Louisa's Farmer's Market Favorites

Hi, I'm Louisa Shafia, on eHow.com, and today I'm at the Union Square Green Market in New York City. This is one of my favorite places to shop for food. You can get fish here. You can get fruit. You can get vegetables, everything is locally grown and everything is excellent. You can even come here and drop off your compost which I personally love. It's smelling a little fragrant right now because we're standing by the compost drop off. So this is great for New Yorkers who don't have a lot of room in their apartments, don't have a big back yard to compost in, you just collect your compost in a Tupperware, leave it in your fridge until it fills up and then dump it out here. So you have a set up here with some really nice dark soil which is compost made from everything people drop off and there's a worm in it. Could you explain what this is? We feed all this stuff to worms called red wigglers. Hi dude. These are the worms that turn this vegetable scrap into this beautiful black soil. So people come and they buy the compost, the finished compost from you? Yeah the finished compost and also we have a lot of landscaper gardeners, Springtime and in Fall. So here we are at the Tremblay Apiaries Stand and this is where I like to come to buy my honey, one because it's wonderful fresh, locally made honey and they have all different kinds and DeWayne always gives you a sample when you come up to his stand so you can choose the one that you like the best. Okay so you have a lot of initials here on all the honey bottles. Can you tell me what these stand for? Possibly. There's honey from the locust tree. There's a Spring mixture, Linden trees, Summer flower mixture, goldenrod and a Fall flower mixture, a little more flavor as you go but they just taste like whatever flower they came from. What's your favorite one right now? It depends on what I'm using it for. My favorite for bread and for cooking is wildflower. My favorite in my coffee and tea is Linden. I'm kind of spoiled. I take them all home. But the kind of honey that you have changes at different times of year. Yeah, there's different flowers that bloom in the Spring, the Summer and the Fall, and each different type of honey tastes like whatever flower it came from. Most people are familiar with clover but there's literally thousands of flowers that bloom and produce honey. What's better about buying locally grown honey? Two things, number one when you get it from the store it's usually bottled in mass production equipment and they heat the honey to get it through the bottlers because they're designed for juice. You lose a lot of nutrition and flavor when you heat the honey. The other thing is that if you're battling hay fever, the pollen has to be local. If you get pollen from a different region where the flowers are different it won't work on your hay fever, but if you get it from the same flower as you're allergic to you can get rid of your hay fever. That's so cool. I didn't know that. So here we are at John D. Madura Farms. This is a farm stand that sells mushrooms. Now when I came by earlier this whole crate of maitake mushrooms was full. So I guess they're really popular here? They're a popular white mushroom, yes, you can do so many things with them. You can saute them, roast them, risotto, tempura, break them up in a salad just as they are, soups, breads, the whole nine yards with these. Great, okay. These are shiitakes which I love. You can actually eat the stems of shiitake mushrooms. You've just got to slice them thin and cook them for a long time and they're actually delicious or you can put them in soup stock and they give it a wonderful flavor. These are king oyster mushrooms. How would you prepare these? You could slice them, grill them. You could saute them. You can cut them in half. You can take them out, cut them out and stuff the mushroom bake it and have some mushrooms. And what's the easiest way to cook mushrooms? Saute them. Here I am at the Pura Vida Fisheries. This is where you can get all kinds of wild locally caught fish. They are just right here on Long Island. This is a great thing about the farmer's market. It's not just for vegetables and fruits. You can do all your shopping here. You can get meat. You can get cheese. You can get bread and you can get fish and seafood. My friend Anna is going to tell us what is good today. Ryan what do you think? Some striped bass, do you recommend albacore tuna? It depends on the kind of cooking you're going to do. For grilling we have great steaks of tuna and sword. If you want to do something a little easier in the pan, go with a flat fish like a flounder or lemon sole and if you want to go a little adventurous we have beautiful blowfish and shark today. So when people come and buy their fish here they're pretty much guaranteed that it's sustainably harvested that they're making a good choice when they get their fish here? It's guaranteed that it's local, guaranteed that it's wild. You need to have a fisherman that knows the water and trusts it and we do our best and something you can't perfect well you have to keep going and try for it. The good thing about buying your fish and seafood at the farmer's market is that you can ask. You can ask people like you exactly where the fish and seafood comes from so there's no mystery. So there you have it, that's the Union Square Green Market here in New York. You can find all kinds of sustainably harvested products, locally grown foods, everything is fresh and delicious. I hope I've inspired you to go investigate your own farmer's market and find what's going to work on your table. I'm Louisa Shafia. I'll see you next time on eHow.com.