The University Farmers Market opens tomorrow morning, and our own market, on Broadway, will be back a week from Sunday. Better yet, the University market is switching to year-round operation. Admittedly this means a lot of mussels and kale in the winter, but I like mussels and kale. Iris likes to get a blueberry strudel.

My friend Kenji is from southern California, and the first time he went to a Seattle farmers market in the spring, he said, “Wow, that was a lot of greens.” It would be cool to do a time-lapse photo of a market stand over the course of the season, and watch the colors explode and then fizzle out.

Here are some things I have threatened to make with market produce this season:

* lobster and corn chowder (Iris is extremely excited about this)
* corn chowder with fresh shelling beans
* sour cherry fool
* apple pie with cheddar crust
* just plain old corn chowder
* sausages with plums

You’re also invited to hold me to my pledge to buy more meat at the farmers market and less at the supermarket.

Speaking of chowder, I made chicken chowder last week. Chicken chowder doesn’t sound too inspiring, does it? Not to me, either, but per Jasper I started with a good organic chicken, made a strong chicken broth, then shredded the meat by hand and added it back in at the end along with the cream and a shake of cayenne. It was delicious.

The chicken was Smart Chicken brand. I recommend the product, but their website makes me want to hurl:

> MBA Poultry is the creation of Mark Haskins, our Founder, President and CEO. He named our company after his three children: Mark Jr., Bridget, and Amber. Smart Chicken® was named when Mark realized that if you have an MBA, you are likely to be smarter than most. Therefore, he named our chicken MBA Brand Smart Chicken®. Our MBA is a degree in family, which tells you how we like to treat our associates who care for our products.

I have a degree in snuggles and kittens!

According to the Seattle Times, Mexican president Vicente Fox will be visiting Seattle later this month. He’s expected to fly in on May 24th and leave the next day.

It’s not that I don’t follow politics, but my first thought upon hearing this was, “I wonder if they would give me fifteen minutes to talk to him about Mexican food.” Presumably he will initially say that he couldn’t possibly choose a favorite among his nation’s many delicious regions, but when pressed, will admit to favoring the *antojitos* of his native Guanajuato.

We’d hold the interview at a taco truck, of course. I would have two al pastor and one lengua. Fox’s choice of tacos would be scrutinized for weeks by the Mexican press.

Possibly he would order a torta.

You know how sometimes a recipe will call for, say, a pound of spinach, and it will be listed like this?

> 1 pound spinach (about 16 cups)

Whenever I see that, I get this image of myself trying to measure out sixteen cups of spinach leaves with a one-cup measure, and the spinach is falling all over the floor and I’m saying, “Wait, was that 13 or 14? Crap.” This is thoroughly irrational, because I have a scale, and no recipe depends on using precisely the right amount of spinach anyway. Also, sixteen cups of spinach cooks down to about one cup ten seconds after it hits the pan.

Still, when I see a recipe like that, I tend to make something else. Tonight, though, I’m making salmon with creamy spinach-poblano sauce. It involves ten cups of spinach. This may end in tears.

Along with every other family around, we’ve been enjoying Mo Willems’s books about The Pigeon. The first installment, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, is about how you should not let the pigeon drive the bus. The second book, Iris’s favorite, is called The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog. It’s about…okay, I’ll stop now.

Anyway, Iris and I were reading _The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog_ for the zillionth time, and I realized that Iris had never had a hot dog. This would have to be rectified. We got some hot dogs and had them for lunch, and Iris loved it, of course. Who wouldn’t love a hot dog? We had to cut Iris’s hot dog into pieces too small to be a choking hazard, but she had a great time stuffing the pieces into the bun, which she called “hot dog bread.”

In New York, there’s a place called Papaya King that’s been at Third Avenue and 86th since 1932. It’s the place featured on Seinfeld where Kramer gets a hot dog. I’ve only been there once, but it has spawned a dozen imitators in the tropical drinks and hot dogs genre. For some reason, the imitators are all called things like Frank’s Papaya and Gray’s Papaya, not things like Papaya Duke and Papaya Viscount. All of them have the same shtick, which involves playing up the health benefits of papaya drinks. None of them play up the health benefits of hot dogs. I never compared side-by-side, but I thought the dogs at our local papaya stand on the Upper West Side, which I think was Mike’s Papaya, were indistinguishable from the King’s.

In 1999, two hot dogs and a papaya drink at Mike’s were $2. Good times.

The papaya stands start out with good all-beef hot dogs, but their greatness lies in the cooking method. They roll the dogs around on a hot griddle all day. The longer the frank stays on the grill, the crustier and better it gets. I realize this is unnervingly similar to the 7-Eleven hot dog rolling machine.

Most people boil or grill hot dogs at home (or maybe microwave them these days), but the papaya method is the way to go. Heat a skillet (cast iron or stainless works better than nonstick, because the dogs won’t stay put on nonstick) over medium-low to medium with the barest sheen of vegetable oil. Put in the dogs and roll them occasionally until they’re crusty all over. This will take at least ten minutes. To warm the buns, I open them and nestle them over the dogs until the bun is a little toasted on the edge that hits the pan. Ten-cent supermarket buns really can’t be beat here.

What’s the best brand of dog? I think all of the major kosher beef dogs are fine, but my favorite (which I tried based on a recommendation in a freebie issue of The Rosengarten Report) is Boar’s Head. You want the skinny all-beef dogs with natural casings.

Cook the Boar’s Head hot dogs in true papaya fashion, and you will be forever known as the Papaya Marquess.