Torello is here.
She's the manager of the Racine Farmers Market between the smoke, the parasites.
What a summer so far.
Well, hold on.
You're on that microphone.
Usually, yes.
That's fine.
You stay right there.
Yeah.
What a summer with parasites and smoke and what else is coming down the pike?
Exactly.
Okay.
So the farmers market is at Rotary Park Festival Park and it's there every Saturday morning through the end of October.
Well, that's good because that's when harvest comes in.
That's when that's when the stuff starts really rolling in.
And I was there just a couple of weeks ago and we picked up a whole bunch of stuff at the farmer's market.
Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way.
Cyclosporiasis, that's how you pronounce it.
That's the parasite, mainly with lettuce.
But now I'm hearing different types of vegetables and fruits and everything.
And it's a parasite, which when it gets in you, cause a disruption in digestive system.
Right, right.
And it happens to be the one that's in the news right now, but you know, there's bacteria.
There's a bunch of different things that can happen with produce that is that you buy in the grocery store versus at the farmer's market from directly from the farmer.
Now, yeah, this one causes intestinal problems and so forth.
I don't know anybody who's had it, but I know somebody who's been sick, but they said, well, I didn't have any vegetables.
So, you know,
The difference is when you buy and I buy bag lettuce, I lost 42 pounds eating salads and I buy the bag lettuce sometimes because it's just easy for me.
I'm very lazy.
They got clump up with my dirty hands, throw it on the plate, pour some slosh and salad dressing on it and that's my dinner.
But it's the bag lettuce that seems to be the main problem because you were telling me that's made that's lettuce made up of.
a lot of different farms.
It
can be up to 100 farms in one bag lettuce, right?
And so when you buy local, when you're buying from the farmer's market, you are getting a head of lettuce that was in the ground yesterday.
And so it's just between maybe one to three people have touched that lettuce, where they are saying a bag of lettuce can be touched by 15 to 20 people.
So right there, you can tell the freshness of it and the chances
are very slim that you would get sick from a lettuce that was locally grown.
However, you need to wash your vegetables.
See, I don't.
I just take it out of the bag with my dirty hands and plop it on the plate because I've been doing that for years.
But my wife, who cooks with all these vegetables, she chops them up, finally washes them, makes her little thing in the pan and then puts it over rice or whatever.
I mean, well, I just take it, throw it on a plate, because I'm lazy.
I want it fast, and that's the fastest way to do it.
But I used to take a head of lettuce, just chop it up, put it in the bag, and make my own bag lettuce.
Well, lettuce is, excuse me, is part of the issue, right?
Because if she's cooking the vegetables, that gets rid of it.
So it's the raw vegetables that we have to be worried about as far as the bacteria and the parasite.
When you read all this two weeks ago, you didn't say, oh, my.
Goodness, what are they doing to me first, the smoke and now this?
No, if anything,
it's drawing attention to buying gulgul, right?
Like how fresh the vegetables really are and how many people, like I said, have only touched them.
A few people, probably
family
members, if anybody, before that you're buying it directly from the farmer at all the farmer's markets.
Yeah, you know, that guess that's what you have to do until this thing is all cleared up.
And I don't know how long it takes to clear it up.
Lettuce doesn't last that long.
I mean it turns brown and but a week so
but not a farmer's market had a lettuce because it truly was just Yeah,
so
that will last weeks in your fridge.
Really?
Yes.
All right, and make your own bag lettuce.
Yeah, I mean I have plastic big Ziploc bags at home.
I can make my own.
I'm just lazy Okay, now the farmers market is is open on Saturdays from
So we come from from nine to one every Saturday
nine to one and they were all lined up there now this past two weeks you've been having to share the land with Salmonorama.
Yes with the fishermen.
So
that's all
over.
It's all over.
We'll be back to a farmer's market just us taking over a festival park.
It's it's lovely.
Rain or shine.
Yes.
Rain or shine.
Because you're undercover there for the most part.
We are.
All the farmers are undercover and and that's a great way to you know if it's really sunny too for the customer.
