PT: What is most important to you when choosing ingredients for recipes at Gramercy Tavern?
MA: The most important thing when choosing ingredients is that they are grown close to home (in our region), that they are harvested and handled with care, and that they are cooked and served in the shortest timeframe we can possibly manage.
PT: How do you incorporate seasonal food into your favorite recipes?
MA: An ingredient itself is the origin of inspiration and the starting point of every new dish here. We find as many ways as we can to express an idea with that ingredient on each menu, so the same ingredients will appear in more than one dish although treated differently each time.
PT: What motivated you to begin incorporating seasonal, local food into your cooking?
MA: I started cooking professionally in Japan and fell in love with the connection to the changing seasons. I then worked in France for five years and found an immense amount of pride in regional ingredients. These feelings have always been at the heart of the way I look at food.
PT: What are you going to prepare for your Edible Garden cooking demonstration on June 20?
MA: On our menu for the day are Calamari and Carrot Salad, Grilled Kielbasa, and Pulled Pork with Pickles. Since the theme is grilling, we are going to use seasonal ingredients to enhance some basic grilling and BBQ techniques.
PT: What are your favorite tips for healthful eating?
MA: Allowing vegetables to play the starring role in a dish can be interesting, delicious, and healthy. No need to exclude meat or fish, but let them play the supporting role from time to time.
Discuss Research, Learn About Plant World in Casual Setting
James S. Miller, Ph.D., is Dean and Vice President for Science and Rupert Barneby Curator for Botanical Science.
During The Edible Garden, which opens this weekend and runs through October 17, visitors will have the opportunity to gather with some of the Botanical Garden’s scientists in a casual setting known as Café Scientifique. Begun in Leeds, England, in 1998, Café Scientifique is an informal meeting that brings together the public and scientists to discuss science in familiar terms.
Today the Café Scientifique idea has spread well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The Garden has presented these in the past, and this summer and fall will host 18 such events over four weekends, with the first set scheduled this Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. both days in the Garden Cafe.
Garden research staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students will talk about the research and conservation they pursue worldwide—from Latin America to Micronesia and our own backyard—and share with those who attend a greater understanding of the plant world and the efforts under way to conserve plant diversity. They will discuss a wide variety of research topics, such as the exploration of poorly known regions to discover, describe, and name new species of plants; how various plant groups are related and their evolutionary history; and the genetic basic for why plants have different structural features.
Last Chance to Experience The Edible Garden The summer-long celebration The Edible Garden comes to a close this weekend with two days jam-packed with exciting events. Emeril Lagasse takes center stage at the Conservatory Kitchen on Saturday and Lidia Bastianich is featured on Sunday, highlighting a lineup of cooking demonstrations by a number of renowned celebrity chefs.
Also featured on both days are cookbook author signings; food, wine, and beer tastings; home gardening demonstrations; science chats; edible gardening talks; tours of display gardens; and children’s activities. Get your tickets now to ensure premium seating for the main attractions.
Bronx Green-Up Tours, Harvest Fair on Tap this Weekend
Karen Washington is a community gardener and activist. As part of The Edible Garden final weekend, she will lead a tour of the Garden of Happiness.
When I was 8 years old I used to watch the farm report before Saturday morning cartoons and wish and hope that one day I’d have my own farm.
And now, in a way, I do. It may not be what some might think of as a traditional farm, but it’s the closest thing possible: a community garden.
I turned my passion for gardening into community gardening and activism—they go hand-in-hand—over 20 years ago. I want people to be aware that they can grow their own food wherever they are. I live in a low-income neighborhood, and I help educate people to go back to the land, because our grandparents and great-grandparents did not go to a supermarket or grocery store to buy their food; they grew it themselves.
The interest in community gardening has grown in recent years as people are starting to connect their health issues with not knowing where their food comes from. Child obesity—I mean diabetes at the age of 12 or 13!—wasn’t happening to our grandparents or great-grandparents. So now the younger generation is really sitting down and speaking to their elders and having that conversation. And with over 600 community gardens in New York City that you can join for free, the combination creates an atmosphere for people to really want to grow their own food.
