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.

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