Nuts, Knuckles, and More at the Wake Forest Farmers Market

We have a confession. Until last weekend we’ve never taken the time to visit the Wake Forest Farmers Market. That was clearly a mistake. It is freaking awesome.

The part that will blow you away is how amazingly nice all the vendors are. They love to talk about the quality of their products and they should be proud of the stuff for sale there because it’s pretty cool stuff to eat.

The visit started off by meeting some really great veterans who wanted to fatten us up on a pancake breakfast at the American Legion post in town.

From there we wandered over and meet the sweetest lady in the place, Teresa and her pure local honey.

Teresa educated us about the problems of bee colony collapse and why bees are both helpful and not expensive to start and keep your own hive. We might just do that.

But try as hard as we might, and even though we do love honey, it is dangerous to over think honey. You see bees gather nectar and store it in an area called the honey stomach. When they get back to the hive they “transfer” it to the hive. And when we say “transfer” we actually mean puke it. Still, so tasty.

Teresa and her husband and kids have been raising bees for quite some time and have made it a family affair.

We also met The Flour Garden lady, whose name we irresponsibly lost. But then again we do suck.

Here we learned all about spelt flour and why it is good for people with a gluten problem. Another thing we never knew. There is also some homemade granola available as well.

In researching this story we also learned spelt flour is also called dinkel flour. Now that’s a name we can get behind. “Pass the dinkel please,” just sounds like such a fun thing to say.

And then there was something that went way over our heads about using sprouted flour. This type of flour is supposed to be easier to digest and great for people with blood sugar issues since it does not lead to as big of a sugar spike as white flour does.

A bit further down the aisle of stands we ran into Dr. Gauthier, a veterinarian, who also loves raising sprouts and selling them through her Chickcharney Farm stand.

Julie and her shy daughter are great representatives to get you to try a whole range of sprouts. We dove right in. Not because we are sprout fans but because someone offered free food.

Julie had broccoli, alfalfa and something called radish rage sprouts, on hand to try.

Don’t let Julie and her daughter fool you about how lovely and delightful the sprouts are to eat. Sure, some are really refreshing and delightful but we got suckered into tasting the radish rage sprouts and they kicked our ass. They are a bit fiery hot, not what you’d expect from some tiny environmentally friendly innocent green things.

We bet they’d actually be really tasty in a steak salad, with greens and pieces of steak. It would be like a steak with horseradish on it in a lovely salad.That’s something we can get behind.

They also raise Narragansett turkeys on their farm. She says they taste so much better than one of those over-bread store turkeys.

But while we are slaughtering things let’s move on to the Triple B Farms tent of meat. There is just about every type of meat you could ever want here. They even have cornish cross chickens.

We have no idea what makes the cornish chickens cross but with their free ranging and injection free hippie life they have before we kill them and eat their tasty nuggets, they should not be cross at all.

If it’s in a pig, cow, lamb or chicken, it’s available for sale at this place. They got Mt. Oysters (testicles), liver, tongue, heart, feet, knuckles, shanks, butts, and bones. On demand, they can wander into their trailer and pull out Boston butts (really a pig shoulder, crazy Bostonians), skirt steak, brisket, lamb chops, ground beef and chicken. It’s a carnivore paradise.

The local market is open every Saturday from 8am to Noon. As the weather warms up the days and hours get longer. You can discover more information about the market, here.

The Wake Forest Farmers Market is held right in downtown Wake Forest at 150 N White St, Wake Forest, NC 27587. If you have not been yet, you should really go.

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