Greenmarketing

I've been trying to stretch the few dollars I have, which means cooking more and eating out less. So if you're wondering how many meals can come from $50 at the greenmarket and a little over $30 at Whole Foods and other, more local, markets, here it goes.

On Wednesday, I went to the Queens County Farm Museum, where I got two small black peppers, four large heirloom tomatoes in different colors/varieties, four kirby cucumbers, two ears of corn, and a discounted pork chop for two (all pork at the Queens County Farm Museum is currently twenty-five percent off) for eighteen dollars. Next, I hit up the Astoria greenmarket for local peaches, yellow plums, one eggplant, one yellow squash, one red onion, and Japanese turnips (seven dollars). The next morning, I went to a salumeria near my house, where I bought a pound of fresh bucatini for three dollars, and the fish market, where I got a half pound of rock shrimp for another three dollars.

At Whole Foods, I undertook my most expensive shopping for the week. I bought hormone-free grass-fed cow cream, fresh butter, Maytag blue cheese, a pint of Van Leeuwen pistachio ice cream, and apricots from Red Jacket Orchards in upstate New York.

Friday, I made a run to the Union Square greenmarket for farm fresh eggs, a loaf of wood-fired whole grain bread, bush basil, a small watermelon, blueberries, and sour and sweet cherry nectars (twenty dollars).

My meals went as thus:

Thursday:

Fresh bucatini with corn, rock shrimp, turnip greens, caramelized red onion, summer squash, eggplant, and cream; Peppers, eggplant, and Squash roasted with Blato olive oil; Yellow plum crumble with pistachio ice cream.

Friday:

Leftover bucatini for lunch.

For dinner: Heirloom tomato salad with pickled Japanese turnips, kirby cucumbers, Maytag blue cheese, bush basil, corn; Grilled whole wheat bread; Poached farm fresh eggs; Yellow plum crumble with Van Leeuwen pistachio ice cream.

Saturday:

Leftover eggs and bread for breakfast.

Leftover tomato salad for lunch.

Monday:

Another tomato salad from the remains of the cheese, turnips, tomatoes, cucumber, basil, and red onion. (The corn is long gone).

That leads me to today. I had poached eggs and toasted bread again. I never get tired of eggs. For dinner tonight, I'll be making that pork chop, grilled, with a Red Jacket Orchards apricot compote, more grilled bread, and a salad of watermelon and basil. Less than a hundred dollars at local establishments bought me dinner for two for almost five days, nothing to complain about.

My recent goal has been to buy food grown near where I live. I try to buy organic when I can, but mostly, I try to stay local. It isn't as easy as it seems. For whatever reason, most of the grocery stores near me sell food that is specifically non-local: mangoes, bananas, strawberries from California, milk from some milk plant in Iowa. Cooks who live near 14th Street have the near-daily luxury of shopping at the Union Square greenmarket; for me, that's a forty-five minute trip, one-way, and a ten-block walk with my haul.

Worth the effort?

Sometimes.

I don't question whether or not this food tastes better; it does. I don't question whether or not this food is better for me; it is. I do, however, question how normal people are supposed to eat locally when it takes nearly two hours of the day to get groceries. Is the carbon footprint I reduce by eating local food negated by the carbon footprint I create just getting to my food?

I guess I don't know the answer. It would be easier if groceries stocked food from actual farms, rather than genetically modified California lettuce. Maybe that's the distant future calling. Who knows?

Wedding Gift

My cousin, who would never by any stretch of the imagination consider herself a foodie and who does not, for all intents and purposes, enjoy cooking, is getting married.  She's getting married to a man who kinda cooks but neither one of them feels this pull towards the kitchen the way I do.  They don't like getting their hands dirty. 

I decided that part of my wedding gift to my cousin would be cooking lessons.  She could choose the dish and I would teach her easy techniques, how to cook without recipes, and how to work with what you have.  I actually chose the first dish because I knew it would be something she'd like and because I knew we'd need a little advance preparation for lesson one.  