Yeah, and it's more than just vegetables and fruits.
They have a whole bunch of other stuff.
We
do.
The Racine Farmers Market specializes in food-related products.
So we have a couple of crafters every week to kind of change things up, but otherwise, it's all farm or food-related products.
And these are local farmers from how far out do they come?
We
have one big farmer bringing sweet corn this week, and they come from right on the Illinois border.
Oh, really?
So many
farmers come.
or many of the vendors come at least an hour to get to us in Racine.
They're trucks and everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're baking bread till the wee hours of the morning, packing it up and bringing it to
us.
Hey, Elmer, get over here.
Help me with these crates, Elmer.
There's a
lot of work that goes into it.
And
I'm hoping, right, that the community comes and supports them.
If I had to grow my own food, and even with cattle, if I had to make it, I'd starve to death.
My wife has box gardens, so she knows what to do and she makes her own rhubarb and stuff.
She'll go outside, snap a few off, and then have her dinner.
I don't know how to do that.
I don't know how to grow my own food.
I have no idea how to grow food.
And that's wonderful because you don't need to.
It's right down the
block, right?
And one of the things that we
have
set up in Racine that no place that I believe in the state of Wisconsin does is the Racine Food Bank.
purchases, all the extra produce.
Oh, that's neat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we put it into the coolers at Festival Park and they pick it up on Monday morning and it goes into the food bank.
Now, we get a bunch of special days we're going to talk about coming up in just a moment.
It's, uh, Don Carrillo is here.
She is the manager of the Racine Farmers Market.
It's just the same.
Do you, the other two farmers markets too, right?
I do a winter market in Oak Creek.
Oak Creek?
Only Hick say Creek.
Don Carrillo, Don Carrillo.
What do you want to say?
How do you say it?
I say Carrillo.
You did say Carrillo.
OK.
Don Carrillo is here.
She's manager of the Racine Farmers Market.
You got to just hit my face on this.
Let's talk about some of the special events you got coming up.
And Pickle Day is this weekend.
Yes.
So all the all the vendors are getting involved and with the theme.
And so we will.
specialized in samples throughout the park of people or of the vendors who offer pickle varieties.
So there'll be a little bit of everything.
I know the Kettle Corn people are using pickle seasoning in their popcorn and yeah, everything from just completely different things.
Ask me how many pickles I had in my life.
I heard you
say zero.
Now, whenever I get something with a pickle on it, my wife says, I'll take that.
She puts her dirty fingers on my hamburger and takes the pickle off.
But there's asparagus and mushrooms.
There's so
many.
Mushrooms I love.
So many.
Mushrooms I love.
Mushrooms I love.
Pickles I don't.
But I'm in the minority on that one because people just eat them.
Yes.
Well, you have to eat them.
Anyway, so pickle days coming up.
When did pickle ball become such a?
When did that, where was I in a coma when this happened?
When we're trying to get the Racine Pickleball group out.
When did this become a sport?
I don't know.
I really don't know a lot about pickleball.
I thought I was in a coma.
I woke up from a coma and all of a sudden pickleball is the new national sport.
When did this happen?
Where was I?
All right, so and people love pickles and they have, they have pickle ice cream there.
I can't imagine that.
But Pickle Day is coming up this Saturday.
Correct.
All special pickle stuff going on.
All special
pickle
stuff.
I want to hear my pickle story real quick.
So when I was a little kid, my cousin Robin was a couple of years younger than me.
And when we were in the diner, they had free pickle, a piece of pickle slices.
And she took one.
I said, you're the Pickle Queen.
And she stopped calling me Pickle Queen.
Now I call her Pickle Queen every.
So my aunt, my mother said, stop calling her Pickle Queen.
Pickle Queen.
And I kept doing it.
She's in her sixties today.
Whenever I speak to her, she goes, this is the Pickle Queen.
Nice.
Funny you don't forget those things.
And the more my mother and my aunt told me to stop, honestly, I'll stop calling her Pickle Queen.
