Sacramento Rocks!!!

What a better way to spend Sunday morning other than going to the farmers market? :-) I know that many of you might think that I am crazy but what can I say other than I simply enjoy it! This is what I do on Sunday mornings if I am not going out of town and if I can’t go on the weekend I make sure I go on a weekday.

I get energized from all the smells, the colors, the bustling of the people, the noise….  while buying all the wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables and while chatting with the local farmers.

Every time I go to a farmers market beautiful memories are triggered. I go back in time when I was a teenager and I was getting up at 4:00 a.m. in the morning to go to the farmers market with my dad. He used to go every single day 6 days a week to buy all the fresh fruit and vegetables for his grocery store. I could never go every single morning though. Most of the time I preferred to check in to work at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. :-) Since I am not an early riser 4:00 a.m. would not cut it for me BUT when I went I was happy! All the noise that was coming from the farmers doing transactions with the store owners, the earthy smells from all the fresh fruit and vegetables, and the wonderful aromas from freshly baked bread was simply energizing for me!

  

    
Sacramento has a lot of farmers markets in the metro area but also in all of the surrounded suburbs.

I never realized how much farming there is in the area and how many quantities of food come out of the local farms till I started living here. I am very fortunate and grateful to have access to all these wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables on a daily basis.

Let’s support our local farms while having fun!

….and as always this past week I tried out a few of the local eateries – I like to call them jewels. Some of them I have gone to before while others I visited for the first time. Two  stood out this week. I went back to one of my favorite local restaurants – the Grange in the beautiful Citizen hotel. For the first time I went to their annual event which was held in the hotel – The Greatest Cocktail on Earth - where they served handcrafted cocktails while circus acrobats were entertaining the crowd– even though the event was fun our empty stomachs forced us to go into the main restaurant next door where we enjoyed a lovely dinner with great conversation. I had their delicious gnocchi with lobster mushrooms, fennel sausage, arugula and red pepper butter. The gnocchi was simply melting in my mouth! I highly recommend this dish! What I love about this restaurant is that the chef uses only local fresh vegetables and he changes the menu according to what’s available in the season.

Another restaurant I visited this week was Tokyo Fro’s Rockin Sushi bar on Fair Oaks blvd in Sacramento. I went there for the first time. They serve yummy sushi – I tried a few from my friends’ plates – but I opted for the salmon on the menu. It was the perfect choice – grilled and served with asparagus. While the salmon was moist and not overcooked the asparagus had too much salt so I could not finish eating them! This is a  casual restaurant with a large bar serving a lot of different kinds of sushi while offering live music and other great entertainment throughout the week.

I am telling you - the little town of Sacramento is rocking in every corner!

Till next time ...stay well!