I chose chicken parm.  But part of my goal here is to turn ordinary dishes into really good dishes and, as an extension of that, to make empirically unhealthy dishes very healthy.  So the first thing I made her do was make breadcrumbs.  By hand. 

I wouldn't have made her crush the crumbs by hand if she'd had a food processor, but she didn't.  So, instead, I told her to toast four pieces of whole-wheat bread to deep brown, a firm toast.  She removed them from the oven and broke them into crumbs with her hands.  We mixed that wheat crumb mixture with a quarter cup of fresh grated parmesan cheese, good old Italian seasoning from the bottle, salt, and pepper.  

She said, "We have tons of tomato sauce in the cabinet."  I said, "You're going to learn to make your own."  I showed her how to chop a shallot and how to bruise garlic with the back of a knife.  I added a tablespoon of olive oil to the bottom of a saucepan and sweated the two down.  "This is what they are supposed to look like," I told her.  

"Clear?" she asked. 

Exactly. 

Next up, two large cans of peeled Italian tomatoes, salt, pepper, wine (I brought a Chianti), a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a tiny bit of sugar (I would have used agave nectar, had I thought better of it), fresh basil, and fresh oregano.  They had no bay leaves so I skipped the step.  I left the pot uncovered.  She asked if the sauce was supposed to be shrinking.  I said that was exactly what I wanted it to do. 

We bought a head of broccoli.  She had never cooked fresh broccoli before.  "Break off the florets," I told her.  "Put them on a baking dish."  Her engagement gift spice rack of filled spices gave us chili powder, coriander seeds, and cumin.  She covered the broccoli with, admittedly, a little too much olive oil.  I sprinkled the spices on top.  

I told her to separate three eggs.  She knew how to do this.  We seasoned the egg whites and dipped the chicken breasts in them.  The breasts went from egg to breadcrumbs to baking pan and into a 350 degree oven along with the broccoli. 

"You're going to make your own salad dressing," I told her.  She scooped a teaspoon of dijon mustard into a bowl and added a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.  

"Give me the whisk," I said.  

"I don't have one," she told me.  

"I'm looking at one," I said.  

"Oh.  I didn't know we had that."  

I taught her to emulsify.  "Pour while I whisk," I said.  "The mustard helps bind the oil to the vinegar to the oil, since vinegar and oil constantly want to separate."  I added salt and pepper and put the dressing to the side. 

Next up, garlic toasts.  I minced four cloves of garlic and heated them in a saucepan with a few turns of olive oil and three tablespoons of a low-cholesterol butter spread the had in the house (good for consistency and only 50 calories per tablespoon).  I added a chiffonade of basil and oregano.  When the mixture was just short of a simmer, I took it off the heat and spooned it over three split whole-wheat English muffins,  and put the muffins inside the toaster.  

Thirty minutes into cooking time on the chicken, I removed the trays, topped the breast with thinly sliced fresh mozzarella, basil leaves, oregano leaves, and an ample helping of the tomato sauce.  I returned the chicken to the oven to melt and continue cooking.  

We served the chicken parm, which, by the way, tasted unhealthy enough, with whole-wheat pasta, our garlic toasts, a simple salad, and the roasted broccoli.  Both my cousin and her fiance seemed amazed that we had conquered it all on our own without screwing up.  My cousin was particularly impressed with my refusal to go by any book or recipe.  I told her that all you need is a general understanding of how things work and you can succeed in the kitchen.  

But the real problem was that she viewed the product of cooking--the actual meal--as the point, and I don't abide by that philosophy.  For me, the trip to the market, the creative process, the time getting my hands dirty, these are all therapeutic elements in and of themselves.  I enjoy the whole process of cooking, from start to finish.  I like knowing that I can be inspired by produce at a grocery store and that cooking doesn't always mean being armed with an ingredient list or a list of instructions.  

I was hoping that bringing her in touch with her food would inspire in her a new desire to want to cook, to want to create things that she could be proud of.  And she did take pride in the accomplishment of the completed meal.  I'm still hoping that the result of this ongoing project will be an increased drive to get her hands dirty, to love food a little more than she currently does.  On that point, the jury is still out.  Stay tuned.