The summer is perhaps the busiest time of year: not only are our CSAs in full swing (only a week or so away from the Annual Zucchini Wallop), but our calendars are also packed—incredible eating-and-drinking events are popping up all over the city and beyond. Here, our editors give you a sampler of what they’re attending.
VIDEO: Recycling in Their Own Words, with the PS 22 Green Team — GrowNYC
Does it get any cuter than elementary schoolers writing poems to promote recycling? Nope. And it’s just one of the ways GrowNYC is more than a market. Learn more about how they, and other markets, run at To Market! To Market! this Wednesday.
Amy Zavatto: Tales of the Cocktail
As is my summer ritual, I’ll be heading to the Land of the Sazerac in mid-July for the annual cocktail and spirits throw-down, Tales of the Cocktail where, bonus, I’ll be doing a couple of book signings for my wee drinks tome, Architecture of the Cocktail. Totally can’t wait. Every year I discover some great, new producer, thoroughly fascinating bit of history about spirits and cocktails, and even attended a great seminar last year on how climate change is affecting spirits production. And, well, I have a really good time, too, as one ought to at a conference where the first thing you see stepping out of the elevator in the morning at the Hotel Monteleone is a cheerful Bloody Mary bar.
Rachel Wharton: Brooklyn Eats
Last week I hit the second Brooklyn Eats, the Brooklyn makers food fair run by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce at the Pfizer building. Open to the public but mainly for the trade — retailers or wholesalers — it was like a Fancy Food Show just for this borough. (That I visited too.) Many of the sellers I saw there we’ve covered in our pages, some we hope to. The biggest takeaway was really the size of the thing: I don’t think any of us would have thought Brooklyn food makers could fill a room the size of a high school cafeteria when Edible Brooklyn began almost a decade ago. Or that, as we reported earlier this year when we wrote about the Chamber’s plans to create a “Brooklyn-made” label, there’d one day be a certification process where you have to prove your product is really made in Brooklyn!
Caroline Lange: To Market! To Market!
It is no secret that I love the farmers market—enough to get completely verklempt over the first stone fruit of summer or the arrival of pumpkins in October or, most of all, the first microgreens of spring. And while it’s easy to remember—as you smear samples of goat cheese on crackers or swoon, elbow deep cranberry beans—the incredible amount of work farmers put into the markets; but the work the market managers do is typically farther from our minds. This Wednesday, To Market! To Market! will bring together an all-star panel of faces from some of the city’s most wonderful greenmarkets, including GrowNYC and the Brooklyn Night Bazaar, to enlighten us on what can only be the monumental task of market coordination. (Also, our very own Lauren Wilson will be moderating. It’s not a night to be missed.)
Gabrielle Langholtz: Northeast Organic Farming Association’s Summer Conference
Summer is a time for farmers markets, swimming holes, campouts, cookouts and catching fireflies. Still, one of the things I most look forward to might not sound like as much fun: a conference. Specifically the Northeast Organic Farming Association’s annual summer conference in Amherst in August. My husband, a livestock farmer, leads a few sessions each year and I always tag along. Over 150 workshops cover organic farming, yes, but also fermentation, homesteading, seed saving, beekeeping, food politics, activism, and more. And it’s not all classroom sessions. Outdoors we hit draft horse demonstrations, 3-legged races and watermelon-seed-spitting contests. Plus we always sneak away to hit the excellent Amherst farmers market and yes, go jump in a lake. See you there.
Feature photo: Flickr/Graeme Maclean