At my garden—I belong to the Garden of Happiness on Prospect Avenue between East 181st and 182nd Streets in the Bronx—we have 30 families. Each is assigned a specific plot—the plot can be 5 by 6 feet, 10 by 15 feet—to grow what they want. The Botanical Garden’s Bronx Green-Up program and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation’s GreenThumb program supply us with lumber for raised beds, tools, plants, seeds, soil, and compost. We bring our sweat and our hard labor.
Daisy Martinez is host of Viva Daisy! on the Food Network and author of Daisy Cooks! Latin Flavors that Will Rock Your World. She will present a cooking demonstration on Sunday, The Edible Garden’s final weekend.
When I was a little girl, I used to marvel at how my mother and her mother could grow anything and everything in their garden. Mama Clotilde, my maternal grandmother, would grow medicinal herbs in her garden along with a variety of beans, a banana tree, a prolific breadfruit tree, mangoes, achiote, grapefruit, yucca, and avocados. She would send us out to the garden before dinnertime to collect whatever she needed to create delicious meals. When my family moved to Staten Island in 1964, it was no small wonder that Mami’s first order of business was to set up her vegetable garden in the backyard…and what a garden it was!
Mami, like her mother before her, was born with a green thumb. I mean, the woman just has to wave her hand over anything green and she charms it like a snake charmer! In no time flat (and after a trip to a nearby stable to pick up some manure), Mami had rows of lettuce, tomatoes, beans (against the backyard fence), eggplant, sweet peppers, ajicitos dulces, cilantro, culantro, basil, rue, scallions, zucchini, sugar beats, radishes, and even watermelon! We had a peach tree in the yard that yielded juicy, delicious yellow peaches, and a plum tree that yielded sweet little black plums that we would eat by the dozen!
Mami would tend her garden with everything from coffee grinds to eggshells and involved me in the weeding, harvesting, and pest control (pie plates full of beer for slug control, anyone?). And although I assumed that I would pick up a lot of her skills through osmosis, when I got married and felt the need to start my own garden, I found that I did not inherit the green thumb that my mother, and her mother before her, had waved in my face with impunity! Not to be outdone, I headed to my local botanical garden and library, and although I cannot compete with my grandmother’s or Mami’s garden, I find that I can fend for myself these days.
I grow my own herbs, of course: I keep thyme, lemon thyme, cinnamon basil and regular basil, cilantro, chiles, sage, and parsley. This year I grew jalapeno, Madagascar hot chiles, plum tomatoes, and sweet fennel. I have a couple of blueberry bushes that my children hit up around breakfast time everyday during the summer, and my raspberry bushes aren’t too shabby either. It is a humble, if inadequate homage to Mami and Mama Clotilde’s gardens of paradise, but an homage nonetheless. I can only hope that my simple little garden serves to inspire my daughter (and sons!) to one day have one of their own.
Valerie Imbruce, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Environmental Studies at Bennington College in Vermont who was a doctoral student at the Botanical Garden, researches the production and distribution of ethnic fruits and vegetables for New York City markets. She will be holding an informal conversation about ethnic fruits and vegetables in Chinatown and urban food systems during Café Scientifique on September 12 as part of The Edible Garden.
Cities, home to half of the world’s growing population, are poised to redefine how we produce and supply our food. Cities are where people are demanding more farmers markets and community supported agriculture groups and where there is a local agriculture craze. Food is a social movement with a particularly urban flavor.
Living in southern Vermont for the past year after being in New York for nearly a decade, I learned that in New York City it is easier to purchase a diet of regionally produced foods than in the food-producing regions themselves because of the structure of our food supply chains.
Since World War II the number of farms in the United States had been declining, but between 2002 and 2007, the last year for which data were available, there was a 4 percent increase. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, these new farms are half the size of the average U.S. farm, have younger operators, and have sales of which one product accounts for no more than 50% of the farm income. These are the types of farms, small and diversified run by a new generation of farmers, which farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and chef-farm partnerships have been the primary supporters of.
But direct marketing arrangements are not enough to support a sustained increase in farm numbers: The volume of food sold directly from farm to consumer is a drop in the bucket compared with the volume of food that is sold through wholesale distribution. Why should New York, the second largest apple producing state in the nation, export its apples and then turn around and import apples from Chile and New Zealand for New Yorkers to eat? Why should the United States export more than 4,000 tons of yogurt and then import just over the same volume? It’s because fundamental aspects of the “mainstream” food system make it difficult for regional farmers to access their regional urban markets. We need to get commodity agriculture and supermarkets on board to change this, and we need city government to create policies to ensure access to urban markets by regional farmers.
