Farmer's Market Haul, July 4th

The July 4th holiday is a big one. And like most holidays, it has its own food associations and traditions.  Strawberries, certainly, and cherries are two.  Both are patriotic colors and come into season around early July.  Pies, cakes and other pastries made with these red fruits or in combination with blue ones like blueberries are on the dessert menu.  Grills are fired up as summer is perfect grill season.  The problem is when these fruits come from conventional farms that use a lot of pesticides, when the meat on the grills comes from factory farms where the animals are fed an improper diet and kept in inhumane conditions.  The problem also manifests itself in the white bread hamburger and hot dog buns, the potato chips fried in vegetable oils, and all the rest of the processed foods that help fill out the picnic.

I celebrated my independence from the industrial food system by going to the farmer’s market bright and early and purchasing the bounty that you see in the photo above.  Going shopping is a pleasure rather than a chore if you have a farmer’s market or a farm that you can buy directly from.  I love talking with the people running the stalls – often times it is the very farmer him/herself!  And just seeing all of the wonderful food and thinking of all the possibilities with the ingredients fills me with optimism.  Cooking food isn’t so bad either.  In the summer you can rely heavily on salads which don’t require a hot stove or hours in the kitchen.  And even in the winter, roasts and soups provide delicious meals and many leftovers with very little effort involved.  And when I do rely on packaged foods or convenience foods, they can be purchased from ethical companies that source good ingredients and create the food in a way as to keep the nutrition in.

Want some examples?  Look no further than the rest of the posts on this blog, or read many of the food blogs linked on the right.  Or stay tuned as I blog over the next few weeks about some of these foods in more detail.  Below the jump you’ll see what I purchased on July 4th and a description based on what I know so far of these foods.

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Farmer's Market Haul

I got up early this morning and went to the Farmer’s Market at Union Square.  The Union Square one is the biggest around.  There are the most vendors, and it is definitely the most crowded.  I do not enjoy that aspect of it.  However, when you get there as soon as it opens, it is not crowded.  I was able to take my time.  I like being able to walk the entire market before purchasing something.  This helps me plan meals in my head and know what to get.  It also allows me to find the best source for each item.  I’m concerned about price and I want good quality.  Getting there early also means the vendors aren’t too rushed.  They can take their time and you can too.  Ask about the meats – are they grass fed?  Do they receive routine antibiotics, or only if an animal is ill?  Is the milk homogenized?  What sort of pest management do you use? Where is your farm located?  I ask these questions and so many more.  It opens up a dialog and helps me understand more about the food I’m purchasing.  It puts them in touch with their customers so they know what things are important to consumers.

I saw a lot of fabulous things – non homogenized, lightly pasteurized, grass fed, organic milk; grass fed buffalo, beef, sheep, and goat meat; raspberries; blueberries; strawberries; the first cherries of the season; piles and piles of greens of every size, shape, and shade of green; edible flowers; tomatoes…  Oh, if only I had an endless wallet and an endless stomach.  I would spend my days cooking and eating everything there is to cook and eat.

Here is what I got (as seen in the photo above, left to right):

• Apricot juice from Red Jacket Orchards
• Currants
• Purple carrots (with tops)
• Beets (with tops)
• Purslane
• Feta goat cheese
• Rhubarb
• Almost 2 lbs of ground lamb
• Lamb sausage

The apricot juice comes from Red Jacket Orchards that sells a lot of juice and fruits like apples.   I don’t drink a lot of juice, preferring to just eat the raw fruit,  but every now and then I’ll get some.  It usually goes into my smoothie, which is what happened to a little bit of this when I got home!

The currants excited me.  I remember my grandma once made a current pie.  I LOVED it!  I need to do some research with my cookbooks and the internet and find a good way to use the currants.  My only concern is that I might not have enough for a whole pie.  If that is the case, I could probably add some other berries to the mix, or instead make a quick bread or something else with the currants.  Any suggestions for my currants?

Purple carrots.  Purple!  Why buy regular carrots when you can buy purple carrots?  Did you know that carrots used to come in a much wider variety of colors?  And our familiar orange carrot wasn’t even the dominant variety?  In the 1500’s or so, the Dutch started selecting for the orange carrots because of the ruling family, The House of Orange.  Clever, isn’t it?  I want to be a food historian; I find this stuff so fascinating.  Purple carrots have more beta carotene than orange carrots.  You can usually look at the color of vegetables to find out how much they have – the darker/deeper the shade, the more beta carotene.  If you are like me and love reading about the history of food in addition to its nutrition, check out The Carrot Museum for more information than you knew existed about the carrot.

I love beets with the tops because then it is like getting 2 vegetables in one.  Beet tops are essentially chard and can be cooked like any leafy green.  The roots I’ll probably boil and put in salad.  I love a good beet salad.

