Amarillo

Happy discoveries of the weekend:

Bright yellow peppers, and purple! Impossibly purple and glossy as childhood's grape jelly, neither Han purple nor indigo nor violet, but glad purple itself—the name derived from Greek, the purple of the murex shells that dyed cloth in antiquity. A sacred color, understandably. Purple peppers and yellow, the two brilliancies juxtaposed.

Breakfast at the farmer’s market in the lot behind the post office (among the possibilities of fresh-baked bread or crêpes with cheese and ham or rolls larded with nuts and cinnamon), from the Oaxacan Kitchen, a tamale with chicken and mole amarillo wrapped in a corn husk— delicious, but apparently with no chocolate and nuts and cloves like mole negro. Instead, tomatillos, chayote squash, hierba santa, cominos, guajillo chiles . . . and corn masa (or masa harina) for the tamale dough . . . Click for mole recipes.

Then chicory, the kind found at the agora in Crete (wild greens to saute or to eat in pies, hortopita, as the heroine of my Cretan novel, Reading the Stones, loves to); baby red chard; wild arugula; basil. Heirloom tomatoes, at what is nearly the perfect moment of the season. Local raspberries.

A woman with a parrot at a picnic in the Palo Alto Hills. A parrot of few words but also brilliant colors.

image: http://www.goinglocal-info.com/my_weblog/2008/09/preserving-swee.html