Mt. Sinai Farmers' Market: Go Uptown, Moses

This little angel lives at the 96th st. Subway Station in the Station Operator's booth; isn't it fantastic? Kinda looks like it's rockin' out.

Given that the Bowling Green farmers' market was so lackluster I decided that I needed to try and get out to another market this week, so I went 80+ blocks away for the Mt. Sinai Hospital Greenmarket, which is at 99th St. on Park and Madison, closer to Madison. Some materials online will tell you that this market meets on Fridays, but don't be fooled, it meets on Wednesdays now. I've made this mistake before, and it's no fun going up to Mount Sinai only for the revelation that there is no deliverance. Er, I mean, no produce delivered. You reap what you sow.

The market itself is small, so don't come uptown expecting some kind of huge gathering of tents. However, there are a bunch of stalls, and they offer a pretty wide variety of things. I would go so far as to say that Mt. Sinai is a small market done right.

It may be small, but it's tough.

It had some missing pieces; no plants, no real "bake" shop, and no fishmonger, so if you're looking for those components you might want to look elsewhere.

However, it did have a very wide selection of both fruits and vegetables, with several varieties of fruit that I haven't seen at a small market before. The presence of a dairy vendor was especially welcome, as I'd exhausted my butter supply last night on browning butter for the fish and pasta I'd made. That recipe will get posted eventually, don't worry.


The dairy stall was actually pretty good; yogurt, cheese, and butter available from both sheep's milk and cow's milk. Ravioli and gnocchi made with sheep's milk. Cave-aged cheeses. An amusing French staffer. They had a wide variety of cheeses, and something that I simply had to buy; fresh mozarella that was ready for sale yesterday. A recipe for how I used it appears at the end. One warning, though, is that their butter is made from both sheep's and cow's milk, and so you need to be careful that you like the flavour of sheep's milk, as it may be different from what you're used to having.


While there was no bake shop, there was a little fruit vendor who also had some wares that were made from his fruits, like pies and cider, so if you're looking for a good pre-made apple pie, this might be your place. I, however, went straight for the cider because it had been pressed only a few days before and is super-fresh. Given that the apple crop is making its way to market right now, it's pretty fantastic.

The vegetable selection is pretty worth it, but the corn is really the best part of this market. It is consistently good. Personally I'm not sure that this market is worth it for a person like our NYU student Amelia, since the market is so far uptown, but for people living on the middle-to-upper East Side this is a place that I would strongly recommend visiting if Union Square is less convenient.

I ended up buying some Roma tomatoes, the fresh mozarella, and the cider. I couldn't resist the idea of doing an insalata caprese for lunch, seeing as I knew I had some leftover basil from the fish I'd made the night before, and if you don't use up basil quickly, it becomes a green and black mess of rot. It turned out fantastically:

This dish is a breeze to prepare. It has all of five ingredients (six if you're feeling like adding a little excitement), and there is no actual heat involved, just chopping. To prepare it as a light lunch for one person, you'll need:

1/2 lb mozarella cheese, fresh. Don't use the hard, rubbery mozarella from the supermarket here. You want your cheese the freshest possible, as its very delicate flavours are what will tie this entire dish together.
1/2-1 lb Roma tomatoes. I use Roma tomatoes because they have more meat than seeds, and so you don't end up with tomato seeds all over eveything and a lot of the flavour translates to the dish itself rather than running off in juice.
Basil; the amount of basil that you use should be based on your own preferences, but I recommend at least one leaf per slice of cheese/tomato that you produce so that you can mix all of the flavours appropriately.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil, again to be added based on your preferences. Do not use "pure" or "light" olive oil, or olive oil that is too old, or has been heated; all of these lack the fantastic flavours of Extra Virgin olive oil because heating or time has destroyed the volatile oleic acids that make the magic happen. Use first press oil if possible.
1 tsp-1 tbsp Salt, again varying to taste
Balsamic Vinegar (I do not actually recommend using this at all; lots of places will give it to you with a caprese salad, but there are a few gastronomy reasons not to apply it. For one thing, its astringency totally masks the taste of the cheese. Second, the fats and oils from the cheese and olive oil block out the less astringent tastes of the vinegar and both worsen the effect while removing its advantages. I suggest only using this if you have cheese that is getting a bit old and losing its flavour, and even then, sparingly. In Italy you will rarely see this served with Caprese, especially because the cheese there has an even more distinct flavour as it is made as intended, from bison milk)

