Now that summer berries are here, I can’t get enough of them. At any given moment I’m slicing them onto breakfast cereal, baking them into tarts, or popping them one after the other into my mouth. Sometimes I cook them down with a little sugar into a compote, which makes a quick topping for waffles or French toast, or even for those pre-packaged cheese blintzes you can find at Polish delis or in the supermarket.

Recently I cooked down some strawberries for a pancake topping, then for some reason decided to pour the finished compote through a strainer. I worked it against the mesh with the back of a wooden spoon to squeeze out as much juice as I could, and ended up with a delicious, fresh strawberry syrup, perfect for my pancakes. As I was enjoying my breakfast the idea struck me: I bet this syrup would be awesome as the base for a soft drink. There was still some left in the pan – I poured it into a glass, topped it with soda water, added ice, and stirred. Refreshing, light, not too sweet, infused with that fresh, only-in-summer berry flavor — instantly, I knew I’d be drinking homemade berry soda for the rest of the summer.

When I had an evening free to experiment, I ran to the Farmer’s Market to stock up: blueberries, sour cherries, more strawberries, red currants, and gorgeous ripe black raspberries that left purple stains on my hands when I barely touched them. After a quick rinse, the berries went into a saucepan and onto the stove. I added white sugar – only a little, less than a tablespoon per pint of berries – and a pinch of lemon zest, and a little water (not too much – only a few teaspoons). I gave it a stir, and as the mixture boiled I mashed it up a bit with back of the spoon or with a potato masher.  I let it simmer for about 10 minutes, then turned off the heat. Once it was just cool enough to handle, I poured it into a strainer set over a bowl, and pressed it repeatedly with the back of the spoon until only a dry, pulpy paste remained in the strainer. I made sure to scrape off the thick stuff that had accumulated on the outside of the strainer, and stirred this into my syrup as well.

And that’s it.  When the syrups were fully cool I funneled them bottles. To make a soda, just pour the syrup into a glass, top with soda water, add ice, and you’ve got the best, most refreshing soda (a.k.a. ‘pop’ for you Midwesterners) that you’ve ever had.  If you like it strong, add more syrup. If you like it sweet, add more sugar.  I use an old-fashioned soda charger to make soda water, but bottled club soda should work just as well. Enjoy!

Some thoughts and pointers:
**With blueberries, there was barely any pulp left in the strainer once I’d worked all the juice out. With raspberries, there was much more left. With strawberries, there was practically nothing left behind at all, but the resulting syrup with quite thick (it sort of looked like ketchup). For a more refined strawberry syrup, think about using a very fine-meshed sieve, or perhaps even cheesecloth.

**Experiment with how much syrup to use for each drink. I like a lighter drink, so I used about a jigger of syrup per pint of soda.  You could use as much as twice that if you like a heavier, sweeter soda.

**Experiment also to find out how sweet you like the syrup. Taste the syrup often as you cook it and add more sugar if needed. It’ll be much easier to dissolve sugar into the syrup as it cooks than it will be once you mix it with cold, iced soda water.

**It’s best to use a strong, good-quality strainer for this. If you have a cheap one, you may bust through it as you work the berry pulp. I’d love to use a food mill for this but the ones I’ve looked aren’t fine-meshed enough.

**Strain the syrup while still warm – it thickens as it cools.

**Add vodka!

A reminder that the Borough Hall Greenmarket in Cadman Plaza is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a day long party this Saturday, 6/27. You can play CENYC’s Recycling Game; talk to a rep from Slow Food about sustainable food systems; see videos and historical photos of the market and its farmers and customers; and eat some great food: American Seafood will be grilling up some of the local catch, and Dan Leader of Bread Alone will be grilling pizzas made from seasonal ingredients. You can read more detail on the event flyer.

