We’ve been bouncing around an idea here at the Edible offices of an issue that looks back and sees where all of the small food start-ups we have covered at Edible Manhattan, Edible Brooklyn and Edible East End over the years have ended up. The majority, happily, are still going strong, like Sweet Deliverance, the catering and CSA-driven food delivery service started by Brooklynite Kelly Geary a few years back in a Bed-Stuy kitchen. (You can read the original Edible Brooklyn story in all its glory right here.)
Each week Geary picks up produce and fruits and other goods from CSA farmers and turns them into meals for her clients. But by the end of the season there’s often a surplus of apples and okra and carrots and cucumbers, and there’s only so many pies and sides you can eat each week. So Geary turned the extra into pickles with flavored vinegars and spices and chiles, and jams and chutneys with lower sugar, and other farm-market driven canned goods and gave a big bag to each of her customers at the end of the season. (They thought it was a gift, she jokes, even though it was really their own food.)
The results were so exactly what people wanted to eat she started teaching canning classes at Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg, and then selling the jars there too, and then, just two weeks back, came the book on the subject: Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes for the Modern Kitchen. (Buy it here.)
It’s a lovely piece of work, but even more importantly it’s exactly the kind of recipes (candied kumquats, green cherry tomato chutney, carrot habanero hot sauce, blueberry-lemon honey jam and horseradish beer mustard) we’re guessing Edible readers want to make. But don’t take our word for it: You can watch Geary in action on this episode of our NY1 show, Let’s Eat. Which for one week, at least, should be called Let’s Can.
