Local Flavor: Part I, the Market

Steve DeAngelis asked me to begin our cooking lesson at the farmers market so that we could buy pick out the produce together for our dinner. So on a beautiful and cloudless Saturday afternoon, I headed to Union Square to meet the young chef.

For those of you who live in New York, you probably know that the Green Market on a beautiful day is more packed than a Monster Truck Rally holding hot dog give away in rural Tennessee. That's no hyperbole - it’s that packed. Steve had found out about NYCookery through a friend of a friend and, therefore, I had never met him. When it was time to find him amongst a throng of New Yorkers who were pressing on the belly buttons of cantaloupes and knocking on watermelons, I had no idea who the hell I was looking for. After about 10-15 plays of phone tag (we kept missing each others' calls because of the drone of market's customers), Steve finally found me. Later, he told me that he was able to identify me not only by the large, cherry-red beads that hung around my neck, but also by the slight look of panic on my face.


After we shook hands and introduced one another, Steve suggested we walk around to decide which stand had the best prices . We had met at 4pm and, since it was the end of the day, the heirloom tomato lady from the ironically named "The Cheerful Cherry" farm had marked down her produce from $5/lb to only $1/lb. Steve picked out six, large, and beautiful-looking purple-y red fruits and handed them to the scowling farmer behind the stand.

"How acidic are these?" Steve asked the woman. Frowning, she replied harshly "They're not acidic. They're heirlooms. The heirlooms aren't acidic." Steve, either not catching on that this woman could care less about his inquiry or wanting to highlight her error, pointed to the druzba varieties and said "Not all of them are low in acid - like those yellowy ones are good for canning because of their high acidity." I was impressed at his knowledge. The farmer clearly was not. She mumbled something, rolled her eyes, and then bagged up the Purple Cherokees that Steve had selected.


I followed Steve like a sheep as we continued walking around the market and as he tore open papery corn husks to check on the freshness of the kernels contained within them, as he squeezed juicy peaches to test their ripeness, and as he picked up bunches basil and shoved them under my nose so that I could get a whiff of their sharp pungency; all the while, he told me about the different peculiarities of each plant, the affect of rainfall on their growth, and the different types of fruits and vegetables that are best for canning. When we finally finished shopping, I felt a little exhausted from the whirlwind tour.

Steve and I walked to the L train station at 3rd Ave and headed for Williamsburg, where Steve resides with his roommate Surly Tran who is the buyer for The Brooklyn Kitchen (and who will also be the next featured cook on this blog). The apartment was, like most New York flats, slightly cramped - it's smaller size accentuated by the seemingly endless assortment of kitchen gadgets and food stuffs that were stacked, piled, and stowed on and in every nook, cranny, shelf, cabinet, and surface of the house... I loved it.

Steve put on a very large pot of water (in fact it might have been the largest pot I have ever seen) and left me to talk with his roommate as he prepared the back yard and the grill for dinner.