And oh, of course, there’s the market itself, which on Saturday will be bursting its seams. If you’ve been away from the greenmarket  you’re in for a shock –  I got one when I visited this morning, and I go every week! Suddenly, alongside the sugar snap peas, spring onions, lettuces, rhubarb, radishes and strawberries we’ve seen for the past few weeks, today there were raspberries, black raspberries, blueberries, cherries (sweet & sour), cherry tomatoes (red & yellow), zucchini, yellow squash, pod peas, kirby cucumbers, green beans, yellow beans… I lost count after that. The floodgates of summer food have been thrown open, and from now until November the greenmarkets will give you wider variety and higher quality than anything you’ll find in the supermarket.

So head to Cadman Plaza this weekend! Pick up some great food, congratulate the market and its farmers on the anniversary, and celebrate your luck at having such an exceptional greenmarket in your neighborhood!

It was Saturday. I was hungry. I needed rest from my weekend labors, and I needed a rice ball. I knew Lorimer Street Meat Market at Lorimer St. and Skillman Ave. makes some good rice balls, so I decided to stop in. While a butcher warmed my snack my eyes browsed under the counter, and there I found a truly remarkable ricotta.

It was packed in what looked like a small metal flower pot, with a creamy dome of cheese like an ice cream scoop on top. It came in small (1-1/2 lb) and large (3 lb) sizes.  The dome of cheese was covered with a plastic sheet bearing the stately name of the cheesemaker: Lioni Latticini, Inc., formally of Lioni Italy by way of Brooklyn though now headquartered in Union NJ. Their own website describes best what I’d just found: ricotta made the “’old fashioned’ way… hand dipped and scooped in order to preserve the texture and allow for a truly premium, chunky-style Ricotta.”

Their claims did not exaggerate. The cheese was flavorful and fresh, slightly sweet and moist and creamy while still maintaining the curdy chunkiness the website brags about. It made a delicious version of my standard spinach-ricotta spread (flavored this time with a bit of nutmeg) that I enjoyed all week on slices of Nunzio & Sons’ sourdough bread.

The Lioni Latticini website tells the story of a family company making cheeses according to traditions brought over from Italy. Though they’re operating on a fairly large scale (they’re suppliers to Whole Foods), this was far superior to a Sargento or Polly-O tub o’ ricotta.  Aside from the tin of Ricotta I brought home, they also make mozzarella, and a basket cheese like I’d found on my previous ricotta quest.

Lorimer Street Meat Market has this ricotta delivered twice a week. As close as this is to my apartment, not to mention its proximity to Brooklyn Kitchen, I expect I’ll be stopping off for this ricotta fairly regularly.

No information yet about Pecoraro Dairy, near the corner of Leonard and Metropolitan. I called to find out whether and where their ricotta could be found in the neighborhood, but did not get a call in return. Very mysterious.

Read part 1 of the Ricotta Quest here

Remember the Vermont Pharmacy? The storefront on the corner of Carroll and Henry that seems eternally to’ve been filled with the decrepit remains of what may once been a store? For the entire decade I lived in the area I always wondered how such a prime neighborhood location could stay idle. Well today I learned two things about it : first, that today it’s hosting a party to promote The Greenhorns, a non-profit that works to support and recruit new farmers (as well as a film about the same). This morning I stopped by as they were setting up and watched them roasting goat meat on a bicycle-driven spit. They’ll have plenty of other food besides, along with music, demos, and a film screening. Stop by!

Secondly, I learned that later this summer the storefront will re-open as the Pharm/Farmacy, which will sell produce and goods from local farms, along with natural sodas & ice cream. That section of the neighborhood has long needed a produce market, and it sounds like they’re getting a good one!

More info:
thegreenhorns.net
thegreenhorns.wordpress.com
foryoungfarmers.wikispaces.com
serveyourcountryfood.net

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Borough Hall Greenmarket in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza.The market is marking the occasion with a day-long celebration on Saturday, June 27th. There will be, of course, lots of food (Long Island seafood and made-on-the-spot seasonal pizzas), along with talks and demos featuring green energy and slow food. You can play the Recycling Game and see videos and photos highlighting the market’s history, its farmers, and its customers. The party runs from 8am to 6pm. You can download a poster for the event here.

