Tompkins Square Greenmarket

On a visit to New York City from my home in Los Angeles, and with time to kill on a Sunday and Monday in May, I decided to drop by a couple of farmers market. Those are the slowest days of the week for farmers markets in New York City, with only four of the city's 37 greenmarkets open on Sundays and just one on Mondays. But I got a chance to see two markets that I missed on my last visit to New York last December.

The Tompkins Square market is situated in a gentrifying section of the East Village with a somewhat tumultuous recent history. The square, which has been a site for political protests at least since the 1960s,  is most famous for a riot that erupted in 1991 when the police evicted homeless squatters.  When I visited on Mother's Day, the park in the square was quite pristine, filled with a riot of leafy green springtime growth. There were no squatters in sight, just a lone panhandler, a young man with a mohawk haircut asking passersby if he could borrow a cell phone for a quick call to tell his mother he loved her, a group of middle-aged men engaged in an animated debate about God, and many parents with children in fenced off playground on one side the square. The market, which occupied the sidewalk on the west side of the square, had 10 vendors: three selling vegetables, two selling nursery plants, two selling baked goods, two selling grass-fed meat and a vendor of cheese.   

Union Square Greenmarket

Red Spinach, Burpless Cucumbers

There are a couple of different leafy plants that are sometimes called "red spinach." One is a variety of amaranth with edible leaves, Amaranthus gangeticus, also known as elephant head amaranth. Another is red orach. This plant, an eye-catching newcomer to the Union Square Greenmarket, looks nothing like either of those. It has a mild, earthy taste that is quite a bit like, but not exactly the same as, green spinach, which suggests that it may in fact be a red variety of spinach, unlike those other two crops that have assumed the name. It is better than amaranth leaves or orach and could hbe used raw as a salad green or quickly sauted.

Price: $6/lb. for red spinach
$4/lb. for cucumbers

Parsnips, Purple Potatoes, Shallots

Big, fat parsnips can't be found in the farmers market of southern California where I come from. They need long stretches of cool weather to get this big, and can be left in the ground over the winter, getting sweeter in the process.. So these were a treat for me, which I bought and carried home to Los Angeles. 

Price: $2/lb. for parsnips
$1/lb. for potatoes
$6/lb. for shallots

(left to right) Empire, Northern Spy and Crispin Apples

There were lots of apples at the Tompkins Square market. They have been in storage since fall but were still crisp and fresh-looking. I sampled three varieties from across the color spectrum, including the Empire, which descends from the Red Delicious and McIntosh, and the Crispin, also known as the Mutsu, a Golden Delicious-Indo cross developed in Japan half a century ago. Price: $1.25/lb. for apples $3 for eight-ounce jar of plum butter

Plum Butter

Toussaint Raw Milk Cheese

Raw milk cheese, made from unpasteurized milk, is a product that has generated lots of controversy in recent years. If federal regulators in the United States had their druthers, they'd ban it outright as unsanitary. Even in Europe, producers of raw milk cheese have been on the defensive. Cheese connoisseurs, however, insist the safety concerns are nonsensical. Groups including Slow Food USA have rallied to the defense of the product. For now, it is permitted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but only if it is aged for at least 60 days. I ate this wedge of raw milk cheese and lived to declare that it was delicious. 

Price: $20/lb.