mr. lorenzo, if you please.

sometime in january, i was driving down the road with my boys and i saw a billboard for the yellow green farmers market. i convinced the mister that our life is not complete without a weekly visit to a farmers market, so the following saturday we checked out the place. i tried hard to see this place as the market of my dreams, but reality won...it is a flea market with a few farmers and a pretty name.

fresh herbs. would you like conventional or organic? exactly.

now i have always dreamed of living in a small town - you know, the kind with a main street actually named "main street", home to a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker, where everybody knows my name - so, no surprise that i was itching to include a farmer's market in my weekly grocery shop.

maybe it is the palm tree, but this picture disguises the dinginess of the building.

enter lorenzo's farmers market. a squalid peach-colored building next to the railroad tracks. not exactly the open-air stalls of beautifully laid out produce from my dreams, but i am willing to sacrifice decor for the amazingness that is lorenzo's. a time warp that takes you back thirty years to the days before computerized inventory. here the prices are hand-written on signs and the cashiers have them all memorized to type them into the register. want to change a price? walk to the front of the store and tell the cashiers the new price. wow.

baskets and baskets of deliciousness.

on one side of the parking lot is lorenzo's farmers market. a tiny market bursting with every fruit and vegetable you can imagine and some you cannot. i have found things in that place that i have never heard of and it seems that every trip, there is something new at which to look. golden beets? check. fresh bay leaves? check. fresh garbanzo beans? check. black radishes? check.

love.

and the prices. oh my god, the prices. 99¢ for a pint of grape tomatoes?!? what? 79¢ for an avocado? who are these people? $1.19 for a bag of basil? puh-lease. last saturday i walked out with my three reusable grocery bags bursting at the seams, for a mere $23. heaven.

such an unassuming little place.

across the parking lot is the big daddy market, lorenzo's italian market and restaurant. looks like a whole lot of nothing from the outside. inside it is dreamy. upon entering, the first thing to greet you are two cases of homemade pasta. yum.

fresh, hand-made pasta. oooh la la.

wander around the little store and you will find a restaurant/café alongside several aisles of groceries. wrapped around this is the bakery, deli, butcher, and seafood counter. that is right kids, i found the little market from main street, usa, plopped in the middle of bustling miami. amazeballs.

an aisle devoted to pasta. both sides. dreamy.

and like its little farmers market cousin, it is bursting at the seams with yummy goodness. lots of things i know and a whole lotta craziness of which i had heard, but had never seen and certainly would not know where to buy. 20 pound bags of couscous? check. grape leaves? which brand would you like? pasta? there is an entire aisle!!! tomatoes in every form you can imagine? got it. cardamom pods you could not find anywhere else? check. and while the prices at the italian market are not jaw-droppingly low, they are no higher than the regular grocery store.

grape leaves, if you please.

whoa, olive oil. no joke, somewhere in that collection is a $58 bottle.

it only took me five and a half years of yearning for a farmers market, to discover that all this time, the little shop of my dreams has been 0.8 miles from my house.

p.s. yes, i plan to blatantly ignore the fact that we missed the entire month of march. details.