How to Cook Like a Man by Daniel Duane Page B

baby leeks and Chioggia beets, wood-oven baguettes and live lobsters:
That’s right, got mine!
    Finally, I saw the portal through which I’d have to pass to enter the market: the phalanx of sizzling, smoking restaurant booths forming an outer flank of temptation. Like baleen in the mouth of a whale, all those expertly cooked softshell-crab sandwiches, sustainable-pork BLTs and pastured-egg omelets filtered out the unserious by encouraging them to blow off shopping, eschew cooking, screw personal growth, and just buy a big, beautiful plate and settle in to chow.
    I paused there a moment, looking up at the Ferry Building clock tower and the blue sky beyond. I felt my pulse accelerating. I hadn’t even entered yet, and I wanted everything: I wanted to eat every bite from every booth and thus to know what all these people knew. But then I remembered the turnips with turnip greens and took the plunge. I marched straight past all the breakfast-eating amateurs and right down the throat-like corridor of the lavender-and-flower merchants into the whale’s belly—the farm stands themselves. There, I found a once-in-a-millennium conglomeration of the world’s most beautiful plant foods, with “dry-farmed Early Girl” tomatoes looking like the Platonic Ideal of tomato-ness, and whole plants of basil for sale cheap, and mountains of multicolored sweet peppers, and exquisitely tenderfrisée. The fevered crowd, swirling around me, engaged in the uniquely San Franciscan contact sport of elbowing past the chutney-buying tourists to grab the last of the jumbo levain loaves at Della Fattoria—sweating the hot sweat of panicky desire, bribing pissedoff kids with five-dollar cinnamon twists and six-dollar smoothies, and then paying way too much for a pig’s liver that ought to be free, given how nasty a grown-up pig’s liver typically tastes (suckling-pig organs are different). Out of the corner of my eye, in the swirling kaleidoscope of agricultural bounty, I saw a woman holding postcard-perfect French breakfast radishes up to the light, scrutinizing their flawless tender greens for the slightest signs of wilt. I remembered suddenly that
Vegetables
had a radishes chapter, and the memory made my pulse quicken even more. A bead of sweat ran down my ribs. I could see picture-perfect baby carrots—no bigger than my pinky, priced like jewels—and I could recall a recipe or two for which they’d be ideal. I could see a sign saying “Tat Tsoi,” and another reading “Amaranth Greens,” and both were key ingredients I’d not only never seen before but never thought I’d find as long as I lived.
    Bolting to bag some radishes of my own, I wondered:
How many bunches do I need to knock off every single radish recipe tonight?
My wallet now more open than closed—Liz a little appalled, I think, to see my profligacy with our grocery dollars—I began to bounce from farmer to farmer, buying anything and everything as if my life depended on my project’s completion, as if this market were the only place on earth to find the essential ingredients, as if this very Saturday might just be the market’s last day ever, before the Judgment Day upon which a wrathful God might demand to know why the hell I’d not yet completed the shelling-peas section of
Vegetables
.
    Then I saw them: young white turnips, smaller than golf balls, fresh green leaves truly sprouting off their tops.
    A familiar voice said, “What up, double-D?”
    I looked up from the turnips and, to my surprise and delight, saw a guy I’d known in a former life, a tall, unshaven, shaggyhaired surfer named Joe. The very sight of Joe’s face brought a knee-weakening tide of nostalgia for weeks on a certain Baja beach, surfing all day in warm water, eating fish tacos and drinking beers at night, and sleeping blissfully with Liz, just the two of us. But Joe stood on the backside of the farm