Beginning this Thursday, April 1, the Borough Hall Greenmarket will be open on Thursdays. The market is also open, year ’round, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Here’s more info from Jessica Douglas, the regional coordinator for the GrowNYC / CENYC Brooklyn Greenmarkets:

Brooklyn Borough Hall Greenmarket returns on Thursdays starting April 1st!

The Brooklyn Borough Hall Greenmarket has brought fresh, local produce to this thriving downtown location for over 25 years. This year, we will be accepting EBT/Food Stamps from May – December! Three days a week we serve the diverse communities of Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, and Downtown Brooklyn with a bounty of fresh picked fruits and vegetables, beautiful plants and flowers, grass-fed meat, grass-fed dairy products, including the best goat cheese you’ll ever eat, just caught Long Island fish, and amazing free-range eggs. Plus, there will be free events all season long like cooking demonstrations, raffles, school tours, and kids & family friendly activities. Come talk to the friendly farmers who grow your food, meet your neighbors, bring a friend, and taste the difference at your neighborhood Greenmarket!

The Brooklyn Borough Hall Greenmarket is located in Camden Plaza at Court St and Montague St, and is open from 8am – 6pm every Tuesday and Saturday, year-round, and Thursday from April to December. EBT, WIC & Senior FMNP accepted.

The strawberries and asparagus and rhubarb and sugar snap peas, all the first-comers of the new growing season, are just now basking in at their first rays of spring sunshine. They won’t be ready for market for another month or two. Until then, here’s a market report from Jessica Douglas, the regional coordinator of the Brooklyn Greenmarkets for GrowNYC (formerly known as CENYC):

Cayuga, who you know already for their beans and whole grain flours, has begun selling loaves of bread that are truly amazing. They also now have All Purpose Flour.

Also, a new arrival at the market, Oak Grove Plantation (Ted Blew, proprietor), will be at the McCarren Park Market for the first time this Saturday, March 27 . Be sure to stop by and welcome him to the market, and pick up a few herbs and plants to get that garden started on your fire escape.

Also, for those of you further south, this Thursday, April 1, is opening day for the Thursday market at Boro Hall. Stay tuned for more details!

It was not my day to take the prize last Saturday, at the McCarren Park Greenmarket winter squash pie cookoff.  The laurels went instead to my friend and esteemed colleague Jane Grenier. Her masterful hazelnut-topped butternut-squash adaptation of Epicurious’ Pumpkin Ginger Cheesecake Pie (not to mention her vote-collecting two-pie strategy) won over the crowd of greenmarket shoppers. She won the day’s winter-squash crown and a bagful of market goodies. Congratulations Jane!

My own creation didn’t play nearly so well with the pie-loving crowds. It was a delicata squash custard layered atop chocolate granache.  I dreamed up the recipe one day at work while eating leftover pumpkin pie and a chocolate bar simultaneously. It was good, I thought, and if chocolate and pumpkin can be combined in pumpkin bread, why not in a pie? And while I’m at it, why can’t I use delicious, honey-sweet delicata squash in place of the pumpkin? Hm? Why not?

It turned out that the cookoff crowds had some reasons why not, since so few of them voted for my pie. But even so I felt I was onto a promising recipe, if only because of the gorgeous autumn-sunset-yellow color of the finished pie. It was at least worth another round in the Dave’s Kitchen test lab.

From Jane’s pie I took the idea of adding hazelnuts to the chocolate layer. And to give some bite to the squash custard layer I added orange peel and lemon juice. It may yet be a prize winning pie – I’ll find out this weekend when I enter it into the 1st Annual Brooklyn Pie Bake-Off Benefit at Spacecraft in Williamsburg. Come on out and see if I’ve made a competition-worthy pie after all!

My current version of the recipe for this pie can be found here.

This Saturday, November 14, there will be a winter squash pie contest at the McCarren Park Greenmarket. The  best pie wins its baker a bag of goodies from the market booths, but the real winners of the contest will be the market customers, who get to taste each pie and vote for their favorite. I’ll have an entry on hand, though its exact recipe is still being formulated in the Dave’s Kitchen test labs. The lovely Karol Lu, decorated veteran of the Brooklyn Cookoff scene, will also be there, as will Jane Grenier, whose tarte tatin was a hit at last month’s Greenmarket apple pie contest. There’ll be other contestants besides, and we’ll be pulling out the stops to make some delicious pies. Come out and try ‘em!

Remember that the market has recently moved, and can now be found at Union between Driggs & N 12th.

