Sunday, October 26, 2008
Weird Science
I used to be a straight-up cauliflower hater. Why? Because the typical white, limp cauliflower is nothing but a useless filler on vegetable platters around the world. I pride myself on my ability to avoid cauliflower in any incarnation.
But last week at the market, I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, drawn to a booth with a little hotplate setup that was handing out samples of something smelling lovely. Without even thinking, I plopped a toothpick into the bowl and pronounced the fluffy orange stuff in it delicious. Lo and behold, I was informed that I had consumed cauliflower.
After panicking for a moment, I calmed down. Turns out I had eaten some cheddar cauliflower, which is really pretty and contains 25x more beta carotene than lamewad white cauliflower. So I bought a head, which is delicious when sauteed with a nothing more than garlic, salt and pepper.
Mathematician's Delight
And then D, who is a lover of all things fractal , came home with another crazy cauliflower, the Romanesco variety. It was was even cooler-looking than the cheddar, though I cannot yet vouch for its flavor.
The moral of the story: Try new things. Cauliflower can be good. Nature is cool.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Fall Market Report
Alex at Maxwell's Farmstand displays a fine gooseneck gourd
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Sunday, July 27, 2008
Market Report
Offering my two cents on the locavore/ Slow Food/ sustainable agriculture trend and its consequences seems, to be frank, a bit tired to me. It's not that I don't care--these topics are certainly pertinent to my personal and professional life--I simply don't feel the need to embroil myself in an already much-publicized, highly complicated batch of issues. I do, however, offer the following as food for thought, if you are so inclined:
Epicurious Seasonal Ingredient Map
(One of my personal, thought-provoking favorites): A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss
NY Times Opinion: Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores?
Now.
Moving along.
The point here is to share with you the delicious wealth of fruits and veggies (and meats and cheeses and breads) arriving with the warm temperatures. Above, we have gorgeous stone fruits, a colorful trifecta of beans; below, an assortment of cabbages and scallions, plus carrots, radishes and a strange creature ("famous," according to its signage) known as the Avocado Squash.
Sometimes shopping at the Greenmarket can be intimidating. There are too many booths, too many people, and way too much to choose from. Sometimes I panic when foods with a limited season arrive, because I think I need to buy those garlic scapes/ artichokes/ sour cherries/ one billion other potential things RIGHT NOW BEFORE THEY GO AWAY FOREVER. These feelings are natural. It is important to breathe deeply and soldier on when the panic sets in, lest it become too overwhelming and you miss out on [whatever food] entirely.
Anyhow, this is just a small sampling of what's on display now. Check the Council on the Environment of NYC's Greenmarket Guide for a complete list of market locations, seasonal updates, volunteer information and more. (Also, if anyone has actually done some work at any of the city's Greenmarket, let me know! I want some firsthand perspective.)
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Friday, June 27, 2008
Scape Session
I come from a smelly, smelly family. We love garlic. We love it a lot. My mom used to roast entire heads and we’d pop the cloves straight. I always thought we were somehow unique, until someone (Melissa Clark) with a much larger readership than me wrote in last week’s New York Times about her family’s garlic worship. Turns out I’m not the only smelly kid. Anyhow, Clark details her trials and tribulations with the beautiful and elusive garlic scape, the early-budding flower shoots of the subterranean garlic bulb. I was immediately on a mission (admittedly, a short one, since the Union Square Greenmarket is blocks away from the office). Here are the fruits of my labor:
In her article, Clark recommends making scape pesto, but I didn’t have enough and felt strangely opposed to chopping the shit and shape out of the gorgeous green tendrils. So I decided to make an almost disgustingly healthy and simple stir fry with some fresh sugar-snap peas (also from the USQ market) and leftover cremini mushrooms. Yeah, that’s it. No rice. No noodles. No chicken, no shrimp, no real protein of any kind. Whatever, I try to keep it light one meal a week to offset the bacon/burger/dairy overload I usually clog my insides with. So basically it’s all that vegetable goodness, plus soy sauce (liquid salt—nom nom), sesame oil, a splash of red wine vin, and a wee little bit of fresh ginger.
It was good. The scapes, snacked on raw by a few brave/stupid people (me), lost some of their sinus-clogging bite after they’d been cooked for a few, though I kind of wish they’d kept more…garlicy flavor? It was a bit too mellow for me. The mushrooms absorbed most of the soy sauce and became tender little salt-bombs, and the sugar snap peas remained snappy (side note: does anyone else feel like they’re eating Gushers when the little pods explode while you chew?)
Summertime = vegetables = happy stomach.
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