With the beautiful weather and a three-day respite from work (for most), this is a great time to get away to the Botanical Garden—and without going far. Enjoy the waning days of summer viewing the lush Perennial Garden, Seasonal Walk, and Rose Garden. Catch The Edible Garden in its penultimate weekend with tours, cooking demos, children’s activities, and more. Take a bird walk or attend the Greenmarket on Saturday, enjoy poetry readings on Sunday, relax on a Tram Tour of the Garden’s 250-acres on Monday (or any day). You can do all these wonderful things with an All-Garden Pass.
Annie Novak is coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden. Click here to see a Today show segment about the program.
A few weeks ago, during one of many rainstorms in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden this summer, I took refuge with a few students from our Children’s Gardening Program in the wigwam tucked in the side corner of the garden’s Meadow. While the kids played giddy musical chairs on the stumps inside, I sat quietly with my back against the bark wall. It’s a cozy space. Although the kids were acting loud and giggly, the small wigwam felt peaceful. The rain fell near-noiselessly on the dome of birch saplings. Through the wigwam’s single window, daylilies and tall zebra grass shone orange and green against the gray.
Part of the Three Sisters display garden, the wigwam was built in 2006 to re-create the lifestyle of the Lenni-Lenape, the first New York natives. When teaching, I often ask my students to imagine what it would be like to live as the Lenape did 400 years ago. I ask the children to think about everything they do inside their homes—cook, read, watch TV, play with toys, take refuge in air conditioning when the summer hits—and think of what the Lenape would be doing instead. With seven-year-olds, of course, a reflective discussion like this leads to hilarity pretty quickly.
But after some groans and giggles about sharing a bedroom with your whole family, comparing lifestyles leads to an epiphany as well. The wigwam only seems small in comparison to today’s houses when you think about it as an equal living environment. But it isn’t. In those early, pre-hustle-and-bustle New York years, an entire world around the home provided the space for cooking, playing, harvesting. (Who needs air conditioning with the Bronx River running so close by?) What I like about the wigwam is its clear definition of necessity. It’s a space of shelter and sleep. Imagination provides the rest.
NYBG Student Travels to Asia to Trace Eggplant’s Roots
Rachel Meyer, a doctoral candidate at the Botanical Garden, specializes in the study of the eggplant’s domestication history and the diversity of culinary and health-beneficial qualities among heirloom eggplant varieties. She will hold informal conversations about her work atThe Edible Garden‘sCafé Scientifique on September 13.
The eggplant (Solanum spp.) may not seem like the world’s most exciting food crop at first thought, but its history and diversity are actually quite intriguing. The common name, “eggplant,” actually covers more than one species, whose size, shape, color, and flavor are remarkably different throughout the world.
People have grown eggplants for over 2,000 years in Asia, and it is thought that eggplants were used as medicine before being selected over time to become a food. Many present-day cultivars of eggplants still contain medicinally potent chemical compounds, including antioxidant, aromatic, and antihypertensive, some of which might be the same compounds responsible for flavor as well.
If we can unravel the history of the eggplant’s domestication and investigate the health-beneficial and gastronomic qualities of heirloom eggplant varieties, we can promote specific varieties that may be useful to small-scale farmers, practitioners of alternative medicine, and eggplant lovers around the world.
I spent seven weeks in China and the Philippines last winter exploring how different ethnic groups use local eggplant varieties. These regions in Asia are important, because scientists are still not sure where eggplants were first domesticated (that is, selected by people over generations for desirable qualities instead of just harvested from the wild). We know it was in tropical Asia, but the written record doesn’t go back far enough to provide more clues. For that reason I also collected wild relatives of eggplant that might be the ancestor of the domesticated crop.
PT: What is most important to you when choosing ingredients for recipes at Gramercy Tavern?
The eggplant (Solanum spp.) may not seem like the world’s most exciting food crop at first thought, but its history and diversity are actually quite intriguing. The common name, “eggplant,” actually covers more than one species, whose size, shape, color, and flavor are remarkably different throughout the world.