid who struggles to sit still for dinner time – breakfast burritos and an enchilada casserole I made recently. In my book, Josh’s knack with peppers and pique sauces deems him 100% trophy husband material, that and his gorgeous ability to endlessly invent games to entertain our too clever for his own good Prince of Mischief, oh and his meticulous chopping skills. Here’s the hot sauce recipe for my fellow cooks.

We used a combination of Indian Longhorn, mad hatter, white bhut jolokia, shishito, jalepeno, red habanero, sugar rich peach, golden scorpion and alteno hot peppers, among others.

Which brings me to my last note. For our third wedding anniversary this fall, just a day before the baby’s first birthday, I bought the man a pot. A nice pot. To the gardener-meets-home-cook, this is the height of romance. If you disagree, you may show yourself out. More on wooing my husband with porcelain lined cookery next post.

Until then, may you dance like no one is looking. Or, better, like they are all looking and you couldn’t possibly give a damn. 

– Virginia