And it was like nine years old.
I'm just still remembers to this day because she liked pickles.
All right.
The next one coming up is the Dockside demo.
And what is this about?
So Manny from Old Madrid.
comes to the farmer's market and does a cooking show.
He was just last week,
and he'll be every second Saturday of the month to the end of October.
And he buys all the fresh produce that morning and then prepares samples for all of us.
So it was wonderful.
He was just there last night.
Paella.
Yeah.
We got a paella from there.
Yeah.
And it's always crowded there, too.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, here's something I really like.
And by the way, that's coming up August 8th at Oxide Demo.
August 22th is Corn Fest.
Yes.
So the first 200 people will get free hot roasted corn.
Excuse me.
That's smoke.
Yeah.
And yeah.
And it'll all be corn themed.
So again, like pickle themes, we'll be able to taste
corn
salsa and all the wonderful things that sweet corn bring to us at this time of year.
When I was a kid, here we go again.
When I was a kid, there was one farm on all of Long Island, and my father knew the guy who ran the farm.
And corn was their big thing.
It's not there anymore.
It's housing development now.
But Guido Folia, he ran this farm.
And at dinner time, his wife served this big Italian meal.
Then he said, all the kids, go out, grab some ears of corn.
And we grabbed them out in the field.
We took, you know, once we can find we pulled it and we shut them.
We got all the stuff off.
We threw in a big pot to boil.
And then we had corn for dinner.
It was it was it was really my father did it.
We were on a road trip when I was a kid.
He pulled over to the side of the road, went to some field, pulled into your court and ate it right off the thing.
It's amazing.
Rockhorn is amazing.
And we'll have it at the taste attempt for.
probably not this coming week, but the second week, because it just, it's wonderful.
If you've never tried it, you need to try
it raw.
I get that face between my teeth.
That big face, and it's hard to eat corn with that face between your teeth.
But I do love corn.
I love eating corn.
Now, there are two ways to eat it.
Across like a typewriter, or just roll it like this.
I have a picture on my phone.
I was at a corn eating contest, and this is years ago, and I was against the folks at channel six.
Vince Gibbons and a bunch of people there.
And there was one guy there who, how many years of corn can you eat in five minutes?
And this guy just cranked it around with it.
And just, I said, how is he doing this?
He just cranked it.
He didn't go, do you go across or go?
I do across.
Yeah, I do across, yeah.
But he was cranking it around like it's a, you know, machinery thing.
Right, right, right, right.
And that's how we got all the corn.
And they inspect the cobs.
And one, two, three.
And where is he doing this?
Mine's covered in butter, so it'd be way too slippery.
Oh, man.
OK.
And Cornfest is coming up on August 22.
OK.
August 29, Apple Day.
Yeah.
So we'll do that same thing.
We'll celebrate Wisconsin apples.
At that time, we would have a huge variety of apples to taste, because the orchards will be into the market at that point.
You're going to do like a William Tell thing, shoot an apple up some kid's head.
No,
no bobbing for apples because that's disgusting.
It's alive in the water.
Yeah.
But you're not going to shoot an apple off somebody's head with an
arrow.
Oh, OK.
I was hoping you'd do that.
All right.
September 5th, the salsa showdown.
Right, that's one of the best ones to come in at 10.
We'll have 10, we'll have five and five.
So five local vendors that sell salsa at the market and then five local restaurants will come in and give samples.
We'll divide all the samples up into small cups.
Everyone will get a bag of chips and we will have guest judges vote on their favorite and then we'll have the community vote on their favorite.
It's a great way to try different salsas.
The public library once held a
Hot sauce eating contest with salsa hot sauce.
And you had 10 hot sauces and you had a sample.
Then you rated them and a bunch of people there was free to go.
Except number eight.
And I'll never forget it.
I take me to the hospital, take me to the hospital.
What they used was cooking.
A number eight was a cooking hot sauce.
It wasn't meant to be scooped up in a chip.
And I was there were two people, me and some other guy out of the 16 people there couldn't handle it.
