Stock up, starch up at market

We are at Your DeKalb Farmers Market, having second lunch.

Second lunch is, to my way of thinking, a fine and vastly underrated meal. It goes by many names and many guises.

The English call it High Tea and subsume its naked gluttony in a kind of one-lump-or-two formality. Children enjoy it as an after-school snack. Office workers refer to it as a coffee break and try and cram all their second lunch needs into 16 ounces of caramel macchiato.

Many people do need a caloric pick-me-up in the late afternoon and usually indulge in something sweet. My daughter and I tend to like our carbohydrates complex.

So on Saturday afternoons when we stock up at the market, we both feel the siren call of the potato.

I also love all the oddball vegetables beckoning from the steam table: the mushrooms roasted to a fare-thee-well until they resemble leather buttons; the Swiss chard with its yellow and red stems; the baked apples and parsnips; the steamed Indian pod called tindora.

But what I really want are the fantastic Moroccan-spiced lentils, the rice pilaf studded with golden raisins, the mac and cheese.

You can always count on a mix here. The international staff at Your DeKalb Farmers Market seem to start with a standard Southern meat and three items (fried chicken, corn bread, collard greens) then mix in whatever needs using up and whatever recipes they've brought from home. I can still remember a feeling of utter joy at discovering "Afghanistan rice" here.

My daughter and I settle into our table with our trays. It is cold inside so we wear our jackets. It is also noisy, so she shouts between bites of sweet potato to make sure I follow her story.

I kind of do —- something about the social arrangement of girls in her fifth-grade class, but after a while I begin to lose track of all the players.

She has eaten her sweet potato to the skin, and I say she has to eat her chicken before moving on to the mac and cheese. I'm happy to see my child show some appetite; she had barely touched her first lunch.

Her story continues, and I begin to nod and phase out. Next to us is a Chinese family —- two kids about 6 and 8, a mother in a sweatsuit and a father wearing a bronze-colored parka with a fur-lined hood. The parents eat rice, vegetables and fried fish; the kids, mashed potato.

On the other side are people speaking English with what I assume to be a Nigerian accent. The woman holds a toddler on her knee and hands him individual curls of macaroni.

A lovely old man and woman sit side by side sharing a small plate of greens, corn bread and baked chicken, and they both smile at me when I look over.

These are our people, I think, as we pack up the remains of my daughter's food. Folks who understand the joy in and reason for a 4 p.m. meal.

> Your DeKalb Farmers Market, 3000 E. Ponce de Leon Ave., Decatur. 404-377-6400, www.dekalbfarmersmarket.com

jkessler@ajc.com