From market manager Lauren, here’s some of what else you’ll find at the market this weekend:

Red Jacket has apple butter and delicious ciders.  Hot cider will be available at the market.

Osczepinski has a wide variety of winter squash. Once you’ve been inspired by the masterful pies at the cookoff you can pick up some squash and make your own.

Healthways has great potatoes.  Perfect for your winter soups and stews.

Arcadian pastures has whole rabbits and chickens.

Dipaola is accepting orders for Thanksgiving.  Turkeys (in a range of sizes) can be pre-ordered and picked up at the market.

And on Saturday the 21st, Daily candy will be hosting a “buy a bag” event.  Customers can buy a bag of produce (specific list of produce TBA) from the market and simply drop it off at the Daily Candy tent.  All proceeds go to NYC Food Bank!

See you on Saturday!

From Jessica of CENYC and the Greenpoint Greenmarket:

We are hosting our annual Brooklyn market bike tour this coming Saturday, October 10^th

Meet Greenmarket farmers, nosh your way through some of Brooklyn’s finest farmers’ markets, and go on a fun bike ride with Time’s Up Environmental Group and Greenmarket!

The air is crisp, the leaves are changing colors, and the farmers’ markets are on the cusp of Fall.  All this means that now is the best time to EAT! Work up an appetite as we bike the Saturday Brooklyn Greenmarkets and eat Fall’s bounty.  The tour begins at the Greenpoint Rooftop Farm, where farmer Annie Novak will give us a tour of this stunning 6,000 sq foot farm sitting atop a warehouse in industrial Brooklyn.  Afterward, we’ll head to the McCarren Park market for coffee, breakfast and bike tune-ups (provided by NYC Bikes) before riding to the Brooklyn Borough Hall market for some cider pressing and cider doughnut eating. Next we’ll go to the Ft. Greene market for a worm bin composting demonstration by the Ft. Greene Compost Project folks. We’ll end our insider’s tour at Brooklyn’s largest Greenmarket, Grand Army Plaza, with a cooking demonstration hosted by Jacques Gautier of Palo Santo and market-inspired lunch in the park with a couple of Greenmarket farmers.

Space is limited, RSVP to lcarollo@greenmarket.cc.

For more information, visit www.cenyc.org/biketour.  Cost, $15.
When: Saturday, October 10th
Starting Point: Greenpoint Rooftop Farm, 44 Eagle Street
Ending Point: Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Time: 8:30 AM – 3:30 PM

Concord grapes are in season here in the Northeast, and their aroma in the booths at the farmers markets is close to intoxicating. So when I was invited to participate in an apple pie bake-off at the McCarren Park Greenmarket in Greenpoint, I could only think whether I might be able to make an apple pie that incorporated these gorgeous purple grapes. I was sure I remembered somewhere seeing a recipe for Concord Grape & Apple Pie. On Epicurious? No. In one of my cookbooks? Nope. Finally I found it on Cathy Erway’s well-known home-cooking blog “Not Eating Out in New York.” Since this recipe seems to exist no where else, Cathy gets credit for inventing it. Score one for the home cooks!

As she describes, she grappled (grape-lled?) with the dilemma that concord grapes have seeds. Not wanting the tedium of de-seeding a pound of grapes, she opted to leave them in, not minding the bit of crunch they added to her pie but realizing also that not everyone would enjoy them. In my Google searches for apple-grape pie recipes, though, I came upon a page from the website of the New York Folklore Society, containing what appeared to be an old-fashioned, upstate New York recipe for Concord Grape Pie. This recipe describes a technique for removing the seeds.

This same grape pie recipe was also written up in Saveur Magazine, and interestingly I found a version of it in a cookbook that I keep on my shelf but don’t use very much: Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking: A Mennonite Community Cookbook. That, along with the fact that the origins of the upstate New York pie apparently came from “an old German woman” makes me curious. Does Concord Grape pie have some Amish provenance? Does it, like me, come from Pennsylvania Dutch stock?

But I digress. The technique for removing the seeds from the grapes is a little like the method I used earlier this summer for making berry sodas. First you pinch the thick purple skin to squeeze out the surprisingly green pulp inside. The skins are set aside in a bowl, while the pulp goes onto the stove. It’s simmered down for a few minutes until it’s soft, then strained through a sieve. The seeds are tossed, and the strained hot pulp is stirred back into the reserved purple skins.

Through all of this, the grapes give off their musky, autumn-sweet aroma. The process of separating and then recombining the purple skin and the green fruit made me think of what making wine must be like. These definitely were not your ordinary, thin-skinned seedless supermarket grapes.

