Kimchi Fest

Our kimchi always causes a fuss at the market. Sometimes that means people stomping and hollering over the heat, groups of Koreans excited to find a familiar flavor, people yelling at us for not warning them properly about the spice level before they taste, and vegetarians excited to finally find a fish-free version of this beloved food (it usually contains anchovies and fish sauce). Besides the spice and ferment phobic few, most people are incredibly happy to find kimchi at the market, even if it is made by a white girl. We're often scolded for not making enough of the stuff.

The main ingredient, nappa cabbage, is in shortage this year in Asia, but growing in abundance in the Hudson Valley. There should be a ton of kimchi as well! At market, after the sweating and yipping are past, and as people are tucking jars of kimchi into their bags, they often ask for ways to serve it.

And so Kimchi Fest is born. We've made three times the amount of kimchi we usually do, and will be cooking up some sample ways to eat it. These may include kimchi pancakes, kimchi guacamole, kimchi soup, and more. Come try this treasured Korean staple for yourself.

No Tofu

Alert to regulars—there will be no fresh tofu tomorrow at market.

I am sad to report that our friend Mickey, our regular tofu-talking delivery guy, has passed away. I'm kind of glad there will be a gap in tofu sales—it seems only proper that Mickey's death should disrupt us!

Please forgive our soy pause while our thoughts are with Mickey's family and friends, and we'll be back to our regular programming soon. We'll have plenty of other goodies available at the Cold Spring Market tomorrow morning, including seitan, cashew cheese, spicy beer mustard, and a bunch of varieties of pickled veggies.

Summer Farmer's Market

wintergreens will be at the Cold Spring Farmer's Market every first and third Saturday of each month, beginning June 5, from 8:30 to 1:30.

We'll have a variety of fermented vegetables, chutneys and mustard, quick pickles, and vegetarian staples, like fresh tofu, handmade seitan, and cashew cheese. See you there!

Long Johns

It's eleven degrees this morning. Bundle up for the farmer's market!

Beacon or Bust

It was a great summer in Cold Spring, but winter is all about Beacon! We've closed up shop in Cold Spring, and will now be at the Beacon Farmers Market the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month, through the end of April.

Butterball

For the next three weeks (Oct. 31, Nov. 7, and Nov. 14) we'll be giving out free vegetarian/vegan holiday cookbooks and taking orders for homemade veg roasts for your Thanksgiving dinner. Seitan roasts serve six, and will be available for pickup the weekend before Thanksgiving, Saturday at the Cold Spring market, and Sunday at the Beacon market.

Visit us at the halloween market tomorrow and order yours!

Baggage

Hey members, we're giving out bags as part of the first distribution! We've hand-stenciled wintergreens tote bags for you to carry your treasures home. They're very cute (and reminiscent of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood era), so we'd understand if you wanted to put your food in a different bag, and use this one to show off when you're about town.Whether you're carrying your wintergreens bag or another one, you'll need to bring something to put your food in to all other pickups. We won't be giving out plastic bags—the world doesn't need any more plastic. You actually may want to consider bringing more than one reusable bag, since some veggies from the cellar will be dirty (dirt helps them last longer in storage, believe it or not), and you might not want the dirty stuff touching the clean stuff. Or the frozen stuff touching the fresh stuff. Or the peas touching the carrots.

If you don't have a stash of cloth bags, take inspiration from Bags for the People, and make a couple quickies out of whatever fabric scraps you have available. What's cooler than a tote bag made from your old t-shirt?

Sharp Glow

Notice this trend of painted pumpkins rather than carved jack-o-lanterns? My favorite thing to do with pumpkins is eat them, but I do appreciate creative carving as well. I'm not against painting things generally, but painting on a pumpkin for Halloween is a bummer, and I've quietly disliked it as I've seen it rise in popularity. I've never said anything out loud, knowing it's a stupid thing to get hung up on, but got pushed over the edge this week when I ventured into a big box hardware store, and saw pre-painted (truly ugly) pumpkins for sale there.

