Saturday dawned chilly and rainy, but I went to the Riley Park Market anyhow. What with family and health and weather issues, I’ve been mostly cooped up lately, have been feeling caged, bored, and blue. Also, the Market is only ten blocks from our place, along a bike route. So I saddled up the e-bike and went hunting.

For Vancouver people: The summer version of that Riley Park Market is average at best; I rarely bother to go any more. So I wasn’t expecting much, but what a pleasant surprise; this year the Winter Market is more than twice as big and was full of vendors I hadn’t seen before.

More below, but the reason I’m writing this is to encourage others to get out of the house even in shitty weather in a shitty winter in a shitty decade. Good things still happen but you won’t know about that if you stay home doomscrolling.

The place was busy, even in the rain. The picture suggests many colorful umbrellas but that’s a lie; unfortunately most people here hoist boring black umbrellas over their boring black outfits.

I had a goal; to come back with makings for borscht. We had some stuff but needed beets, cabbage, and onions. I wandered by a lot of vendors with those things but somehow ended up buying them all at one stand, because they presented well and worked hard.

Three kinds of beets!

I’d never previously heard of Chioggia beets, so I got a couple of beets from each basket and we’ll see how the mixture works in borscht.

I didn’t buy any Daikon, but the color was unearthly. My Fujifilm camera is really good at white balance and color accuracy but, believe it or not, I had to dial back the saturation on this one because the red pixels were screaming for mercy.

The hardest-working stand had to be Ms Lee’s

It was a successful expedition. I’d been looking for onions but the shallots were huge and seductive, and generally have more flavor than onions anyhow.

Borscht is made from all those vegetables plus potatoes, parsnips, celery and garlic (lots of garlic), some cubed, some sauteed, all boiled up, vegan until you add the sour cream.

As for the Rice Whisky, what can I say? It was being sold by a nice jovial gentleman with Asian genes who said it was made right down by the water in Delta. I tried a sample and it was tasty.