If you are lucky enough to have a Farmers Market in your area then you already know that the freshness and quality of the produce by far beats anything you could ever buy at a regular food market.

Generally a Farmers Market brings together farmers and other producers of food from surrounding regions to a central market where they can sell their produce.

The benefits of a Farmers Market are fresh produce (since it comes direct from the farm), exotic foods and a fantastic assortment of organic products.

In our local area we have two farmers markets and the last time I went to one of these there were only three stallholders so obviously there really wasn’t much to choose from. Subsequently I never went back.

With this in mind, I really wasn’t expecting much when we decided to take a visit to the second market on the northside of the city.

Fortunately for me, after entering the big hall, I was pleasantly surprised as this market had what looked like over 100 vendors and there was plenty to choose from.

The first stall we stopped at was selling a wonderful array of breads and cakes. We ended up purchasing an Italian loaf to have with dinner tonight.

It will go well with the pate and cheeses we had bought during the week. If only we had waited, we could have purchased it all fresh at this market.

We then moved on and tried out a few different foods. These markets are a great place to taste test before you buy. You just don’t get the opportunity to do this at most regular food markets. Today we sampled some Italian biscuits, a variety of different flavored sausages and (grass fed beef) meat balls.

The owner of the meat products is from Minto Galloways Stud at Yass, just north of Canberra where we live. He emphasised how tasty the meat was and he was right. The meat balls had no added herbs or spices and yet the taste was just wonderful.

They have also won awards for various regional shows around Australia and one of the more outstanding wins was for Grand Champion Bull at the 2006 Melbourne Show. As you can imagine, we couldn’t go away empty handed so we ended up buying some of the ground beef to try later in the week.

One of the other more interesting things we found was the Exotic Mushroom stand. I have never seen such a great variety of unusual looking mushrooms.

Normally we see these type of mushrooms dried but these were all fresh and looked as though they had just been picked.

Apart from those pictured we also bought some King Brown mushrooms which were just as oddly shaped.

We are going to try them all tonight just sauted in a little butter and oil. I want to experience the real flavor of these mushrooms so we aren’t going to waste them by mixing them into another dish. Just straight on their own is enough for me.

After wandering around the market for about an hour, we finally came out with a huge loaf of Italian bread, a variety of mushrooms, some ground beef, a handful of organic garlic and a big bag of beautiful red juicy apples.

Next time I will go prepared with a little more cash (no credit cards accepted here) and a big bag to take everything home in.