Carving pumpkins has always had a tragic edge, since you know you're wasting food when you do it. But, you do salvage the seeds (yum) and removed chunks, and end up with something aesthetically pleasing to light up and share with your neighbors. Glowing jack-o-lanterns, even the scary ones, are beautiful.I've never seen an attractive painted pumpkin, and I'm pretty certain those seeds aren't being scraped out and roasted or saved for planting the next year. And I worry that this painting business has come from adults who are unwilling to help kids safely handle knives. I think kids shouldn't be protected from everything under the sun, rather, taught to understand what is dangerous and why, and how to act with sharp things, fragile things, living things, sour things. (At the market, I've seen kids drawn to our pickled veggie samples by the pinks and yellows and oranges and purples, and parents literally drag them away saying, "Ug, pickles" or "Ug, no, c'mon, c'mon, let's go get a donut." as if it would hurt a child to taste something new. On the flip side, adventuresome kids have dragged their grown-ups over and made them buy radishes or mint carrots or dill cukes or kimchi.)
Let's all take our lives in our hands this year and carve pumpkins, shall we? Let's roast and save seeds. Let's bake the pumpkin parts we remove. Let's remind our young ones and ourselves that knives are not weapons, and that there are safe and proper ways of using them.

Pufferball Pizza

Ok, maybe it's weird to write about pizza here? But but but, there are plenty of good reasons! My total insane pizza fandom aside, I have three (three!) positive pizzas reports.

1. I recently experienced my first TWO PIZZA DAY, ever in my little lifetime. As far as I've dived into hedonism, I'd never done this. Articles abound in foodie mags lately about all the artisan pizza places popping up in the city, and it was killing my pizza spirit to not have tried any of them. So, because Una Pizza Napolitana in the East Village had already closed down, I made a pizza pilgrimage to the old 'hood in Brooklyn. The first pie of the day was so-so. They relied too heavily on the enormous slabs of expensive meat and cheese we saw topping other customers' pizzas, and didn't pay attention to the basics: good crust, good sauce, herbs. The salad and wine were nice, and it was cheap, so I won't totally dis, but the bottom line is that the brick oven wasn't enough to make this lackluster pizza worthwhile.
   
   That's okay, because that brings us to the second pizza of the day, which was a bit more expensive, and fantastic. This one was from Fornino, and really hit the spot. They were a little weirded when we insisted that they not put sauce or cheese on our wild mushroom pizza (just a little black truffle oil, please!), but once they smelled it, I think they saw the logic. Here, the shrooms were fantastic, as was the crispy crust, and the lack of sauce let the mushrooms take center stage.
   
   This is the best Brooklyn pizza since my beloved JJ's closed. (That's not the real name, but it was along the lines of "Brick Oven Pie" or something that got lost in the fog. I've learned, now, that the owner's name was Terry, but to me, he'll always be JJ.)
   
   
   
2. Angelina's is a plain looking pizza joint in Cold Spring. But the owner, Ali, isn't afraid of unusual ingredients, and has been making "farmer's market" pizzas each Saturday. He walks across the street to the market, picks up whatever we have on offer, and tops his pizzas with local, seasonal stuff. Not only am I impressed with his concoctions (pear & candied walnut pizza), but he brings a stack of free pies over the market vendors nearly every week. There's always one sans cheese and topped with fresh hot peppers. How could I not be a fan?
   
   
   
3. This magic happened in my own kitchen. Vivian from Madura Farm gave me a maitake mushroom the size of my head. I was starved, and made a pizza on store bought dough-in-a-bag. Yeah, I can admit it! As I chopped up this mushroom (literally, like a cabbage) I worried I was making something really low class with this amazing fungi, but my hunger urged me on. I turned the oven to 500 degrees, flattened my 99 cent crust over some coarse cornmeal, and topped it with caramelized onion, fresh garlic, one pretty dried out tomato (sliced), olive oil, salt, pepper, and an enormous mound of chopped maitake. This was, I think, the perfect pizza. Better than Fornino, better than JJ's, better than pizzas made in the cob oven I helped build, better than potato pizza from Sullivan Street Bakery, better than truffle oil or pears or candied walnuts. Shockingly, amazingly perfect.
   
   Within an hour, I was on ebay looking at maitake inoculation plugs. How many ten minute meals cause a person to want to convert their basement into a forest of fungus?

Oh magic maitake, I think I love you. As much as I love pizza.

Sickly Green

We won't be at the market tomorrow, Saturday, October 10th, due to illness. Our apologies go out to our regulars, but, it seems like a bad idea to prepare food for others when ill, right?

We'll miss you, but see you next week, bright, shiny, and not sneezing in your supper.

Pickle Upper

Meet Eva. She had never had a pickle in her (nearly) eighteen years.* All that changed two weeks ago.