The feta cheese came from a farm full of happy goats.  I got to talk to the lady running the stand and I got to see pictures of the goats.  Goats are actually not grazers if they can help it – they are browsers.  They prefer bushes, weeds, even tree bark to grass, though they will eat grass if they have to.  Sure enough, the goats in the pictures were on weedy pastures on the fringes of forested areas.  No wonder the goats looked so happy and the cheese tasted so good!  These cheese will go in my beet salad.

Purslane is back!  I got this once from my CSA last year and loved it.  It is a weed and is unceremoniously tossed from many yards.  But it is delicious and nutritious!  The flavor is herb-y and lemony.  Very moist and delicate.  For nutrition, it is one of the best source for ALA omega-3.  ALA is the vegetarian source of omega 3.  Purslane is great in stir fries or as an accent to soups, meats, and so many other dishes.

It is still rhubarb season!  I’m so happy.  I haven’t even touched on all of the rhubarb things that can be made.  Rhubarb pie, rhubarb bread, rhubarb sauce to put over yogurt or anything else really…  Any suggestions?

Finally, I stopped by Catskill-Merino Sheep Farm’s stand.  They sell wool and meat, and the occasional plant item that grows on the farm.  They have an online store and they ship, if you don’t live nearby.  The sheep seem to be happy, grazing on very green grass, just as sheep are meant to do.  I haven’t eaten lamb in a long time, so I purchased some ground lamb and a lamb sausage.  I figure I can just use lamb instead of beef when making tacos, spaghetti, meatloaf, stroganoff, or anything that calls for ground beef.

Any suggestions for any of the things I got?  I’m particularly interested in ideas for the currants and rhubarb.

fiddlehead ferns

This post is submitted to Fight Back Fridays and the No GMO Food Challenge Blog Carnival.  Eating wild foods takes me out of the industrial food system, and I won’t be eating any GMO foods.  I like that!

Eating fresh sustainable produce and grass fed beef feels good.  I’m getting superior nutrition because of the way the food is grown, and I’m supporting farmers who are good stewards to this earth so that nutritious food may grow year after year.  One step further is wild food, so long as it is foraged in areas away from pollution (don’t forage along the roadside – car exhaust) and the food is harvested/hunted in a sustainable manner, so new generations can be gathered year after year.

I recently purchased a bunch of wild foods: morels, fiddlehead ferns, wild arugula, nettles, ramps and dandelions.  A lot of these were new foods to me.

Morels are a kind of wild mushroom.  As I discovered, they have a rich and powerful flavor that reminded me of a perfectly cooked steak.  I’ll be eating morels again for sure.

Fiddlehead ferns are the top portion of a young wild fern.  When they are young and growing, they are curled up and look like the end of a violin.  They taste fresh and green and woodsy.  People describe them as being similar to asparagus.

Wild arugula is just like cultivated arugula – good cooked or raw.  A little spicy and quite good.

Nettles, as I described in a previous post featuring them, are green leafy vegetables with a flavor not unlike spinach or kale or some mixture of green leafy vegetables.  They are a bit prickly, so you need to boil them before eating.

Ramps are a member of the Alliaceae family – the same family that gives us the onions, leeks, garlics and chives.  They grow wild in many places and are so popular in Quebec that there is a limit on how many you can collect, so as to prevent them from being over harvested.  They taste somewhere between a leek and a garlic, and are completely edible.

Dandelion greens can be eaten raw or cooked, but they begin to get bitter as they get older.  Best to eat these young and fresh.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with all of these, it being my first time cooking many of them.  I decided to saute all but the nettles (nettles weren’t included at all in this dish) and toss them with some pasta and lemon and topped with Parmesan cheese and another drizzle of olive oil.  It was delicious, though I realized at once that I could have easily made the morels and fiddleheads the star of the show.  In fact, I wouldn’t have objected to a plate filled with sauteed morels and little else!  Being my first time cooking most of these, it was a lesson in preparation as well as taste.

If you decide to go for any of these wild foods I’ve mentioned, a few tips:

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Rhubarb at the Farmer's Market

Last week was a pretty easy cooking week for me.  I didn’t go to the farmer’s market because I had plenty of fresh produce from my last trip and  I ended up cooking enough over the weekend to last until Saturday.  But a week without cooking and without the farmer’s market had me really itching to go this morning.  I arrived as soon as it opened.

What a great week it was to go!  There were wonderful cheeses, baked breads, several grass fed/pastured/organic meat stalls, and of course, the vegetables.  I walked in and rhubarb immediately caught my eye.  My dad used to grow this in his garden in Alaska when I was growing up.  I ate rhubarb cobblers, pies, crisps, and sometimes, I’d just go into the garden, pick a stalk and eat it raw, dipping the stalk into a bowl of sugar with each bite, to offset the tartness.  How wonderful is rhubarb!  I could hardly contain my excitement and bought 2 lbs.  Now, what to do with it all?  This is the kind of problem I like to have!

Then the asparagus.  Waves and waves of asparagus, all bundled up.  Every stall had a huge selection.  I had to get some of that.  I also got some sweet potatoes, inspired by Delicious by Nature, some radishes, and some apples.  I  got enough greens for a couple of salads, so I grabbed a cucumber to help round out the salad.

