Wednesday, July 31st

Ou est l'erable?

(This is the second, and last, of my columns about my Quebec trip.)

Evidently the Quebecois equivalent of our 7/11 is Epicerie Richard. In all of the Upper Town of Quebec City, it is the only place that carries junky soda and candy and tobacco products, along with tiny bags of cat food and sugar. It also carries fresh produce better than what is in the groceries at home, and offers a variety of home-cooked takeout items, a full deli with a variety of pates and cheeses, fresh croissants and a decadent pastry case, all the requisite maple foods (syrup butter candy etc.) and a full selection of beer and wine. There's Belgian chocolate mixed in with the Hershey and Cadbury standards, and fresh hand-dipped ice cream. All of this is contained in a shop with an approximate square footage of 500 feet and a total of three short aisles. Which is open from six in the morning till eleven or twelve at night.

We stopped into the epicerie each day we were in Quebec, and each day, I started to wonder more about why there aren't such places at home. Granted, I was on vacation, and didn't need to do the kind of shopping that you do to keep a house going; I know that there are big grocery stores in Quebec, but they probably aren't picturesque enough to be featured on a tour. Even so, I wondered.

On the last day of our tour, we stopped into the farmer's market of Quebec City, down in the Lower Town by the water. Each stall in the market, which is only really under roof, featured small quantities of the freshest items: lettuces, cauliflower, strawberries, raspberries (by the pint and quart, which we never see here in Maryland), green beans, peas, tomatoes, squash. Our guide told us that usually the produce in the market, which is open seven days a week, would normally be much more abundant. The weather this year had put everyone behind.

We spent a total of forty-five minutes at the market before we had to leave for lunch. I would have been happy to stay there twice as long. I could identify the items at each stand just by smell, which is impossible in the produce section of my grocery store here. There were fresh raw-milk cheeses and warm breads to sample. For a large part of the time we were there, I was eating homemade potato chips with coarse salt out of a brown paper bag and trying to select which hand-made honey soap I wanted to bring home. I was amazed by all this bounty in a place where the growing season is half what it is here on the East Coast.

Now that I'm home, I am trying to emulate my Quebec shopping experiences as much as possible. Rather than just going to the grocery store, I'm driving twenty minutes out of my way to go to our local produce shop. I went to the Howard County Farmer's Market, held once a week in the parking lot at the library, and was very pleasantly surprised: I netted fresh Yukon Gold potatoes that were much cheaper than they would have been elsewhere, three pounds of peaches, and some zucchini. I don't think it's quite tomato season here yet, but I'm looking forward to that too. I'm trying new goat cheeses and planning a trip to Baltimore's only fromagerie this weekend.

Still, though, I wonder. In a country where we have so much to choose from, why am I stuck in a rut of broccoli-corn-frozen peas-green salad? Why, in a county that is still quite rural, where there are families still farming that have been farming for hundreds of years, am I going to a grocery store and buying strawberries shipped from California? I thought that I had been avoiding the "convenience foods" littering our grocery-store shelves, but it turns out that I've been a victim of convenience all along.

Oh, I still shop at the Giant most of the time, and no doubt I'll keep eating broccoli and California strawberries. In the meantime, I plan to keep trying recipes like the one to the right of your screen, for penne with a sauce of goat cheese and zucchini. I'm waiting for the tomatoes to come in, so that they can be added, too.