Eva looked sleepy, and I offered her a fermented garlic dill pickle, thinking she could use a vitamin C kick. She explained the lack of pickles in her life thus far, and was tentative with her first few bites. The report was good: it tasted great to her, and unlike anything she'd had before. That pickle started something.

Today, Eva explained that the past couple of weeks have been filled with cravings for things she never had or liked before: olives, dark chocolate, and pickles.** You might call it a tastebud revolution. She wants a version of the wintergreens C.S.A. that is pickles only, every week, all winter long.

Not a terrible idea, Eva. Not bad at all.***

*I had word with her father about this tastebud terrorism.
**Eva's father had a word with her about whether she might be pregnant.
***This would be the easiest C.S.A. on the planet to run, no?
P.S. Meet beekeeper Mike. He thought these particular half sours in this particular jar were too beautiful to eat. I took this picture so that he could look at them forever, and still get to eat them.

How to Feed a Vegan

Because everything at the wintergreens market booth is non-animal, shoppers frequently come by and ask what on earth they should do with their friend/sibling/houseguest who is vegetarian and/or vegan and is coming over for the weekend/dinner/a barbeque. It's funny to be treated as the vegan authority.

For starters, when people ask, at a farmer's market, "What do vegans eat?" it is a little boggling. We're at the farmer's market, with piles of beautiful fruit and vegetables all around us. Um, they eat fruit and vegetables. and beans and grains.

Of course, I do have opinions about how to host your vegans well.

1. Ask your friend/sibling/houseguest what foods they like. Vegan tastes range as widely as carnivore tastes. Some crave processed fake meats, some hate tofu, some live off french fries, some are gourmet raw chefs, some eat quinoa for breakfast.
   
2. Don't serve your friend an iceberg lettuce salad. Don't serve them flavorless food at all. Vegans have taste buds!
   
3. Another no-no: Don't make something vegan for your guest to eat, and a pork chop for yourself. This isn't the same as, but is about as sensitive as cracking open a beer with your A.A. friend, and making gay jokes to your queer pals, expecting them to laugh. (In this scenario, you're a straight person who is not a recovering alcoholic.*) You can eat a vegan meal, and enjoy it. You probably do it all the time, and don't even notice: pb&j, miso soup, falafel platter. Don't question their choices: Are you sure you don't want just a tiny bit of goat cheese? .
   
4. Prepare something you like. Nobody's happy if there's a great big spread and the host is only picking at the food and drink. You can stick with simple preparations (spaghetti & salad) or fancy (watermelon coolers, poblano tamales with mole sauce, and coconut flan).
   • If you like pasta, prepare vegetable marinara instead of meat sauce, and skip parmesan in the pesto (yes, it tastes amazing without).
     
   • If you're a grilling enthusiast, throw on mushrooms and fresh corn. Veggie burgers are a crowd pleaser, and there a zilliion recipes for them online.
     
   • Mexican food (or Indian, or Thai, or Chinese) are easy to make vegan. Begin with warm tortillas and salsa and guacamole and a margarita! (Que normal, no?) Unless, of course, your vegan friend is in AA, in which case you should stick with horchata.
     
   • Make PIZZA with all the great produce at the market. You don't need cheese, you don't even need sauce! Just pile your crust with tomatoes and peppers and onions and basil and garlic and corn and eggplant and drizzle on olive oil and salt and pepper and it's perfect and fresh and delicious.
     
   • Dessert can be as simple as fresh fruit or sorbet. If you bake, there are fruit tarts and pies.
     
   • For breakfast, make scrambled tofu the same way you'd make scrambled eggs: dress up mashed tofu with mushrooms, scallions, herbs, or your favorite hot sauce. Or pretend you're British, and have beans on toast with tea.
   
   
5. Don't be offended if your guest doesn't taste the tree nut cheese you got especially for them. Any vegan has likely tasted scores of disgusting soy and rice cheeses, and may not be enthusiastic to try anything called "cheese" ever again.
   
6. Instead of pestering your guest, use the internet to answer your every vegan question. Need to know what brands of margarine are vegan? Google search. Need something to replace eggs in baked goods? Look to the pros.

This barely scrapes the surface of what you can feed the vegan or vegans you're hosting, so please put books or the web to good use. Remember to enjoy yourself while you try something new and host people you love.

*Did anyone else notice the guy at the market this past week wearing the "Straight" t-shirt with the grey "rainbow"? What's with that?

