The Farmer's Market

We have been making an adventure of the Saturday Farmer's Market this summer.
The market is held on the town green - there are animals to visit, honey to taste, home baked cookies to sample and bunches and bunches of vegetables to buy.

This Saturday we arrived in time to watch our favorite farmer unloading her crates of vegetables from the back of her truck.
We chose beets with the greens still attached (washing and then cooking both the greens and the beets was lots of fun). We bought yellow squash and zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers for Grampy and three giant bell peppers to make stuffed peppers for our dinner.

We used the crock pot to cook our stuffed peppers.
Maya used the potato masher to thoroughly blend the ingredients for the stuffing -
a basic meatloaf mixture of:
3 slices of stale bread torn into little pieces and soaked in
3/4 cup of milk combined with one egg
1/4 cup chopped onion
and 3/4 lb. lean ground beef
while I cut the tops off the peppers and cleaned out the insides.

We set the seeds aside on a paper plate to use later on, then stuffed the peppers with the meat mixture.
We poured just enough tomato sauce into the crockpot to cover the bottom of the dish,
put in the stuffed peppers and poured the remainder of the jar of tomato sauce over them.
The peppers stayed in the pot for 6 hours on low heat and then they were done!

While the peppers cooked, we decided to do an art project to remember the fun we had cooking our vegetables from the farmer's market. We got out our paints and painted a couple of sheets of construction paper green, like the peppers.
Once the paint was dry, we drew two large peppers on the green painted paper and cut them out. Then we painted those green peppers with white glue, covering all of the paper peppers. We did that so that the seeds we saved from the insides of our real peppers would stick to the paper. We set the paper peppers aside for the rest of the afternoon to dry. That night we had a super dinner and some new decoration for Grammy's kitchen!