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February Market Report, by Stacey Harwood Lehman

During one of the coldest days of this winter season, I trudged up to the Union Square Farmers market to check out the offerings. The pickings were slim compared with the summer-time abundance. Still, I was able to find enough to make a substantial winter meal: short ribs from grass-fed beef, onions, carrots, daikon radish. A Korean-style stew was in my future.

My new favorite bakery (Greenpoint-based She Wolf) was open and selling Pullman loaves, perfect for French toast made with eggs from any number of vendors. I bought a large loaf with the intention of freezing one half and making sandwiches with the other.

If I wanted to (read: if I had a bigger freezer and refrigerator), I could have gotten seafood, prepared bone-broth, all sorts of fermented vegetables, and even a bottle of whiskey for post-prandial sipping.

Upon completing my circumnavigation of the market, I stopped at the GrowNYC information tent to get my “Winter Warriors” card punched. Since I visit the markets regularly, it won’t take long for me to earn the ten punches needed to qualify for a market prize.

GrowNYC initiated Winter Warriors in 2015 to encourage shoppers to visit the markets throughout the year, not just during the warmer months. It seems to me that the farmers and other vendors are the warriors, schlepping to and from the city in harsh weather to set up shop so we can buy fresh goods. Let’s show them some love.

Thinking about the meal I would be preparing with my market goods had me rifling through my recipe folder. It’s real, not virtual, and among the pages torn from magazines and newspapers are a number of recipes hastily scribbled on scraps of paper. These are my favorites and apparently I’m not the only one who values these endangered artifacts of our pre-internet way of exchanging recipes. Award-winning chef, journalist, cookbook author, and international restaurant consultant Rozanne Gold is curating an on-line series based on handwritten recipes. She’s looking for submissions. So find that recipe-stuffed folder or shoebox, scan or take a photo of a recipe and send it to Rozanne along with a 300-500 word essay about how it came to you. You’ll be helping to preserve a piece of our culinary history.

 

feature image via Edible Manhattan. 

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December Market Report by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

Do you feel it?  The holiday season has officially shifted into high gear. The pressure, the dread, the shopping wrapping unwrapping returning:  “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—“  So begins William Wordsworth’s sonnet about how we’ve lost touch with nature. If this was true at the time of its composition (1802), it is even more so today. Just look at the panicked expression on the faces of shoppers crowding the aisles of a department store. Or think of how easy it is to buy gifts from on-line mega retailers without thinking about the underpaid child in some far-off land who worked long hours to make something with a half-life of about ten minutes.

There are alternatives. We can shop locally.  Even better, we can make donations to organizations committed to helping others.  Here are a few suggestions:

God’s Love We Deliver prepares and delivers nutritional meals to people with life-altering illnesses living in all five boroughs of New York City, Westchester and Nassau Counties, and Newark and Hudson County, New Jersey. You can make a donation or shop from the on-line gift shop. I can personally recommend Chuck’s Famous Brownies.

Now in its fifth year, FoodCorps is a nationwide organization that teaches kids about nutrition and real food to help them grow up healthy. FoodCorps recruits talented leaders for a year of paid public service building healthy school food environments in communities with limited resources.

Since 1993, Growing Power has worked to provide people in all communities with access to healthy, high-quality, safe, and affordable food. Growing Power began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a place for teens who needed work; it is now a national nonprofit organization that annually produces thousands of pounds of food, employs over 350 teens, trains new farmers, and creates nutrient rich soil from diverted land-fill waste.

Find your local Food Bank and make a donation to help feed the hungry in your own community.

Holiday shopping: Done and done.

Do you have a favorite food or nutrition related organization that needs support? Please use the comment section to add to this list.

Happy holidays to all!

Stacey Harwood-Lehman

feature image via Civil Eats.

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November Market Report by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

“Now the leaves are falling fast, /  Nurses flowers will not last;”:  So begins W. H. Auden’s “Autumn Song,” reminding us of the passing of time, the year drawing to its close. With each strong gust of wind, trees reveal more of their bones. Take a walk through your local farmers market and observe the changing nature of the produce. Goodbye to summer’s lush stone fruits and delicate greens. These are being replaced, week-by-week, by “storage” produce: tough-skinned winter squash, onions, potatoes, and fall’s apples and pears. In recent years, a few industrious farmers have learned to extend summer by selling bags of frozen fruits and vegetables. Still, as winter approaches, it might become increasing difficult to imagine another meal of stuffed acorn squash.