CCCorn

I know that the rain is making a little corner of your brain consider skipping the farmer's market this weekend. But then you'd be missing pickled chipotle coriander corn rounds!

The corn is finally super sweet, and these niblets are terribly delicious. They dress up any old meal in a flash: from creamy black bean soup to whipped yam.

The veggie burgers this week contain NY state Cayuga beans, lots of kale, shitakes, and other good things.

Like postal delivery, we'll be there with corn rounds, no matter the weather!

Anti-Cheese

The argument rages on about whether nut cheese is "really" cheese. I couldn't care less about what makes cheese official....this is amazing stuff.

Our own Dr. Cow (a.k.a. Veronica and Pablo) are profiled on G Living about their non-dairy tree nut cheese making process. Come to market on Saturday and try raw aged cashew nut cheese for yourself (the eating, not the making).

Spoiled with Food

I am lucky to have this job. One reason that's true is the great people I get to meet. One couple who are wintergreens regulars at the market are passionate about tofu, saying that the tofu we sell is the best they've had in the U.S. (though still not comparable to Japanese tofu quality). One of them came by after the market was closed today to tell me about hiyayakko preparations for tofu, and to make me an on-the-spot cool lunch on a really hot day. How sweet is that?

Then I had the pleasure of going to a guacamole competition/party, thrown by another market-goer who takes her guacamole VERY seriously. I'd gotten the date confused and didn't have traditional ingredients, so made Korean guacamole, with a lot of kimchee chopped finely and mixed in to mashed avocado (what I did have available). I didn't take home the big sahuaro prize, but people were intrigued. (I must reveal my inspiration: a west coast friend had just told me that Korean tacos are all the rage there.) It was a lovely gathering, and everyone wins when there's guacamole to be had and sangria flowing.

It's great getting to know you all—and your food!Korean Guacamole

• 1 ripe avocado
  
• 1 cup kim chee, diced
  
• 4 tsp kim chee brine
  
• 1Tbsp diced jalapeno
  
• Dash of sea salt

Chop avocado then mash with a fork. Gently stir in other ingredients.

"Real" Pickles

There are some people who've enjoyed tasting citrus turnips and curried cauliflower, but who just don't believe a pickle is a pickle unless it once was a cucumber.

For those of you needing a pickled cuke to chomp on, traditional garlic pickles have arrived in the 'hood. Madura Farm has provided us with stacks of lovely kirbys, and they've made for crunchy, REAL, crowd-pleasers. Visit wintergreens at the Cold Spring Farmer's Market and taste for yourself.

War Pickle

I'm too young to have thought about this, but a large number of men in the U.S. associate kimchi with their time in the military.

The heads of napa cabbage are lovely right now (there was one torso sized one I should have photographed but didn't). So I've been making a lot of kimchi. I love spicy food, and the people who come to wintergreens seem to really crave spice and sour and layers of flavor—it fits. When I mentioned to my father that I'd made a batch, he remembered his time in Korea, and the kimchi being fermented in holes in the ground. Interesting, noted. Because M*A*S*H was my favorite tv program as a kid and there was one kimchi-pot-mistaken-for-landmine plot line, I should have connected the U.S. military to kimchi in the American mind.

Then at the market yesterday three or four men mentioned having not tasted or smelled kimchi in decades, and having such fond memories of it from being stationed in Korea. It's interesting how war and colonization affect our relationships to food—of course they have dramatic effect.

I can be small brained, I guess, but I'm glad to be expanded a bit by interactions over this particular food and its expansive flavor.

Food Art

Remember Polaroids? Apparently iPhones now take pictures that look like Polaroids. My sister was in town visiting, and nearly threw her phone across the market shaking it while they "developed." I found it to be a hilarious cross of the new and the old: I'd missed those wacked out colors!

Eat Pickles, Be Healthy

Wintergreens is all about preserving local food when it's harvested, for use in the deepest depths of winter. We're currently selling frozen local baby food, pickled local veggies, and stuff like veggie burgers (made from guess what—local veggies) at the farmer's market to raise money for our walk-in freezer.

But somehow it's the pickles that stick for people. Someone with turrets said to me the other day, "You make those funny pickled things, don't you?" Guilty.

But E, The Environmental Magazine is here to tell you why eating pickles is a good thing: probiotics, immune support, etc. etc. Pickle Power!

Smackdown

True story: At the farmer's market, the meat vendor and the mushroom vendor got in a fight over wintergreens' last serving of wasabi baked tofu.

It's a new world, people, a new world.