No. Buy for the meals you’ll actually cook, and check your market’s calendar before treating October like the end of fresh food.
Market schedules vary. In Chicago, for example, Green City Market’s calendar lists Lincoln Park on October 21 and 24, West Loop on October 24, and markets continuing into November. Check your own market’s current schedule before making a last-chance shopping trip.
The useful question this week: what belongs in your bag when the season changes?
Start with dinner, then admire the vegetables.
A beautiful market haul can still become a refrigerator full of assignments. Buying six unfamiliar ingredients does not magically produce six free evenings. Annoying, but apparently the calendar gets a vote.
Green City Market’s seasonal list includes carrots, potatoes, onions, kale and apples. Here’s a manageable way to turn that abundance into actual food.
Before shopping, count the people eating and the dinners happening at home. Check the fridge. Then choose quantities for those meals, rather than buying one of everything that looks autumnal.
Give the ingredients three jobs:
Roast night: Cut potatoes and carrots into similar-sized pieces, add onion wedges, toss with oil and seasoning, and roast at 425°F until tender and browned. Turn partway through. Serve with beans or your usual protein.
Soup night: Soften another onion in oil. Add diced carrots, potatoes, canned white beans and broth. Simmer until the vegetables are tender; stir in chopped kale near the end.
Toast night: Warm more white beans with sautéed onion, add kale and a splash of water, and cook until the greens are tender. Spoon over toast. Lemon, vinegar or grated cheese can finish it.
Keep the ingredients for each dinner uncooked until you need them. This is shared shopping, not a compulsory Sunday meal-prep marathon.
Apples can simply be apples. They do not require a baking project to justify coming home.
For a plan with quantities, see Three Dinners, One Grocery List. If you’ve cooked one of those dinners, reply with which one and what you’d change.
Before leaving the market, ask your favorite grower where they’ll sell next month. A changing schedule is useful information. It is not an instruction to purchase seventeen pounds of optimism.