A Vegetable Grows in Long Island City

The Brooklyn Grange is planting a 40,000 square foot vegetable farm on a rooftop in Queens.

I heard about this project initially when taking a pizza class a couple of months back with guys from Roberta’s and Pulino’s.  They mentioned that seedlings were planted, and the Brooklyn Grange team was close to securing a rooftop.  The plan is to raise an acre of organic vegetables, create a green space smack in the middle of the city, have a neighborhood farm stand, and supply area restaurants with the most local food they could imagine (delivering on bikes whenever possible!).

The group is in the final week of their Kickstarter fund raising campaign.  They have just under 25% of their goal left to raise.  If you are not familiar with Kickstarter–it is a site where you can donate as little as $1 to a project of your choice, but unless the goal is met by the deadline, the group won’t get any of the money pledged.  Take a peek, if anything just to learn a lot more about this important, innovative, and delicious project.

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Fancy Food Show in NYC!

I have been interested in going to this event for years.  The National Association of the Specialty Food Trade’s Fancy Food Show will be in New York City at the Javits Center, From June 27-29.  180,000 products will be featured, including “confections, cheese, coffee, snacks, spices, ethnic, natural, organic and more.”  There will be 2500 exhibitors from 81 different countries.  And I imagine a sample or two…

Typically the show is in San Francisco in the winter, and NYC in the Summer.  However the upcoming schedule looks like the next two summers the show will be in Washington DC instead.  So New York, get your fancy on while you can!

Tickets are $35 through 5/21, and $60 thereafter.  However, clicking on the link below will allow you to get a ticket for $25!  See you there.

Attend the Summer Fancy Food Show for just $25

The Summer Fancy Food Show, June 27-29, in NYC is North America’s largest specialty food trade event and attracts 2,400 exhibitors showcasing over 180,000 specialty foods and beverages. Take advantage of this invitation and I hope to see you there!

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Jamie Oliver on getting our kids to eat better.

If you haven’t seen this yet, it is wonderful and absolutely worth twenty minutes of your time.  It made me cry, and reminded me all too well of what I saw, first hand, in cafeterias of NYC public schools all last year.

On visiting an elementary school classroom, Jamie comments:  “Immediately you get a really clear sense of if the kids have any idea where food comes from… If kids don’t know what stuff is, then they will never eat it…We’ve got to start teaching kids about food in schools.  Period.”

“The home needs to start passing on cooking again.  For sure.  Pass it on as a philosophy.  And for me it’s quite romantic, but it’s about if one person teaches three people to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself twenty-five times, and that’s the whole population of America.”  –Jamie Oliver

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Rick Bishop

Farmers are my heros.  As a chef and food fanatic, they are the mamas and papas, surrogates and midwives of my most precious ingredients.  As an upstate resident, they are the fierce protectors of our land, farming heritage, and heirloom varieties of animals and vegetables.  And since moving upstate, I have had the great pleasure of getting to know many of these amazing neighbors–and then getting to visit them at the market in Union Square.

Rick Bishop of Mountain Sweet Berry Farm is one of the rockstars of the Greenmarket, and a friend of ours.  He is adored by the most brilliant of chefs and grows the most magnificent strawberries (Tristar) and heirloom fingerling potatoes, among many other treasures.  Keep an eye out for his table overflowing with ramps in the early spring.

Seriouseats.com did a great short film about Rick  a little while back.  Definitely worth a few minutes of your time, particularly in the doldrums of winter.

I love Alexandra Guarnaschelli’s comment about Rick in the video:

“When I buy your potatoes, and I bring them back to the restaurant, and I put them in the oven, I can smell your soil, baking, in the oven…I love your dirt, and he said “It’s not dirt, it’s soil, and it’s a living, breathing thing.”

Yes.

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The Leanest Month

Beginning a few years ago, my husband and I have made almost every effort to cook and eat as seasonally and locally as possible. We are continually making changes to our lifestyle, but don’t feel like we are really making any huge culinary sacrifices. Each season we do dig up more and more of our backyard to add to our vegetable and herb gardens (currently at about 2,200 sq feet). We blanch, freeze, can, dry and preserve as much as we physically have time for, both from our own plants and all the area farmers markets. All with hopes of having a little bit of those glorious, most prolific, summer produce months available to us in colder times.

However, this time of year it gets tough. We are down to about five of the treasured quart jars of plum tomatoes we bought in flats from our farmer Seth Heller at the local market in August and canned over a weekend (all 45 of our heirloom tomato plants died in this year’s blight, described here by Dan Barber http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09barber.html?scp=1&sq=tomato%20blight%20barber&st=cse). We’ve mostly used up our squash, garlic, shallots, and beets that were in cold storage, and are growing a little weary of produce, though frozen minutes from when picked, plucked from our freezer.

Thankfully, there are farmers markets still operating this time of year!

I visited the Union Square Greenmarket in NYC this past Friday (I split my time nearly 50/50 between the city and the very rural NY Catskills–more on this later). Though smaller than in warmer months, there is still a strong number of booths, offering a big variety of produce, meat, cheeses, and local foodstuffs to the urban locavore.

I did some grocery shopping, and came home with a heavy bag of fresh food. Parsnips, carrots, celeriac, crimini and king oyster mushrooms, kale and Mutzu apples. Combined with the chickens and eggs we get from the local farm Quails-r-Us each week, February is not looking so much like a culinary wasteland in upstate New York. Recipes from this week’s bounty to follow shortly, as well as every week hereafter.

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