In the past we’ve always worn heels to the Greenmarket’s swanky annual fundraiser–usually held at some fine hall in Manhattan–but this time around we’re considering more practical footwear. In conjunction with Harvest Home, another non-profit group that runs farmers’ markets in the city, they’re hosting their first-ever dance party next Wednesday night, December 7th at the Bell House in Gowanus.
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A few weeks back we asked you to tell us what seasonally and locally inspired cocktails you’re drinking now, with the idea that the reader with the best answer would score two tickets to our winter Good Spirits, the next in a series of seasonal cocktail parties we host in tandem with Edible Manhattan. As usual your answers put our own drinking habits to shame.
In honor of Black Friday (!) the topic of our weekly NY1 show is dark chocolate: We took a trip to Mast Brothers Chocolates in Williamsburg, where the siblings behind the city’s first true bean-to-bar operation have just expanded their factory by 3,000 square feet and hired Finnish pastry chef Vesa Parviainen to run their new test kitchen.
May your your cornbread stuffing contain loads of briny East End oysters, and your cranberries be from local bogs. Here’s to the result of those trips home from the Greenmarket with Long Island cheese pumpkins, Jersey Brussels sprouts and Upstate bacon. Pass the rolls, praise the host and don’t forget the pickle platter, without it, it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving in Brooklyn.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw that American farmers were producing too much; they weren’t earning off their extra work or surplus. In came the New Deal with the first-ever Farm Bill, set to end overproduction by paying farmers to grow less. In the ’70s, a man named Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture at the time, thought that idea was nuts, and so he paid farmers instead to “get big or get out”–referring of course to farming by the thousands of acres and those devoted to just a few crops. It was a perfectly good idea at the time for a country still discovering the value of its land and thenew global marketplace, which seemed to have no problem taking on the surplus. We couldn’t know then what has happened, which has also included farmers growing more crops for secondary, inedible products like corn syrup and cow feed rather than feeding us.
Don’t forget to join us in just four hours for a live Q & A on our Facebook page with Chef Alfred Portale of Gotham Bar and Grill! From 2-4pm, Chef Portale will be answering all your questions about preparing and executing your Thanksgiving feasts (check out more details about it all right here.) Want to know how to flavor the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie with rosemary bitters? You could win lunch for two at his restaurant just by asking!
You’re probably technically at work until Wednesday, but we know what’s really on your mind: What’s the deal with deep-fried turkeys? Is there a secret to super-fluffy mashed potatoes? Are giblets really necessary for gravy? What apples are best for pie? That’s right, there’s plenty of Googling to do in the next few days as you prepare for Thursday’s big feast. But now you don’t have to: Chef Alfred Portale of Gotham Bar and Grill will be on-hand tomorrow for a live Q & A on our Facebook page.
PHOTOS: In Honor of Thanksgiving, a Clinton Hill Chef Makes Pemmican from the Native American Plains
Clinton Hill chef Matt Weingarten’s makes the Native American snack called pemmican, which has historically made use of both fall harvest foods on the Great Plains and a successful hunt for buffalo.
I sat down to a friend’s dinner table last week with a hunk of acorn squash roasted in brown butter, a mixed greens salad with a yogurt vinaigrette, root vegetable fritters, various jars of home-pickled and home-jammed produce, bread with goat cheese and red wine (a nice spicy one, for under 20 bucks)–all grown or produced within 30 miles. The meal was made by a 20-something farm intern in upstate New York, who’d love to hear good news next week. That’s when The Farm Bill, renewed every five years (most recently in 2008), might reach the legislature more than a year before it should.
In Brooklyn, they’ll apply their approach to seven courses of what’s in season here and now, and what their host Sweet Deliverance has told us about the menu is pretty mind-blowing. They’re making homemade Japanese pickles with kirby cukes, watermelon radishes, Asian turnips and their own King Trumpet mushrooms plus persimmon/star anise/honey cinnamon syrup for the cocktails (whiskey, lemon soda, citrus bitters and a cognac float); while the SloMo boys are doing stuff like housemade ramen noodles with short rib stock, sake steamed clams and smoked shishito peppers and Japanese fried chicken. It’s $90 for seven courses, and that includes beer and sake too. Our biggest worry is how many nights to go.
Our colleagues over at Edible Manhattan are teaming up with chef Alfred Portale of Gotham Bar and Grill for a live discussion on the Edible Manhattan Facebook page on Tuesday November 22nd–next Tuesday, and two days before Thanksgiving. From 2 to 4 p.m., Chef Portale will be answering your questions about preparing the perfect seasonal and locally inspired Thanksgiving feast.
Our publishers just alerted us to a sweet deal, especially for those currently struggling on their holiday gift lists, double especially for those of us who haven’t even started. If you order a new subscription to Edible Brooklyn (only $28 a year!) before December 1st–or to Edible East End or even Edible Manhattan–they’ll kick in a free copy of Edible Brooklyn: The Cookbook. You can find more details right here.