Preparation is simple. Cut the tomatoes and cheese into 1/4 thick slices. Ideally the slices should be able to fit in the palm of your hand, unless you have especially small hands. I suggest cutting both on the plate you intend to use for serving; runoff from the cheese and tomatoes will mix on the plate and soak into the cheese for a nice effect. Arrange the slices along with basil leaves so that the cheese, tomatoes, and herbs cover the plate, are layered, and overlap each other. The whole point of this salad is to make sure the flavours and tastes interact. I tend not to overlap my basil, but that's done mostly for presentation purposes. Sprinkle salt on to taste, but try not to overdo it. Salt can really overpower the mozarella's flavour and turn this into the equivalent of chewy, freshly washed, salted basil. Then, drizzle on the olive oil liberally. I use about 4-6 tbsp of oil, though I've never measured. I tend to just eyeball it, since I'm pretty sure you can go wrong unless you completely coat everything on the plate in oil. Don't do that.

This salad is a very refreshing lunch. Enjoy!

Bowling Green Farmers' Market Revisited and Panned

If you can see the customs house, then you are near the Bowling Green farmers' market.

Today, I tried to give the Bowling Green Greenmarket a second chance. It just has such a fantastically redundant name that, really, I couldn't let my first impression condemn it.

My second impression, however, was sufficient. The basic details are that the market is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 AM to 5 PM. I arrived at about 2 PM, so it's possible that things are better in the early morning, but I really doubt it. The space available for the market is so insufficient that I really just don't know where more stalls would fit.

The entire market is pictured here

Three stalls. Two of them with more or less identical offerings, though one had corn and potted plants and the other did not. One had cleaner okra. I was not pleased.

The middle stall was a little interesting. It carried baked goods with a dessert focus, and seemed to have some pretty good confectionarial technology going on. Unfortunately it just wasn't what I'm looking for when I try to get food. Pre-baked desserts, to me, are like the souvenir shop of the foodie world. They're generally overpriced for their quality, they're not as good as what you could make yourself, and while they might look good for an impulse buy, sometimes they sit around until you don't want them anymore.


The thing that this vendor did have, though, was the advantage - I think - of offering a product that the likely consumers at Bowling Green would be interested in. It was a little difficult for me to figure out quite what the intended audience of this market is; after all, the place is situated right near all of the major stock trading groups and many financial buildings downtown, there is not a lot of residential living around there, and the park attracts people who want to see sights during the hours that it is open, not regular stiffs who want to work their 9-5 jobs. I can only assume that it grabs two markets; tourists, and commuters to the financial businesses who might need to bring the odd dessert or forgotten ingredient back home to make sure dinner goes off well.

The baker stall seemed to agree, with its array of premade desserts, but the other two vendors had such an incoherent set of items that I just don't think they would get any purchases from that crowd except by chance. There were certainly people there, but the selection just wasn't very wide and the quality wasn't high enough for me to recommend this market to anyone who doesn't just accidentally happen upon it while in need of cucumbers.

However, because the market was so unfortunate, I decided that I would make my way over to the not terribly far away New Beer Distributors (167 Chrystie St.):


This place easily has one of the widest bottle selections I have ever seen in such a small area. They have specialty brews from a great many US microbrewers, and a very wide selection of imports.

I picked up a few interesting things; the Stone Brewing Co.'s 08.08.08 Vertical Epic, released the same day as the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies. Stone has been doing a series of "Vertical Epic" brews since 02.02.02, all of which are designed to be aged until 12.12.12, at which point they are to be all opened and tried together. I'll be trying the 08.08.08 now, and then will store a second bottle until that later date.

The second interesting beer is something I've had before; He'Brew's Origin, which is an ale that is brewed with pomegranate juice and I find quite enjoyable. But the best of all is definitely Paulaner's Oktoberfest Märzen. It's like caramel on toast, with a honey undertone. It's delicious and malty. Love it.

After that, I tried to make my way on foot to Union Square, as I like walking, and was interrupted by becoming an innocent bystander to a street fight in Chinatown that got kind of dangerous and I'm glad I got away from unscathed. Not everyone was so lucky, but we made sure the police got called and hopefully everything will sort out well. Very unusual for Chinatown, though.

Finally I made it to Whole Foods, where I got some locally caught bluefish, an orange, and a lemon, along with some linguine and basil. These became an interesting dish, which I'll pass on to my readers once it has become finer-tuned. Until next time...