That's what my wife didn't burn your mouth.
It was hot.
Pat, I was against the wall, you know, they had milk there to drink, so you could cool it off.
Wow.
So you like salsa, though?
Salsa.
Yeah.
OK,
so why don't
you be one of the judges?
Oh, no, no, no, I'm not that good at it.
I'm not that good at it.
But, you know, I eat it and everything tastes good to me, you know, so.
Well, there'll be apple salsa and pickle salsa,
so you will have
to try
those.
No, not going to happen.
They got a dockside demo coming up on September 12th, what's that?
Right, so the same thing.
Manny will come.
every second Saturday of to the end of the season.
So I believe he has three more left.
And so that's he does the dockside demos.
Spud fast.
Now, spuds are potatoes and big spud fast coming up on September 19th.
Right.
So the Wisconsin Potato Association will be there and they have a huge trailer that they bring in with like a potato museum, so to speak.
And so they will be joining us at the festival park.
to talk about Wisconsin potatoes
love potatoes my wife she she had like 16 of them the other day all different sizes and she makes different meals at them but she's got the patience to peel them and do all that kind of I don't have the patience to do that stuff but she does have does a great job on it love potatoes all right that's September 19th whoa that's good all right another dark side demo coming up to 10 from Manny okay yep and the big finale October 24th
Well, October 24th, Fall Fest.
Right.
So we're going to pull all the stops out and just celebrate the fall season.
There'll be pumpkins and there'll be, you know, all the Halloween items should be available at the market.
And we're going to invite all the vendors back, whether you were out and just celebrate the fall season.
There'll be pumpkins and there'll be, you know, all the Halloween items should be available at the market.
And we're going to invite
all the vendors back, whether you were in May through the end of October, all the vendors will be back on Festival Park Grounds and to celebrate the last one of the year.
When I was trick or training as a kid back to my childhood days, you know, we had paper bags.
You didn't use plastic ones like you do today, but you had paper bags up to this woman's house and she took an apple and dropped it in the bag right through the bottom of my bag.
I said, lady, now you owe me a bag, but you're a little kid.
You don't talk back to adults.
You didn't then anyway, but she took it right through the bottom.
What was she thinking the moron?
She just ruined my day and I got home again in the bag because all my candy fell out to the bottom.
Care about the apple, all my candy fell all over his side.
I was stuffing my pockets now.
I was probably crying too.
I don't remember.
All right.
So the Racine Farmers Market, it's at Rotary Park, AKA Festival Park, and it's every Saturday morning, 10 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
Correct.
And just go down there, meet the vendors and.
grab their food and it should be good.
Yes, please, please come in and shop local.
And
if you're worried about cyclosporiasis, I actually looked it up on that, had it pronounced it.
It's not cryptosporidium.
That's a great bug on a great lake.
Yes, I remember.
This is cyclosporiasis.
Don't worry about it because this is food that was probably just picked the day before.
Correct.
And people wash their hands and it's lettuce that's clean.
It's fruits and vegetables just picked.
They bring it down there fresh.
So if you want to stay away from that kind of stuff, there it is.
And then make your own bag lettuce.
Yeah, absolutely.
Please join us.
I have to do that now.
I can't.
I don't trust it.
I got it by my own bag lettuce.
My wife bought two bags of iceberg lettuce.
She was going to quick do something.
Squirrels are eating it now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
I said to her, don't you care?
The squirrels are going to get cyclosporiasis.
They can handle it.
The birds in the squirrels are eating the bag lettuce.
That's done when I were eating fresh.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Don Carrillo, the manager of the Racine Farmers Market.
Don't forget they're at Festival Park, aka Rotary Park, right there by the grassy area.
And you can visit them every Saturday rain or shine.
10 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
They're undercover.
And if you see them, you'll be undercover, too.
Thanks a lot.
How do people find out all this stuff that we just mentioned?
Ah, RacineFarmersMarket.com.
Look at that.
RacineFarmersMarket.com.
You're lucky you got that handle.
I did.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you, Don.