Sheri Castle looks to see the cloves of garlic in this stalk of green garlic. Green garlic is a “fleeting treat” Castle said, and will only be available for a few more weeks.
Commons Photos by Sara Gregory

By Sara Gregory
Staff writer

Not even bugs keep Shari Castle from cooking with fresh vegetables.

“If you see a bug, that’s not a bad thing,” Castle said. “It’s just if you see slime — that’s not good.”

Castle, a Chapel Hill food writer and chef who also gives cooking lessons, led a group March 31 around the Carrboro Farmers’ Market and demonstrated how to buy and cook the freshest vegetables.

A Farmers’ Market regular, Castle said she always walks through the market twice.

“You have to go around at least once to see what’s here, and then you go around again to see what you want to buy.”

She had time Saturday to lead the group around the market only once, but Castle stopped the group frequently to comment on the various vegetables being offered by local vendors.

What is offered at the market depends on the season, Castle said.

“This time of year when it’s hot and humid, you get in vegetables with your bolder flavors,” she said. “The strength of flavors goes almost with the season.”

When trying to decide which vegetables to cook together, Castle said to pay attention to what grows together.

“You can’t go wrong with this: what grows together goes together,” Castle said.

As she walked through the market, Castle bought ingredients for her menu: “kilt” lettuce salad, potato soup, and crepes with fresh cheese and jam.

Castle said the “kilt” lettuce, or wilted lettuce, salad was a family recipe she learned growing up in the Appalachian mountains.

She said she has been cooking all her life, and although she has attended culinary school at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone and Tante Marie’s Cooking School in San Francisco, she said there’s no better way to learn than actual practice.

For both the salad and the soup, Castle bought green garlic, only available for a few weeks each year.

“It’s a fleeting treat, so get it while you can,” she said.

Sheri Castle adds buttermilk to potato soup. Castle said that any type of milk dairy product can be added but that she prefers the richness of buttermilk.

She bought greens for the salad, as well as baby turnips and radishes.

Root plants, she said, have leafy tops that are edible as well, though most people don’t think to use them when they’re cooking.

“Almost anything you can eat the root of, you can eat the top of,” Castle said. “Always make sure the leaves look fresh enough to eat.”

After looking over several bunches of baby turnips, Castle triumphantly held up her choice.

“This is like the poster child of what a root plant should be,” she said.

After Castle finished shopping, she and the group headed back to the arboretum where she set up portable cooking stoves and diced green garlic and leeks for the potato soup.

For the salad, she fried bacon bought at the market, mixing the grease with vinegar, sugar and salt to make a simple dressing.

Over the soup she cut chives and puréed the potatoes, pouring in buttermilk and mixing the ingredients together.

She tested the soup, adding sea salt before doling out samples to those at the market.

UNC students Sara McClain, a junior majoring in women’s studies, and Gary Wilkins, a freshman studying mathematics and physics, were among those who sampled Castle’s cooking.

They attended Saturday hoping to pick up tips for simple but healthy ways to cook in the dorms.

Wilkins said Castle’s techniques were easy enough to convince him to try to cook more often.

“Everything’s been cooked so fast,” Wilkins said. “Usually time is a factor in my schedule, but this was good enough and quick enough to where I can see myself actually doing this.”

McClain said that she cooks regularly, but that she still found Castle’s tips helpful.

“I really liked the shopping tips on how to buy the freshest vegetables,” McClain said. “The food is amazing, and it’s nothing that’s all that complicated. It’s very simple.”

McClain said students interested in cooking should explore the market.

“There’s no better place to get fresh vegetables and fruits than the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, and it’s really easy to find.”

Castle said she enjoys the Carrboro Farmers’ Market because all the goods are produced locally.

“You’ll find that what they produce is very different even though they’re all from 50 miles around,” Castle said.

“Sometimes it’s interesting to experiment with different farmers just because something grown in Chatham County can taste different than something grown in Orange County.”