But first, in honor of father’s day, this coming Saturday, June 20, Fred Wilklow of Wilklow Orchards will be talking about his father and grandfather who farmed the land that Fred still farms.  The farm has been in their family since 1855, and Fred has been with the Borough Hall Greenmarket since its first season in 1984. If you were around the market today, you may have heard Fred’s son Albert giving a talk about how the Wilklow Orchards apples go from seed to tree to truck to greenmarket. You can read more about Fred Wilklow and Wilklow Orchards elsewhere on Dave’s Kitchen.

Yes, there were strawberries at the market last week, though by the time I’d finally got myself there (noon) they were long gone. Lauren, the Greenpoint market manager, told me they’d been brought in by Red Jacket Orchards and that they’d been especially delicious.

She also told me to talk to the Jam Man, of B & B Jams, and to ask him about his marionberry jam. No, it’s not named for the former mayor of Washington D.C., it’s a berry bred in the Pacific Northwest from a cross between blackberries and raspberries.  Apparently it makes really tasty jam.  This is the first year that the Jam Man’s marionberry bushes have produced berries. He started them two years ago without really even knowing if they’d take to the Northeast’s climate. But take they did. Since this is their first berry-bearing year though, the crop will be limited.  The Jam Man says he’ll have marionberry jam next week for sure, but not for long after that. (Apologies to the Jam Man for the poor quality photo. I forgot to charge my camera’s battery, and so had to resort to my phone’s camera.)

As usual, I found something unusual: at the Osczepinski booth, as I was stepping up to pay for my gorgeous red spring onions, I saw a sign for horseradish greens. I did a double-take: yes, horseradish greens.  Next to me a woman reached for a bunch at the same time I did, and for the same reason: she’d never seen them before and couldn’t pass up the chance to try them. Her plans for them? She planned to add them to a gumbo she was making for a party. No doubt her guests got a real treat. As for mine, I’m thinking the peppery leaves will make an awfully good risotto. Mmm…

Coming up at the market this week: kale and rainbow chard from Garden of Eve, more strawberries from Red Jacket Orchards, Peas at Healthway Farms and snap peas at S&SO. There will also be an event in honor of Father’s Day. So bring your dad and get  your veggies!

The delightful surprise last week, in an early June visit to the Greenpoint Greenmarket, was big bunches of fresh, fragrant chamomile at the booth for Garden of Eve Farms.  I brought one home and clipped it to the side of my fridge. It’ll hang it there until it dries, and then I’ll peel off the leaves and flowers for tea. Osczepinski Farms had chamomile as well, and it was looking abundant enough that you’ll hopefully still find some on the shelves in the upcoming weeks.

Osczepinski Farms was also full of  surprises last week. Theirs is the first booth you see as you approach the market from the eastern, Lorimer street side, and as I did so my eye was practically assaulted by a deep red blaze of piled up bunches of radishes. They were nearly big as apples. They didn’t have quite as much spiciness as the multicolored radishes I’d gotten a couple of weeks ago from Fishkill Farms in the Boro Hall market, but they were certainly crisp and delicious. Osczepinski’s booth has been bursting at the seams in recent weeks. Alongside the radishes (and chamomile) they had beautiful red and white spring onions, lettuces & spinach, cut cilantro, parsley, basil, and rhubarb. I was told they’d also had tiny beets earlier in the day, but by the time of my late-morning visit they were already sold out.

Other finds: a firm, dry feta cheese from Consider Bardwell. And in conversation with Kate from Cayuga I got an update on their plan to bring flour to the market: they’re waiting on approval from CENYC (the flour comes from a partnership with another farm, not solely from Cayuga, so the partnership needs to be approved before it can sell in NYC Greenmarkets). I didn’t see any strawberries, but I’m expecting they’ll be plenty tomorrow.

There’d been rumors (notably over at Greenmarket Report) that strawberries had arrived in some NYC farmers markets. I’d yet to see any with my own eyes though.

