Thinking about veggies at the market

   Now that the tourist season is well and truly over, the locals have repossessed Mirepoix market--and we don't feel that we must be there before 9 a.m. Besides, we know at least three secret parking spots. One is by the canal, the other is opposite the tax office and I'm not telling you the other one.
   So, I've probably posted before about my habitual trawl around the stalls, the amazing smells from the paella and couscous stands, and the fleshy delights of the butchers' trucks (sorry, vegetarians, but I'm unrepentant).
   Eventually, I always end up here.

   And you know something? I'm seriously thinking of writing/drawing a bande dessinée (comic book in America but it sounds so much better in French) about the thought processes I go through when I'm faced with the Great Wall of Vegetables.
   Closeup of Ange, wide-eyed as she scans the greens. Over her head appears a thought bubble..."Oh my, that roquette looks incredible and would go so well with those walnuts we've got at home."
   Series of drawings of beautiful Savoy cabbage, strange, demonic black radishes and beetroot/beets/silverbeet (depending if you're Brit, American or Australian), wrinkled and dark, like something rather nasty in a pathology lab. The thing is, they're cooked, and how sensible is that. How many of us, raise your hands, have bought beetroot/beets/silverbeet and never got round to doing anything with them until they grew hair and/or became suspiciously squashy and ended up in the compost bucket.
    So, anyway, cooked beetroot/beets/silverbeet. A brilliant idea. Although, to be truthful, I didn't actually buy any last week.

  You help yourself to a round plastic basket and pile it high. In mine this week was a wedge of pumpkin, which ended up in soup, some frisée, earmarked for a salade Lyonnaise (that's the one with lardons and poached egg) but, for whatever reason, that never happened so it's showed up as part of the nightly green salad instead, some potatoes that just looked too tasty to turn down (not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd write), a red onion or two and, as usual, a big bunch of parsley.
   The only decision after that, after it's weighed, is whether to have everything tipped directly into your basket or to have it packed in plastic bags.