At the Market With Audrey

My friend Audrey is in Town from LA and is staying with us.  Yesterday we went shopping at the Union Square green market to buy supplies for dinner.   Audrey has a great eye and is a wonderful photography who is really digging her Hipstamatic app on her phone.  

These totally natural un-sprayed beyond organic natural apples and pears are for eating and are very sweet.  I love the way they look and they are gown by one of my all tiem favorite farmers at the market the Grozynski Ornery Farm.

This is headless me.  At this age I think I prefer this look.

The corn this year is so amazing.

Oops here's the missing head!

First Strawberries of the Season

Wow that was fast, but the farms in South Jersey brought to the Union Square market today the first Strawberries of the season.

 

and of course I also bought some rhubarb!

Pumpkin Carving

These two gargantuan pumpkins were used as canvases for some amazing artists who created scary and amazing friezes on them.  Sponsored by Grow NYC at the Union Square Green Market.

I love the cow being abducted by aliens and sucked into the flying saucer.

Berried Treasures

Berried Treasures Consistently the Best Produce in the Market

See the long row of potatoes (below) in the back by the guy wearing the black t-shirt?
Best selection of heirloom potatoes in the city and by far the most delicious!

Last year Franca Tantillo, the ex nurse from Staten Island who started Berried Treasures over 25 years ago, was selling Trout in addition to her amazing strawberries, potatoes, beans, peas and herbs.

Yesterday, when I went by she had some wild watercress for $3 a bunch.  I came home and tossed it up with a simple mustard vinaigrette and gobbled it down. Her trout was also out of this world, but then everything she sells is (I have to ask her why she stoped selling it this year?).

She doesn't have a vast variety of produce; instead she focuses on a few items and does them really well.  I always thought that she named her farm in Cooks Falls, NY (Western Catskills) for her famous strawberries, sweet little gems that have the most intense strawberry taste of any sold at the market.  Then yesterday as I was looking at her produce and realized that maybe it's a play on the word berried/buried because in the spring she sells a lot of berries but in the late Summer/Fall she sells a lot of buried treasures: potatoes.  Her tomatoes are damn good too.

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Lani's Farm Stand

The bounty of the Fall season is so beautiful!  This last picture of squash blossoms made me think of a recipe I saw recently where instead of deep frying and battering them, as is usually done, they were stuffed with different kinds of crab, then pan fried lightly and served with a black truffle sauce.  How good does that sound?

These pictures are all of Lani's Farm Stand which is at Union Square Green Market on Mondays.  They grow organically and it is well worth the effort to make sure you get to the Monday market to visit Lani's stand.  They have the best salad greens anywhere (she mixes mint and basil in with delicate baby greens: sheer perfection!)

A great cookbook with inspirational recipes to take advantage of all this amazing bounty is Harvest to Heat (not sure about that title...) but the book is wonderful, I've made several recipes from it and so far they are all winners.  Written by Darryl Estrine and Kelly Kochendorfer and with a lovely forward by Alice Waters.  The theme of Harvest to Heat is the relationship between farmer (fisher, cattle raiser etc.) and cook. The authors go all over the country and find pairings of the two.  So, for example, I made this amazing fish dish where the fish is poached in a sweet pepper butter sauce.  The recipe is a collaboration between Gabriel Rucker of Le Pigeon restaurant in Portland and Manuel and Leslie Lukas Recio of Viridian Farms.

And of course be sure to buy it at my Amazon Store where I keep adding more and more wonderful Urbanfoodguy approved goods for you and your kitchen. 

Market Deals

A 2 Quart basket of early Cortland Apples at the Cheerful Cherry stand at Union Square Market this Saturday. Cheerful Cheery is one of my favorite stands, they have the best sour cherries in the market and every year they have amazing specials like this.

These apples are very tart and crisp, I like to eat them, but Neil found them to be too sour for his liking. Regardless they if you eat them, make sauce with them or turn them into a wonderful rustic tart you really can't go wrong at this price point.