A trip to Haymarket

Just wanted to post briefly on a trip my boyfriend and I took to Haymarket.  For those of you not familiar with Haymarket, it’s basically an open-air produce market downtown in Boston, near Faneuil Hall.  It’s a bit of a Boston landmark, and I’ve been there before, but sometimes it can be a bit of a tourist trap (the most expensive produce tends to be at the ends).  There’s a lot of produce to choose from, but you have to keep in mind that most of the fruit and vegetables are right at their peak freshness.  You’ll be tempted by the prices, but don’t buy more than you need, unless you’re good at preserving/freezing/storing fruit and vegetables.  I remember a few years ago I went, and fell prey to the beauty of cheap and fresh fruit.  Needless to say, plenty of the fruit I bought went bad before I could enjoy it.

To give you an idea of what the prices are, we paid $1 for 8 peaches, $1 for 10 limes (we’ll be making limeade), $1 for a pineapple, $1 for 4 apricots, $1 for a pound of strawberries, and $1 for a bag of 4 garlic bulbs.  I think the price for 3lbs of bananas and 3 limes were also $1.  So yes, it’s cheap.  It’s definitely exciting to get such good deals, and my boyfriend and I have be getting good use out of my magic bullet food processor/blender that I got for Christmas to make all sorts of different fruit smoothies.

Another thing to note is that not all the fruit and vegetables are locally grown.  Much of the produce comes from the Chelsea Produce Terminal nearby.  The vendors at Haymarket find the best deals in Chelsea during the week and then sell them to consumers on Friday and Saturday. (read this news story for more information).

There are also stores in Haymarket that sell fresh meat, fish, cheese, and bread.  I’ve never bought anything from that group, but I’m guessing they’re good deals as well.

I’d like to think that this trip to Haymarket was also helping out my plan to be a healthier person.  We walked around and window-shopped afterward (well, I did go into Crate and Barrel and buy a $3 juicer for the limeade, a bit of an impulse buy), but we got quite a bit of walking in, and it was a beautiful day.  I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I’ve been using MapMyRun to track how much I’ve been exercising.  Granted, most of the walking I do is to and from the subway, but I was excited to find that our walk around Downtown combined with our walk to and from the T added up to 4.13 miles.  Yeah, that’s pretty awesome!  I was also able to enter my workouts that I mentioned in a previous post.  If you enter enough information, it will give you an approximate number of calories that you burned, or the pace that you ran/walked, which I think is pretty cool.  And of course, eating plenty of fruit is a pretty healthy move.  I’m thinking if I’m craving something sweet, it’s better to eat a peach than some ice cream!

So, there’s my review of Haymarket, and MapMyRun, I guess.  I’ve got some pretty exciting news about my job search, but I’ll wait until everything is official before I post…stay tuned!