nyc food detective

by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

On January 11, 2010, at the International Culinary Center (ICC) on Broadway in SoHo, an historic conference on the state of wheat in our New York foodshed was sponsored by The Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), The Northeast Organic Wheat Project, and Greenmarket.  Farmers, millers, bakers, and distillers got together to talk about the state of New York wheat production, with a view to starting a New York State wheat Renaissance.  Once New York State was a major wheat producer; however, according to the USDA, in 2009, 2.22 billion bushels of wheat were produced in the United States.  Of that, about 6.83 million bushels were produced in New York State, making it 32nd in American wheat production, according to the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. 

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC
Every year, with fellow Slow Food members of the East End (LI) Slow Food chapter, Grace and I hold a potluck dinner known as the Duck-off, the last one in February being the fifth annual. The objective is that everybody has to bring a new, original dish made with a real Long Island duck (the kind that look like Donald, not Daffy) and seasonal and local ingredients. We drink Long Island wine and locally made beer..you get the idea. (NB, In this, our fifth year, the competition was fierce: some eaters started rehearsing duck dishes months in advance and one experimented with duck confit-stuffed ravioli made with flour he ground from wild Long Island wheat.)

Anyway, for Duck-off 2009, I decided to make Duck Samp,  Samp being a corn-based dish I sampled first at a Shinnecock Nation festival held at their Cultural Center in Southampton.  I asked a

Slow Food friend who has a Shinnecock friend to get me a Samp recipe. No dice. Apparently, Shinnecock grandmothers, like all others, don't part easily with treasured family recipes.  

So I Googled Samp.  Much to my surprise, Samp is a traditional Native American (Algonquin) and South African (Xhosa) culinary stand-by.

Samp, made primarily from hominy, is the English word derived from the Narragansett, Native American, word, Nasasump, a stew made from dried corn. (The Narragansett and Shinnecock are both Algonquin.)

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC Incubator kitchens are affordable, time-share, professional kitchens that make it financially possible for start-up food processors to move out of home production into a licensed, professional production facility where they can start to grow their businesses.  

Katherine Gregory, the founder of Mi Kitchen Es Su Kitchen, operates the Artisan Baking Center (ABC) Kitchen Innovations incubator kitchen in the Long Island City facilities of the Consortium for Worker Education, a non-profit organization that provides free career training to New Yorkers.

The ABC kitchen, primarily a baking facility, boasts three large, well-equipped working areas, each capable of accommodating several cooks, and a separate confectioner's kitchen, away from the heat of the rest of the facility.  Since Katherine started it in July 2005, the ABC incubator has been used by more than 100 food micro-entrepreneurs, many of whom have “graduated” to their own successful food businesses or to more permanent, shared kitchen facilities.   

Posted by Ed Yowell

In 1998, friends Mark Firth and Andrew Tarlow, decided that their Brooklyn neighborhood needed a good place to hang-out and determined that the best place would be their place, so they acquired a 1920s Kullman (“tin-top”) diner on Broadway in Williamsburg and created Diner.  In the process, they fortuitously found Caroline Fidanza, a sensible cook who believes that the best, simple, seasonal ingredients make for the most satisfying, flavorful dishes.  The trio went on to open Marlow and Sons and the rest is Brooklyn culinary history, or not.  

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

Norm Cote (pronounced kotay), a native of Canada, and his sons Andrew and Michael are third and fourth generation beekeepers located in the historic Silvermine district of Connecticut.  There, at their Silvermine Apiary, they do no less than tend 200 hives and plot the global future of honeybees.  In addition to tending bees, Andrew is a founder of two organizations dedicated to the advancement of beekeeping.  

Globally, Bees Without Borders, founded in 2005, is dedicated to teaching beekeeping as a way to alleviate poverty in economically depressed areas of the world.  Honey is delicious and healthful, full of antioxidants, believed by some to be effective in relieving certain allergies, and an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agent that aids in healing scrapes, wounds, and burns. It is also a low-investment way to produce income.  Bees without Borders has taken Norm and Andrew to places including Iraq, Nigeria, Guatemala, India, and, most recently, Uganda to share their skills. On their journeys, Norm and Andrew teach beekeeping and provide start-up materials to their students, including orphanages and groups of war widows in Uganda.

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC
The usual “premium” chocolates we consume start as raw material in the third world to be finished and enjoyed in the first...cocoa beans and chocolate zig-zagging around the globe...commodity cocoa beans from Africa and South America to Switzerland, Belgium, or France and chocolates from those places to us.  Kathy Moskal, the founder and owner of Vere, chocolate makers, determined that chocolates could be “ethically produced, healthful, and delicious.” Vere (pronounced “very”, derived form the Latin word for “real”) produces delicious, low-mileage, fairly-produced chocolate, that actually is good for you. 

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

The usual “premium” chocolates we consume start as raw material in the third world to be finished and enjoyed in the first…cocoa beans and chocolate zig-zagging around the globe…commodity cocoa beans from Africa and South America to Switzerland, Belgium, or France and chocolates from those places to us.  Kathy Moskal, the founder and owner of Vere, chocolate makers, determined that chocolates could be “ethically produced, healthful, and delicious.”  Vere (pronounced “very”, derived form the Latin word for “real”) produces delicious, low-mileage, fairly-produced chocolate that is actually good for you.

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

Zaid Kurdieh, and his wife Haifa, started farming on a half acre just about ten years ago. “I guess it was more like gardening.” Zaid admits, but producing food suited them. By 2000, they moved to a larger scale when they assumed cultivation of Norwich Meadow Farms in Norwich, N.Y.   Since then, Zaid and Haifa have steadily increased acreage under cultivation and erected high tunnels to expand the growing season.

Increased production has enabled them to deliver their produce to more Greenmarkets, an expanding number of Norwich and New York City CSAs, and one steady restaurant customer, Jimmy’s No.43 on East 7th Street in Manhattan, that sources vegetables almost exclusively from Norwich Meadows Farm. Other restaurants sourcing regularly at the Union Square Norwich Meadows farm stand include Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café.

While Zaid and Haifa do not characterize their farming practices as Eco-Halal, their farm is certified organic and Zaid raises and slaughters chickens according to Halal rules.  Zaid states, “We dedicate our God-given energies to strive to grow food as it was created… as keepers of the earth, we promise to preserve agricultural land and use it in a manner that is economically, ecologically, and ethically sound.” 

This year, Zaid and Haifa are taking advantage of the opportunity to offer pickles, preserves, and sauces made from Norwich Meadows Farm vegetables and fruits.
Their winter Greenmarket presence is good for Norwich Meadows Farm, enabling them to stabilize their work force throughout the year; good for our regional food shed, increasing the amount of cultivated acreage; and good for the winter Greenmarket, as more farmers, offering more products, help maintain Greenmarket as a shopping destination, even during the cold, short days of deep winter. 

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

A 47 acre farm in Queens? Who knew?

The Queens County Farm Museum, originally the 1697 Dutch homestead of Elbert Adriance, is the oldest continuously operating farm in the City of New York. It remained a working farm until 1926, when it passed to the ownership of Creedmore State Hospital to serve as a farm-based, patient rehabilitative service facility. In 1975, the farm came under the stewardship of the not-for-profit Queens County Farm Museum, the mission of which is to, “preserve..the site..and educate the public as to Queens County’s agricultural and horticultural past.” And that it did from 1975 until 2008, presently hosting approximately 500,000 visitors each year, mostly children.