For the pie, I simply mixed the grape mixture with a roughly equal amount of apples that had been peeled, cored, and sliced. I added quick-cooking tapioca to bind the liquids, and lemon juice, sugar (only a little), and a pinch of nutmeg for flavor. Once the filling had been added to the pie shell, I dotted it liberally with butter (this step is important: I forgot this step for one pie and it failed to set. It was tasty, but very runny). Then I covered it all with a top layer of pastry dough, into which small slits were cut to allow steam to escape while baking.

The end result was a beautiful red-purple pie with a delicious grape fragrance and flavor. I’ll definitely make this pie again. I’m also very curious to try a full-on, traditional Concord grape pie, and I think soon I’ll be able to. The farmer I bought my grapes from, Stone Arch Farms & Bakery in the Union Square Greenmarket, said that soon be bringing old-fashioned grape pies to the market. I wonder if his recipe came from an old German woman too.

Read my recipe for Concord Grape Apple Pie Here.

There will be apple pies on hand to taste this Saturday at the Greenpoint Greenmarket, in celebration of Apple Harvest Day. Members of the market-going crowd will judge the pies and hand out the prize.

I plan to be there with a variation of an apple-grape pie that Cathy Erway seems to have invented and wrote about last year. Don’t worry though – I’ve found there are methods for removing the seeds from the grapes. Supposedly this pie tastes exactly like grape Bubble Yum — and yes, I mean that in a good way.

You can also watch cider being made on an old time cider press and we there  will be plenty of cider to drink courtesy of Red Jacket Orchards.

Happy Autumn!

News about the Greenpoint Greenmarket from Lauren Fuhrman, market manager:

The market will soon be moving to a new location: Union Ave between Driggs and North 12th, not far from its present spot at Lorimer and Bedford.  Look for the market in its new location starting on Oct 17th.

This week or next week will be the last day of the season to get Consider Bardwell’s delicious fresh goat cheese.  Dorset, their national-award-winning cheese, will also be available.

Upcoming Events:
Sept 26th – composting demo

Oct 3 – Apple Harvest Festival.  There will be cider pressing and an apple pie contest.  More apple pies will be provided by baker’s bounty, brooklyn kitchen, by the Greenmarket Manager (that’s Lauren) and possibly by daveskitchen.com.

Oct 10th – The Brooklyn Bike Tour will be passing through the market.

Also on Oct 10 – There will be a demo by the Greenpoint Rooftop Farm on how to perfectly pot a plant.

Coming up at the Brooklyn Borough Hall Market:

Red Jacket Orchards will have grapes at the market this weekend for the first time this season.

Also, on Thursday, Sept 24, the market will host Green Brooklyn…Green City – A city-wide fair and symposium where you can learn about how non-profits and the city of New York are laying the groundwork for a sustainable future. Interactive booths and workshops on the State of the Climate; Green your Business; and Local vs. Organic.

Come out and see what’s happening at your neighborhood greenmarket!

This post was written for the “Let Us Eat Local” food blogging contest at Not Eating Out in New York.

When shopping for this contest, I’d planned to visit my local, neighborhood greenmarket so that I could buy produce from my very favorite farmers and sing their praises on Not Eating Out in New York.  However, as so often happens, my time was suddenly taken up with unforeseen plans, and so my market time was considerably foreshortened. Instead of a leisurely Saturday morning stroll through my neighborhood market in Brooklyn, I had to resort to a hasty, after work dash through New York’s central greenmarket in Union Square.

So I wasn’t able, as I’d planned, to get New York State artichokes and remark to the NEOINY readers about how surprised I was when I first learned that artichokes can grow here. I wasn’t able to visit the Phillips and Wilklow booths at the Borough Hall market and extol, as I’ve often done before, the high quality of these purveyors’ produce. Instead I ran from booth to booth in Union Square, while many farmers were closing up shop for the day, quickly finding what I needed from vendors I’m not as well acquainted with.

But this too is part of the experience of shopping at the greenmarket. If you’re lucky enough, as I am, to live in a city with an extensive farmers market system, you can have access to farm-fresh produce even when you’re pressed for shopping time. New Yorkers are famously overbooked and strapped for time.  But the farmers markets here are so numerous, that if you know where to look you can almost always have one on the way to wherever it is you’re hurrying to.  Shopping for farm-fresh, seasonal produce should be as convenient as shopping at a supermarket – I won’t say that it’s quite that accessible yet, but sometimes it almost is.

The recipe for my dish – Eggplant and Black Pepper Fettuccine with a sauce of Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes and Roasted Garlic, can be found here.