The Loftier Branches

Frequently I have to fight the impulse to turn this into a general purpose blog on sustainability, especially scientific and engineering problems in making our society cleaner, leaner, and greener. It's already mean enough.

Of course, I fight this impulse with my strong desire for this blog to remain useful as a tool for those seeking to find good farmers' markets. Luckily (!) I have discovered this new phenomenon wherein individuals with little formal journalism training - if any - write episodic, topical websites.

Namely I was looking up an old friend who I have not spoken with in some time, and discovered that this fine fellow has started a blog that lets me vicariously live out my desire to wax poetic about awesome things like alternative energy and cellulosic biofuels. He calls it Green Rumors, and after close investigation I have decided that it rocks pretty hard. And so, gentle readers, I pass its noble, epic deeds on to you. Hope you enjoy it.

St. Mark's Greenmarket: Watch out for the Goodfeathas!

Tuesday saw me visiting the St. Mark's Greenmarket, which is one of the smaller Greenmarkets available. The location is, unsurprisingly, right in front of St. Mark's Church in a little parklike area there. It is located at 10th st. and 2nd Avenue, and it has longer hours than most of the Greenmarkets around, running from 8 AM to 7 PM on Tuesdays. It's not available year round, but that seems to be true for most of the Greenmarkets. I arrived around 3 PM and found that things were about as busy as the small area where the stalls are set up would permit:


As the first Greenmarket I've visited that had a Church looming over it, I must provide a warning about imposing buildings near your farmers' market: Large stone buildings with food supplies out front attract the flying rats also known as pigeons. I, and my outback hat, found this out the hard way when we got dive-bombed. If you're going to be going to this greenmarket, stay under the merchants' awnings!

Now, of course, this little incident gave me some exciting information about the merchants there. Rather than watching my plight with a disconcerned detachment, one of the staffpeople offered me a bunch of paper towels as a means to get the bird's artistic expression off of me. Considering that she was under no obligation to do that, I was left with a pretty good impression of the farmers' who frequent this market.

Other positives include the proximity to Union Square. The market is a short walk from the major subway stop there, and is even closer to the Astor Place 6 train stop, so it is accessible very easily from the entire East Side and slightly less easily from the West Side.

Food-wise, there was a lot of fruit at this farmers' market for its small size. The Dag Hammarskjold Plaza Greenmarket had a crazy variety of tomatoes, but St. Mark's had a similar variety of apples between the few stalls that were there, and enough different peaches to impress me also. I ended up getting $7 worth of tree-ripened peaches and apples, which are making for good snacks. There was also a surprising variety of pears, which I haven't noticed a lot of at other markets. This picture, for example, is mostly apples:

If we return to the NYU student from the Dag Hammarskjold post- and since I think we'll be revisiting her repeatedly, I think I'll give her a name, say, "Amelia Earheart" - we can find a definite use for this Greenmarket. It runs on days when Union Square is not available and is very close to there. Let's say Amelia ran out of fruit because her voracious roommate got the munchies and she simply must have apples for the pie she's making to celebrate the anniversary of her first transatlantic flight! Well, look no further than St. Mark's if that party happens to fall on a Tuesday.

Will they save your pie?

Additionally, it offered me something that the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza market did not. It's pretty important, with lots of types of bread, that you are able to get it fresh on the day you intend to use it. It's also important to me personally that bread be produced using good ingredients by a baker who knows what he is doing. Well, at the St. Mark's Greenmarket, there was a bread stall. With only four stalls, I was pretty happy that one quarter of this market was dedicated towards baking. The bakery was named Bread Alone, and it is an organic, kosher bakery, so perfect for the religious, Jewish, organic-conscious Amelias out there. For $4.75 I picked up a multigrain organic artisan sliced loaf that has made for excellent snacking and will be used for breakfast toast in coming days. I highly recommend it.


As a small market, this isn't a bad stop if there's something you need, and it has fresh bread, which is always a plus for me. It's not something that you would want to visit every day, necessarily, but in a pinch, St. Mark's may just save the day.

Third Avenue Street Fair

In many ways it was a departure from my usual for this particular blog, but I was on the way to the bank this past Sunday when I stumbled upon the entirely unexpected presence of a street fair in the upper regions of Third Avenue. After dazedly winning a burrito from a magical spinning wheel, I proceeded to examine just what was going on.

