The tomato that led me to Alison Arians appeared in a dream. It was a yellow heirloom. Voluptuous. Tender-skinned. Grown in the heat. I wanted to pick it, but it was just out of my reach.

I woke up and went directly to the grocery store. The tomatoes were lined up under the white light. Uniform and waxy. I knew them well. Their watery flavor. Their grainy flesh. I couldn’t bring myself to put one in my basket.

Not that I should have been buying anything. Thanks to overflow from several friends’ co-op orders, my refrigerator was full. Too full. There was kale and kohlrabi and weird things called snow apples I didn’t know what to do with. For months I’d been coming home to friends’ extra collards in my mailbox. Dinner guests brought arugula instead of wine. I couldn’t keep up. I was out of recipes. When I got half-and-half in the morning, wilting chard stared me down like a cruciferous Mother Superior.

I had vegetable guilt. And tomato lust. I needed absolution.

A friend suggested I see Alison, who is board president of the Alaska Farmers Market Association, a local baker, cookbook writer and all-around Alaska food guru. On Wednesday around lunchtime, I found myself bouncing down her dirt road on the Hillside.

Alison’s house was simple and shingled and surrounded in wildflowers. When I got there, she was sitting on her front porch waiting for me. She invited me in, handed me a chai — with steamed local milk — and set about cooking lunch.

The vegetable of the day was broccoli, which is at the height of its season. She got hers at the South Anchorage Farmers' Market for 75 cents a head. I watched her peel and slice the thick stems.

I told her about my overflowing fridge. She nodded. It happens this time of year. Co-op shares are huge; everything at the farmers’ markets looks beautiful. Alaskans, denied fresh, local food for a long season, go overboard.

“You feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” she said.

She slipped the broccoli into a steamer and gave me some advice: Buy a lot, process it and put it in the freezer. (She has several processing videos on the South Anchorage Farmers’ Market Web site). She fills two chest freezers. She also suggested giving up the summer co-op order and shopping farmers’ markets. And cook more, she said.

I paged through a few of her favorite recipe books, “Rebar: Modern Food Cookbook” and Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Suppers” and Peter Berley’s “Fresh Food Fast.” The pages were crowded with notes and stickies.

Alison swirled olive oil in a big stainless steel pan and tossed in some garlic and red pepper flakes. We talked about the things we ate growing up in Anchorage. The peaches, expensive but soulless, “ripened” in storage containers on their long journey north. The frozen cubed carrots. The atrocity that is canned green peas. I confessed I didn’t taste a mango until I was 20.

Alison calls herself a “serial entrepreneur” in the local food world. She has the Farmers Market Association, and runs Rise & Shine Bakery with her husband, Dan Schwartz, out of a commercial kitchen in their house. She blogs, she writes, she photographs. She recently helped start a small year-round produce co-op with Glacier Valley Farm. And she’s a mom. Her daughter, Meredith, turns 5 this week.

She tossed the broccoli in the pan and added a surprise ingredient: golden raisins. The toaster popped out some of her whole-wheat sourdough bread. She smeared it with a curry-carrot spread she made and froze when she bought too many carrots. She showed me to a table on her back deck. Before we ate, she photographed the meal for her blog. My first bite was raisin sweet and chile hot.

I asked her if she thought the market for non-supermarket produce seemed to be reaching a tipping point. I’d put the same question to Bob McCarny, Alaska territory manager for Full Circle Farms, a regional organic food co-op out of Washington that offers boxes of fresh produce year-round. He told me they had just one pickup spot, in Juneau, three years ago. Now there are more than 160 statewide, including several out of Bethel, Nome and Kotzebue. Close to 2,000 people in Anchorage get Full Circle boxes. Farmers’ market traffic seems to be growing all summer, Alison said.

“People are hungry to connect with people making and growing their food,” she told me.

“They want to know, 'What do I eat?’ ”

It’s much easier to answer that question at the local farmers’ market than at the grocery store, where there are so many choices, she said.

After lunch, she gave me a quick tour of her in-home bakery. I peered into massive containers of sourdough starter they feed for three days before making bread for the Saturday South Anchorage Market. Then we headed down the hill to the Wednesday market in the parking lot at the Dimond Center.

At the market, Alison introduced me to Arthur Keyes, a farmer who has been her collaborator on several farmers’ market projects as well as the Glacier Valley Farm co-op. He’s in the middle of strawberry season (watch this cool video about it). The berries at his stand were crimson and grocery-store size. I tried one. The flavor bloomed in my mouth with honey and tang.

Cool nights made Alaska produce sweeter, he said. His berries and carrots and possibly even his broccoli had extra sugar compared to produce Outside. Then he let me sample some honey from beekeeper Don Berberich’s hives that sit in his squash fields. I dipped in a finger and tried it. It carried the delicate flavor of squash blossom.

Alison led me through the booths, pointing out Italian kale varieties and gluten-free bread. And then I saw it. The Tomato. It was sitting in a basket, candy yellow and heavy with juice. It was almost exactly like the one in my dream.

Except this time I could hold it in my hand.

The Tomato: (from the Kenley's Alaskan Vegetables and Flowers)

map to farmers markets