On my way out, I spied another section of the Farmer’s Market I hadn’t seen before.  There were never this many stalls before, so there was one section set a bit apart from the others.  There was the mushroom stall.  I love mushrooms, and I try to eat some regularly.  The man there was very friendly and helpful.  I got a bunch of portobellos.

Then it was off to my farmer’s pickup, where in addition to some beautiful fresh eggs, and dairy, I got a pint of wild morels he foraged on his farm land!  How amazing is that?

What a fantastic morning, and all of this by 10am.  But still, by the time I got back home, I still had an ache in my heart.  Fiddlehead Ferns -I wanted some.  Desperately.  And the farmer’s market I went to failed to have any.  A huge disappointment.  No matter, I put my food away and set out again, this time for the biggest and best farmer’s market the NYC area has to offer – Union Square.

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I'm a food renegade

It is a wonderfully satisfying trip to get food when you arrive and are greeted by the farmer who not only owns the farm that produces the butter and cheese and vegetables and meat and so forth, but he also works in the field and with his animals daily. You can ask him, “how are the animals doing?” and he will tell you. You can ask him how the grass is coming in. He helps you put your newly purchased food in the bags and thanks you for the purchase.

This is why these days about 90% of my meat, dairy, eggs, vegetables, and fruit comes from CSAs, co-ops, and farmer’s markets. I want to know how the animals are treated before the eggs or milk is collected, before the animals are slaughtered. I want to know what vegetables are fresh and in season. I want to know how they were grown. Meeting the farmer gives me that chance to find out. It also makes me feel safer – I can avoid the massive industrial foodchain that can easily become contaminated (peanuts, anyone? Or the latest warning, sprouts? Before that was tomatoes, peppers, and spinach, not to mention the regular e. coli and salmonella scares…). He is running a smaller farm, so it is easier for him to keep a good handle on quality control. Also, since he is producing less food, if there is an issue, it is likely to be small and since his number of customers is small, it is easily contained. On the rare chance I could get sick from something I ate, it will be easy for me to track down the source of it. I have absolutely no fear for the safety of the food I purchase from farmers. I cannot say the same about the industrial food I purchase.

It is about as real as it gets – having that direct personal connection to the farmer. The only way you could be closer to your food source is if you grew it yourself. Unfortunately, that isn’t an option for me at the moment, living in an apartment in NYC. So I’ll take shaking hands with the farmer instead.

Yes, I am a food renegade, and this post is part of Fight Back Fridays.  This post is also part of Food Roots because I like to know exactly where my food comes from.

Raspberries and Cream

Here in the Northeast, we had an absolutely gorgeous day. It was unseasonably warm, and while some people weren’t ready for weather in the mid 80s, I welcomed it with open arms! I woke up early and took off for the Union Square Greenmarket.

NYC has greenmarkets and farmer’s markets all over the city, but the largest one is probably the one at Union Square. They have everything. Maple syrup, honey, jam, baked goods, vegetables, dairy, meat, even yarn. Visiting is wonderful for food lovers like myself. Except for the crowds. It is so crowded! But still worth going.

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Bell Peppers at the Farmer's Market

Yesterday I went to the Union Square greenmarket. What a sight to behold! There were a LOT of stalls, far more than at the Grand Army Plaza one in Brooklyn. Not that I would expect anything different of course!

People were selling all kinds of wonderful stuff. Lots of meats and root vegetables. Lots of baby greens. There was one guy selling sprouts. And a mushroom stall that was VERY popular. Lots of and lots of pies, breads, and other baked goods. There was a honey stall that looked amazing. Raw honey, honey on the comb, and all kinds of flavored honeys. Like different flavors of jam or something, but all honey. And 2009 New York State maple syrup! I didn’t buy any since I still have a few cups left, though I was sorely tempted. I found a stall that, in addition to meats and things, offered a fine selection of lacto-fermented foods. I ended up buying about a quart of beet kvass.

Beet Kvass is a very interesting thing. I’m going to try making some. Basically, imagine pickled beets. Its like the pickled beet juice – sour and a little bit thick with a beety flavor. I find it delicious, but I ate a lot of pickled beets as a kid and love that flavor.

I also purchased eggs and cabbage. I felt stupid though, because I didn’t get the details on how the laying hens were raised. I normally try to talk with the people selling, but it was a big crowd and I just got nervous or something. I regretted it as soon as I walked away. Though hopefully they won’t be any worse than the free range eggs at the supermarket. They were at least free range, but it would be helpful to know if that means the legal definition (which isn’t very helpful) or if he really meant what we would THINK free range means, a big outdoor yard, access to sunlight and grass and bugs and things in addition to chicken feed.

Oh well, a lesson for next time.

In other news, I should probably try my homemade cream cheese and see if it is any good! I have to admit, I’m a little nervous! I’d never made anything like it before.

Also, I need to see how my water kefir is doing!