After wandering around and finding vast numbers of things utterly irrelevant to what I usually like to write about here, including numerous bedsheet sellers, more $1.00 Thai food than you should be allowed to shake a satay at, and a short course in why I don't like Radio Disney, I found a block near Cornell Weill (around 72nd street) with a number of green businesses that had set up stalls.

These, I figured, would be of interest to other people who sit longing for the day when concrete contains chlorophyll and cars run on sunshine and smiles, or at least just sunshine.

For one thing, I had been looking for a green dry cleaner for a little bit, since my shirts are starting to pile up and I'd like to know that getting them cleaned isn't killing the old furry lobsters of Jonathan Coulton fame. Luckily, Green Apple cleaners came to my rescue. They had a rather impressive display out at the street fair, though I have yet to avail myself of their services- I will let you know how it goes! Apparently they use a carbon dioxide jetting system to clean clothes, and as we all know, carbon dioxide seriously needs to be put to some good use around here. Here being planet Earth. Good use being anything other than melting the ice caps. To be clear.



Given that this seriously reduces the number of weird soaps and other compounds being released all over everywhere in the process of dry cleaning, I was pretty happy to see it. Given that they gave me a free $20 gift certificate, I'm going to be pretty happy getting free dry cleaning at least once.

Another interesting little establishment was what I would call an utterly ridiculous green business, but that is because I don't really think keeping pets is a particularly "green" enterprise, unless your pets happen to live on those oh-so-underused sunshine and smiles rather than processed meat and fish. At any rate, this place, GreenPaws, offers green grooming and care supplies for your pets; if you're going to keep animals, might as well keep them sustainably.


It was, all in all, a pretty unexpected little adventure, but by far the most interesting part about it was when one of the bedsheet vendors tried to set me up with his daughter. Apparently graduate students are kind of attractive to fathers of young, marriageable women. I figure if he decides to email me, I'll figure out how much livestock he'll give me for a dowry and then get back to him.

Of course, now that I've been to the street fair, I'll be able to take care of that livestock sustainably, so it's a win-win. Next time, you'll hear about the St. Mark's Greenmarket.

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza Greenmarket: an Adventure in Spelling

Yesterday's agenda, right after meeting with faculty and going to class, involved me heading down to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, which I assure you is really difficult to type into an iPhone. It is right next to the UN and so is frequently the site of protests for, against, and indifferent to oppression, Free Trade, genocide, the WHO, The Who, Israel, Palestine, and other countries exploited by Britain. Thankfully this post has nothing to do with any of that, unless the hot new method of protest is selling fresh fruit and vegetables. I'm not going to rule that out, actually, but I thought it was a farmers' market.

This greenmarket isn't nearly as extensive as the one at Union Square, but that didn't stop it from having enough variety to give me a pretty good meal out of it.

There were about eight stalls when I got there, but I suspect that a few had already packed up for the day. The morning agenda meant I was there well after the market's opening at 800, arriving sometime around 1430. Still, that's more than three hours before the stated closing time 0f 1800. Based on the stalls closing up when I got there I'm fairly unsure that the market sticks around until that late in any real kind of way.

I'll give you the bad news first. Namely, I was disappointed that there was no baker at this market. It would've been nice to have some bread with the meal I cooked last night, and I could've toasted some of it with breakfast this morning. So that was a little disappointing.

The number of stands, as I said before, wasn't anything to write home about, and that was somewhat unfortunate. If you live down by Union Square, like you would if you were, say, an eco-conscious NYU student, it might not be worth the trip to come up to E 47th St.

Another thing that I imagine will be a negative, but may have little to do with the market itself, is the fact that one of the dairy vendors came all the way out from Lancaster, PA dressed as if he were one of the Amish. Now, parading around as a religious person has its problems, but for me I wonder if it's not a little absurd to drive three or four hours to a local produce market to peddle cheese in costume. Namely because I know there's a solid farmers' market in Lancaster and even Philadelphia seems like a good market. I wonder if this farm has just an enormous distribution network, or if for some reason the locals aren't buying from it anymore. Given that his presence in New York with a giant truck makes it pretty clear he wasn't Amish, I have to say I don't like posers.

At any rate, there was another dairy stall and that was from New York, so the PA farm oughtn't be a dealbreaker for this particular market. Plus, I have no idea if he's there every week or if this was just a little Amish Expeditionary Force.

