We went to the Farmer’s Market in Boulder on Saturday morning and picked up a few things that were available this early in the season.  We bought some purple potatoes, parsnips, and spinach.  We were planning on having steaks and roasted potatoes for dinner Saturday night and we didn’t have any specific plans for the produce we bought.  Thanks to teething, Jake took longer than normal to go down and while I was laying with him I came up with an idea for the produce.  We made a wilted spinach salad with roasted purple potatoes and shaved parsnips, with a maple mustard vinaigrette.

I have been making my own salad dressings thanks to the guidelines in the book How to Cook Everything.  After making Mark Bittman’s basic vinaigrettes I started to see a pattern and started experimenting with some of my own dressings.  This has been my favorite salad dressing so far! After eating it on our salads we fried some french fries the next day and ate it as a dipping sauce, which was also delicious.

For the salad:

I roasted potatoes in the oven with olive oil to coat at 450 for about 40 minutes or until crispy.  I like spinach better cooked a little bit, so I wilted it in a pan with a little bit of olive oil for a couple of minutes.  I put the spinach on the plate, topped with the roasted potatoes, and shredded parsnips, salt and pepper.

Maple Mustard Vinaigrette:

3/4 cups olive oil

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

3 tbsp maple syrup

1 tbsp spicy brown mustard

2 tbsp shallots

salt & pepper to taste

Add the white wine vinegar, maple syrup, mustard, shallots and salt and pepper to a food processor, and blend thoroughly.  Add the olive oil a little at a time and blend.  Adding the olive oil a little at a time should create an emulsion.

Enjoy!

We all had a case of spring fever on Saturday.  It is finally warming up here in Colorado, and Saturday we had temps near the 60s and wanted to get out and enjoy things.  The Boulder farmer’s market opened last weekend, so Saturday morning we made ourselves coffees and headed down to check it out.

Jake enjoyed himself while wearing his stylish sunglasses he received from the dentist this week.  I think the bribe from the dentist worked, he wouldn’t take the sunglasses off all morning.  We’ll see if he loves the dentist next time we go.

As you can see we weren’t the only ones trying to get out and enjoy things.  We ended up buying a bunch of parsnips, a bag of spinach, some purple potatoes, and a few onions.  I think most of what the farmers had was from last season, but they did all have a bunch of fresh greens!  We bought a big bag of spinach for $3 from the Hmong farmers who we like to support  and who also had by far the cheapest greens at the market (Jeremy and I took a trip around the world a few years ago, and Laos was our favorite place).

After we left the farmer’s market we were going to drive up to Boulder Falls so Jake could see it, but unfortunately it was closed, so we got out at another spot on Boulder Creek and walked around.  We were a little shocked, only 10 minutes out of town up into the mountains it felt much colder, so we didn’t walk around for long.

We then went and did some gardening but I forgot to take pictures of that.  We are going back this afternoon, so I’ll try to remember this time and post pictures of our garden in the spring, even though we don’t have much in it right now!

Hope everyone is enjoying spring as much as we are!