Tempting as it may be to skip the farmers markets in favor of the imported melons and tomatoes you may find in your local grocery store, resist. Find a pair of fingerless gloves (to make it easier to count your change) and get going. Farmers at the market need your patronage year round.

A recent report by the New York City Department of Economic Development states that New York City has “the largest and most diverse outdoor urban farmers’ market network in the country,” with 82 markets throughout the five boroughs that support more than 200 local farmers.”  These markets not only improve access to healthy foods, they also provide jobs, catalyze nearby business growth, and support farmers across the region. According to the director of NYC’s Greenmarkets, “85% of vendors say that they would be out of business without the markets.”

Take an early morning walk through your local farmers market and you’re likely to spot chefs from nearby restaurants picking up crates of whatever looks good to them that day. You can spot them in their restaurant whites and if you overcome your shyness, they might tell you how they’re going to prepare this exotic vegetable or that fruit. By doing just that, I learned about “papalo,” an herb commonly grown in the Puebla region of Mexico. It tastes like a cross between arugula and cilantro and is layered in the popular “cemita,” a sandwich with its own special roll and ingredients that might include anything from a fried chicken cutlet and avocado to jellied pigs feet. Delicious.

You can find out more about NYC’s farmers markets, how they’ve changed themselves and changed the way we eat, by reading the NYCEDC report here.

feature image via Most Lovely Things

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October Market Report by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

In Ithaca, New York, where I spend most summers and holidays, one can pick from among several Community Supported Agriculture projects. You pay in advance for a “share,” and each week of the growing season you receive a bag or box of whatever local produce happens to be ripe and ready. This economic model provides a certain amount of insurance to the farmer, whose income no longer depends upon optimal growing conditions. If bad weather or blight hits, or if there’s some other catastrophe that harms the crops, the farm and farmer will survive.

CSAs have grown and proliferated to the point where these days they almost seem ubiquitous. I can now buy a share in a flower CSA, a meat CSA, a fruit CSA, and even a bread CSA, or “crust-fund,” offered by a local artisanal baker.

It was not ever thus. Back in the late-1980s, I was part of a merry band of renegades who started the second or third (depending upon whom you ask) CSA in the country. We had a small farm in Washington County, New York, and with a lot of hard work, were able to recruit eighty members the first year; in subsequent years we capped our membership at 100 families. A few years in we negotiated an arrangement with a farm that had a small bakery cobbled together from the kitchen of a defunct schoolhouse. I became one of the bakers, and each Friday for the growing season I took mornings off from my job, left my home in Albany, NY at 4:00 a.m., drove to Caretaker Farm in Williamstown, Mass, ground the wheat and baked loaves of whole-wheat bread that I delivered to our shareholders. (Our CSA lasted for seventeen years. You can listen to our farmer Janet Britt talk about our early days here beginning at 5:00).

It was from my experience as a shareholder in a CSA that I learned the value of eating seasonal produce. To this day I cannot eat a tomato in November. My CSA membership led me to speculate about the origins of certain dishes, the discovery of which “does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star,” as the French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously observed.

One day in late summer during my first year, my CSA bag contained eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, onion, and celery. How would I combine these ingredients? Caponata! Of course! I like to imagine that the dish had its origins in much the same way: a home cook in Sicily harvested her kitchen garden, raided her pantry (for dried currants, pine nuts, olives, olive oil, and vinegar), and voila! a new dish was invented.

CSAs are great. They force a cook to be creative. If you cannot grow your own food you can at least support those who grow it for you. The New School makes first-hand experience of a CSA available to students. Hat tip to Milano Professor of Management Dennis Derryck, who founded the Corbin Hill Project, which connects farmers in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State with New York City communities. The New School is a drop off point for weekly shares. You should join!

feature image via Crabtree Farms.

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