The good news is that the vegetable and fruit contingent was strong and widely varied. I bought shallots, potatoes, thai chilis, cilantro, some squash, and a variety of tomato that I had never heard of before, the Garden Peach Tomato, which is small, round, yellow and sometimes mottled with pink, and fuzzy like a peach. With good levels of iron and vitamin B5 as wikipedia has chosen to tell me, they're kind of a fun little fruit. The picture can't quite show their texture, but they're good:



So the rundown is that there was one stall with a wide variety of herbs, one with squashes of a wide variety, others with more corn and basic staple vegetables than you really know what to do with. I was pretty happy with it. The one that really got me, though, was a stand with so many different kinds of tomatoes it was unbelievable:


Yep, those are all tomatoes. The rest of the fruit situation wasn't nearly as good, but apparently that can be blamed on the weather, in an example of something I've never seen before:

Anyways, I was overall pretty happy with the prices. Aside from the fish stand, they were lower than those at the Union Square Greenmarket, which might make it worth the trip for the NYU student I mentioned above. My shopping list rounded out with two flounder filets, and the whole thing came out to about $16.

On the way back, I stopped at the Manchester Pub and had myself a Harpoon cider, which is sort of oddly floral and lacks some of the more appley qualities I'm used to in English-style ciders, but it was still pretty good despite a little too much carbonation.

When I got back it was time to prepare what I'd bought. I was originally going for a brown butter, cilantro, and thai chili sauce, but the chilis and the cilantro started to burn before the butter started to brown, and so I ended up with something a little different. To accompany this surprisingly delicious occurence I made a mix of the potatoes, squash, and shallots that shall go unrecorded due to its uninteresting and slightly burned nature.

Anyway, the fish is worth giving you some notes on:


Flounder with Tomatoes in a Thai Chili and Cilantro Butter Infusion

2 Flounder filets (approx 3/4 lbs)
1/2 stick butter
1 cup finely chopped cilantro
1 small Garden Peach or, alternately, Roma tomato
Thai chilis to your satisfaction
Flour, possibly seasoned with a little pepper, or sage and thyme, if you feel like it.

Remove stems from chilis, then chop chilis in half lenghtwise. If you want to reduce their spiciness, or the spice's concentration, remove the seeds, otherwise leave them in.

Melt the butter in a small frying pan and add the cilantro and chili. I suggest medium to high heat. Heating the cilantro should leech out its flavour into the butter; when the butter turns green, scoop out the cilantro and the chili bits that are left. It doesn't matter if the cilantro or the chilis start to char or burn a little bit, because you're removing them anyway. It happened to me and the infusion was still delicious, with a spicy overtone and a cilantro undertone. Set this aside.

Lightly coat the flounder with flour, then cut the tomatoes into small chunks. Place the frying pan with your infused butter back on the heat. If you can judge it right, the flounder should obtain enough internal heat to cook itself fully even after you've taken it off, so you can add it simultaneously with the tomatoes and remove the whole lot of it after you've flipped the flounder once and made sure that it's white and a bit flaky on both sides. Shouldn't take more than about six minutes per filet. Once you've done that, pour the remaining infused butter over the fish and you're done. Pair with some kind of vegetables or pasta and enjoy.

Until next time...

Bowling Green Farmer's Market

This past Thursday I attempted to go to the Bowling Green Greenmarket. I say attempted because while getting there was very easy (just go down to the Bowling Green subway stop and walk up and look around), there wasn't much of a market there.

There were all of three stands, and one of them was selling jewelery. The problem with this is that I was hoping to buy things to cook, and there weren't sufficient things to cook. There just wasn't nearly enough selection at the place for me to justify any purchases because it wasn't wide enough to really make any kind of meal come together. I thought of a few possible explanations for this:

• The farmers' market is a terrible one and there is never any selection
• I went there too late in the day for there to be stalls
• The closeness to Labor Day Weekend resulted in several farmers taking the week off
  

The latter two reasons mean I'll check it out again before condemning it completely.

However, there is the fact that it's near Battery Park led me to have a little fun anyway. The City Gardens at Battery Park are also host to a Beer Garden, which features Victory Brewing Company beers for about $4-5.00 for what seemed to be a 20oz plastic cup. All in all a decent deal and a nice location from which you can see the ferry coming in and out and look at the statue of liberty, etc. The beers are a little carbonated for my taste, but the Hefeweizen was done in almost the proper Bavarian style and it made up for the disappointing greenmarket.