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Greenmarket Grocery Shopping

Sat., March 1, 2008

How you like them apples?

My friend Allison is staging a Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, the first of which is a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme, so I figured I’d be spending time at the famous Union Square Greenmarket. But hold on: in Manhattan alone, there are 27 Greenmarkets. (Each is sanctioned by the city to promote regional agriculture and give family farmers the opportunity to sell their fruits, vegetables and other products directly to New Yorkers.) After checking a map, I discovered there’s been one in my neighborhood, on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street, every Saturday year-round. I didn’t know that.

I walked up Broadway to check it out. Because of its location and the season, it’s small—much smaller than the Union Square version—taking up only one side of a block between an old brick school and Isham Park, where a flock of Canada geese scrounged for insects on a muddy baseball field. There were only seven vendors but each seemed chosen to avoid duplication, so that a creative cook could prepare a largely local meal from the Inwood Greenmarket: apples, beef, turkey, eggs, bread, pies and honey.

After several passes by the vendors, I decided I’d purchase locally farmed apples and eggs and remake that apple cake I first made for Thanksgiving. (At a glance, the recipe seems snotty and complicated but in reality it’s neither.) For the apples, I paid a few bucks for a half-dozen red-and-green skinned McIntoshes from Samascott Orchard, which has been growing them in Kindernook, New York since 1901. Different varieties brimmed in labeled wooden crates, resplendent in a natural glory without the wax, stickers, symmetry and surface perfection found in their supermarket counterparts. I enjoyed a sign on the crate of Fuji apples that blamed a particular hailstorm over the Samascott’s farm in May 2007 for the superficial scars on that variety. The apples were the size of peas at the time yet they carried the battle damage to their fully ripened size. After I had my apples weighed, I added a cup of hot cider to my order, which proved prescient, as a mini snow-squall arrived out of the literal blue shortly thereafter.

I also picked up a dozen large white eggs from Knoll Krest Farm, located in Clinton Corners, New York, where the free-roaming, cage-free hens are fed vegetarian diets free from hormones and antibiotics and whose eggs are “hand gathered.” Yee-hah.

Completing the hippie nature of my travels, I carried my groceries home in my canvas tote-bag from the Strand and instead of further depleting my iPod’s lithium-rich battery by listening to “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, I sang it to myself a cappella.

Bonus mp3: “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau

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