Posted on Thu, Jun. 10, 2004
Get fresh
With a little imagination, it's easy to plan a tasty seasonal menu around offerings at local farmers markets.
By Marilynn Marter
Inquirer Food Writer
The annual cycle of plantings and harvests is under way, bringing a new season of locally grown crops to area farmers markets.
Those baskets heaped high with fresh fruits and vegetables dewy in the morning sun look enticing. But how do experienced shoppers choose amid all the bounty and plan a menu around their selections?
We recently visited the burgeoning farmers market at Clark Park in West Philadelphia with Aliza Green, longtime local chef, food consultant, and author of the Field Guide to Produce (Quirk Books, $14.95, softcover).
Her challenge: to create an interesting, appetizing meal with the best of what she could find fresh at the market.
This early in the season, the selection of produce is limited. During our visit, we found asparagus, rhubarb, hothouse tomatoes, white mushrooms, and scallions with onion bulbs just large enough for Green to call them "spring onions."
She passed on a stash of Yukon Gold potatoes from last year's crop. The new potato crop, starting with reds (best boiled to use in salads), is due later this month.
For her improvised menu, Green focused on a salad using the tight-capped organic mushrooms ($3.50 a quart) picked that morning at Sher Rockee Mushroom Farms, near Kennett Square. Mushrooms also make great additions to soups and stir-fries, she noted. Or they can be added to pasta sauce - as can any number of other vegetables as the season progresses.
On this day in late May, asparagus would highlight Green's pasta primavera, a dish accented with sweet onions, cream, nutmeg and grated Parmesan. In June, the same recipe might include peas or sliced snow peas and halved cherry tomatoes.
Green recommends selecting firm, plump asparagus spears. The thin spears many shoppers believe to be more delicate actually are the shoots of aging plants. They may have stringy fibers and tough skin.
"Fat spears come from young plants and often are more tender," Green said.
"I don't generally peel asparagus," she added. "Just remember: The farther the green goes down the stalk, the better."
The greenhouse-grown Trust tomatoes, with firmer flesh than most of their inbred ilk, can be halved, partially seeded, and grilled as a side dish. Nurtured from seeds imported from Holland said to cost nearly $400 for a packet of 1,000, the tomatoes we found came from Fahnestock Farm near Lititz, Lancaster County, and cost $2 a pound.
Green suggested spring onions, grilled and quartered lengthwise, as an attractive and tasty garnish for an entree or salad.
The prepared pies and sweet buns at Clark Park's farm stands could save the cook from making dessert for this meal. But the fresh, ruby-red rhubarb would make a tasty filling for a homemade pie with crumb topping.
For a lighter, more refreshing option, Green suggested checking markets for early strawberries - perhaps to dip into melted chocolate.
Though farmers markets rarely offer the variety found in supermarkets, they offer a win-win situation: Growers get better prices than a wholesaler would pay, and consumers get fresher foods, often within hours of picking or production, at prices below those a typical grocer might charge. And buying directly from family farmers helps keep them in business.
For many people, that alone justifies adapting menus to what's available.
At Clark Park, Paul Hails of His Kids Dairy in Wyalusing, Pa., sells raw, organic cows' milk ($2.50 a half gallon) and a selection of goats'-milk cheeses, along with produce grown by his son, Zachary, who is 15. Zachary's early pickings included asparagus, rhubarb, spring onions, lettuces and spinach. Those will still be available this month, along with a greater variety of greens and salad mixes.
"There's been so much rain," Hails said. "The weather is killing us. We haven't planted outside in four weeks."
Cool, wet weather delayed early-spring plantings throughout the region. But recent stretches of warm weather have caused crops to mature faster, bringing harvests back near their normal schedule while raising concerns about heat stress diminishing quality.
This is the sixth year that Hails has been making the nearly six-hour, 160-mile-plus round-trip drive from his 121-acre, certified-organic dairy farm in rural Bradford County, on the New York border.
"If I could find two more markets like Clark Park, we'd be set," said Hails, who neared his goal by opening a second stand last Saturday at the Second and South Street market. Zachary is manning that location.
Hails started selling pork sausage made from pasture-raised hogs to Abbraccio restaurant (820 S. 47th St.) last year and just added Mariposa Food Co-op (4726 Baltimore Ave.) as a customer for his raw organic milk and cheeses. He also supplies dairy products to None Such Farm Market in Buckingham and Carroll's Seafood & Produce in Plumsteadville, Bucks County.
Given the choice of selling in New York or Philadelphia, Hails, a Bucks County native, said simply, "Philadelphia feels like home."
As appealing and potentially profitable as farm marketing can be, it - like farming itself- is a labor of love.
Bob Pierson, founder and director of Farm to City, a Philadelphia program that links farmers and consumers through farmers markets and community-supported agriculture, has opened only four markets so far this season, compared with seven last year.
"Farmers are in short supply," Pierson said.
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