Last Tuesday, a dreary, cool gray day, I stopped by the East Village greenmarket at St. Mark’s Church, on 2nd Avenue and 10th Street (one of a few markets open on Tuesdays), to pick up some asparagus for soup. I hadn’t visited this market before, and so I strolled around even after I had my asparagus in hand. And there they were – rows of the familiar green cardboard quart-sized containers, filled to the top with shiny-red, seed-speckled, green-stemmed strawberries. Summer has arrived.

The berries were brought in from Kernan Farms, in far southern New Jersey, near the Delaware Bay. In the sweep of seasonal produce, it makes sense that, and as I reported recently, farms north of the city are still a few weeks away from a ripe crop. Which only means that we have weeks and weeks to come to enjoy ripe seasonal strawberries!

At the greenmarkets the selection is growing. Already there are lots of great fresh things to be found, with new foods and new vendors appearing each week. At the Greenpoint and Borough Hall markets last weekend I found the early season’s offerings on full display, and as usual more than a few surprises.

In Greenpoint, at the Garden of Eden booth, I treated myself to some pea shoots, and indeed they were a treat, with a delicious, pea-like and very spring-like flavor. The shoots are harvested from the tender tips at the tops of the pea stalks, above where the older part of the stem thickens and becomes fibrous. Where they’re pinched off the stems will branch into multiple new stems, and of which will eventually flower and produce pods full of shelling peas.

Also at Garden of Eden I picked up some Thumbelina carrots – also known by the less cheerful name ‘Parmex carrots.’ They were knobby and round, some of them hardly bigger than a walnut. They’d been wintered over – in the ground since last fall and pulled up only recently to be brought to market. Wintering over concentrates the sugars, making the carrots sweeter and more intensely flavored.

A tableful of dried beans was on display at the Cayuga Organics booth. Cayuga is a newcomer to the market – this is their first year at the NYC Greenmarkets, and only their second week at the Greenpoint market.  And dried beans are themselves something of a newcomer too, and are seen pretty rarely at farmers’ markets. Kate, at the Cayuga booth, explained that the few farmers who have brought dried beans to market have had to sell them at discouragingly high prices because they’ve processed the beans by hand. Producing beans on a large scale requires a fairly high level of mechanization for shelling, sorting, etc. Cayuga has invested in the equipment for processing of their crops, and so can sell them at a friendlier price.

They’d also brought whole wheatberries and spelt berries, but had sold out of them earlier in the day. Cayuga and a neighboring farm have invested in a grain mill, and soon will be bringing freshly-milled, whole grain bread flour to the market. (They haven’t determined yet whether they’ll also be producing all-purpose whole grain flours, which require additional processing to remove some of the proteins). By bringing beans and grains to the market, Cayuga is expanding the notion of the greenmarket beyond produce and farm-raised meat to include staple farming. I look forward to visiting their boot throughout the summer to see what they’ll bring!

The Fishkill Farms booth is at the Borough Hall market is so small you might overlook it, but be sure you don’t. Last week I found a bunch of beautiful, multi-colored radishes – red, purple, and white, sitting next to bunches of equally gorgeous purple-bulbed chives.  The radishes had a lovely, spicy bite to them, and paired nicely with the tiny, peppery arugula leaves I also bought. Fishkill is a broadly diverse farm, and over the course of the summer they’ll be selling chard, kale, artichokes, cherries, nectarines, apples, berries and brown eggs from their pasture-raised flock of hens.

Phillips Farms already has an impressive variety of veggies on display, including bunches of flowering cut chives (along with plenty of other herbs), broccoli rabe, kale, scallions, lettuces, and forests of asparagus, to name only a few. This early in the season I expected that some of it must have come from a greenhouse but in fact everything on display is field-raised.

Alongside their tables of garden-ready tomato, jalapeno, and herb plants, Wilkow orchards had gorgeous piles of red and pale green rhubarb, and will have for weeks to come. When I visited last week, Fred Wilklow told me that the strawberries and peas were just then in flower, and so should start appearing at the market in a few weeks. Fred also tells me that this year he’s expanded his herd of steers, good news for us lovers of his pasture-raised beef.