"I didn't know what I would be cooking until I got here today," said Michael Tuohy, the chef of Woodfire Grill, as he chopped sausage from Gum Creek Farm and tossed it with vegetables from several other farms into the sizzling skillet on a portable burner on a weathered, wooden table in front of us all.
He asked Tommy Searcy to talk about his sausage a bit, and Tommy sort of laughed when he looked out at the small crowd of familiar faces.
"Everyone here already knows about my meats," Tommy said, smiling. And it was true. We were the regulars, the die-hards, the ones who come by every week to pick up CSA boxes or milk and eggs pre-ordered via email.
I glanced around the intimate gathering; everyone was comfortably seated on wooden benches, nestled beside a historic shed and art gallery and an overgrown community garden, in the shadow of one of the fastest growing business districts in Atlanta, the skyscrapers barely visible from this vantage point. And I wondered. Would the addition of twice-monthly chef demonstrations change the flavor of this crowd? Would it grow and swell to hords who don't know each other's names, finicky new customers who come to choose which farmer has the better tomatoes rather than to choose some little way to support them all? Would that be bad? No, of course not. Growth in this farmers market would be good for everyone.
Yet, as Chef Tuohy bush-wacked the leaves off a handful of lamb's quarters, causing the audience to gasp as we finally saw how easy it is to use that crop (yes, I admit that I had been removing the leaves, painstakingly, one at a time), and throwing the leaves into the skillet along with oils and spices, I knew that the flavor was, indeed, changing.
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