#GivingTuesday is almost here!

November 26, 2014

#GivingTuesday is back and we're proud to be a part of it for the second year in a row.

Coming after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday acknowledges that we don't just take, take, take. We give back too! This year, on Tuesday, December 2nd, be a part of this growing global movement by taking action in a way that is meaningful to you. #GivingTuesday is about doing what you can to give back. It's about showing that all of us can do so much more with our wallets than just consume.

This year we have an extra special treat: the first $5,000 that we raise on #GivingTuesday will be matched dollar-for-dollar!

The #GivingTuesday campaign is a platform for you to contribute to your community and to help make this the biggest giving season yet. Your donation to GrowNYC helps give schools the tools they need to get learning outside, brings NYC's youngest to experience the outdoors through field trips to different urban farms, offers community leaders the tools they need to keep growing, helps New Yorkers recycle smarter, and supports new farmers and Greenmarket producers.

All of us here at GrowNYC know that you care about making a difference, and that's why we invite you to join #GivingTuesday. Donate, spread the word, volunteer for groups you care about (we hope that includes GrowNYC!) and encourage your friends to to give in lieu of gifts or just because.

Mark your calendar for December 2 and take action in ways that mean something to you.

Together, #letsgrownyc!
To learn more go to www.givingtuesday.org
Be sure to follow us on twitter @GrowNYC and use #letsgrownyc. We'll be sure to retweet you!

Here are some sample tweets to get you started on spreading the word:

  • Be a part of a new worldwide tradition of giving. On #GivingTuesday, #letsgrownyc.
  • Black Friday. Cyber Monday. What about #GivingTuesday? Together, #letsgrownyc!
  • Remember, it's not how you give or what you give, it's THAT you give. For the second year, #letsgrownyc on #GivingTuesday! 

Happy Giving!

The Greenmarket Experience at the Hyatt Union Square

November 26, 2014
Posted in Greenmarket

GrowNYC recently released The New Greenmarket Cookbook by Gabrielle Langholtz, a collection of one hundred seasonal recipes from today’s top chefs and culinary minds. In light of this exciting occasion, Hyatt Union Square New York is celebrating its neighbor with The Greenmarket Experience. Guests who book this experience package will receive a robust sampling of, and introduction to, what this beloved green oasis in the heart of Manhattan has to offer.

Guests will receive:

  • A Greenmarket Wheat Beer from Brooklyn Brewery, which is grown from 70% New York State-grown wheat and barley
  • A $20 shopping credit to use at the Greenmarket throughout their stay,
  • A Hyatt Union Square New York canvas bag to tote their loot, and
  • A guide featuring interesting background on GrowNYC and its vendors.
  • The New Greenmarket Cookbook.

This package has been carefully curated to demonstrate the hotel's alignment with the GrowNYC initiatives, which include supporting family farms, farmers, markets, gardens, recycling, and education.

Thanksgiving Gifts for Hosts

November 21, 2014

Going to a friend or relative’s house for Thanksgiving and need to take a gift? Did you agree to bring a dish and then realized you don’t have enough time to cook? Look no further than your neighborhood Greenmarket for all your Thanksgiving gifts for hosts! Here are a few ideas:

A bouquet of flowers, dried and fresh.  Showing up with an arm full of flowers is never unwelcome. And, if they’re dried, it’s a gift that will last for months.

A jar of delicious, flavored whipped honey. Orange blossom and apple cinnamon are two of our favorites and whipped honey is a perfect consistency for those Thanksgiving rolls.

Soap and lip balm from Nature’s Way Farm. Made from honey, there are so many incredible scents and flavors to choose from. Heading into winter, these gifts are especially useful to protect your host’s skin and lips. Plus, Nature’s Way makes kids’ soaps that are just adorable (hint: they have toys in them).

Tweefontein Herb Farm has amazing salves, herbal rubs, fire cider, lotions, and many more items that are perfect for that host that loves unique gifts.

Jams, preserves, pickles and jellies from Berkshire Berries, Josephine’s Feast, Rick's Picks, and Beth’s Farm Kitchen. Each producer sells very original spreads and preserves that are sure to please everyone. Plus, they travel well.

Maple syrup. Or maple cream. Or maple candy. Or maple cotton candy. Or maple popcorn. If it’s maple, chances are we have a producer that sells it at your neighborhood Greenmarket. Plus, who doesn't want some pancakes on Friday morning after Thanksgiving? 

Booze. Greenmarket has a number of wine and hard cider producers, as well as Brooklyn Brewery's Greenmarket Wheat beer (available at the Union Square Greenmarket Saturdays) and Orange County Distillery's corn whiskey, sugar beet vodka and bourbon whiskey. The cook always needs a drink. 

Don’t have time to bake a dessert? Pick one up at one of our many bakeries who will all be selling Thanksgiving-themed pies.  Food restrictions? Many of our bakers have vegan and gluten-free desserts.

Are you going to a non-traditional Thanksgiving? Or need a non-traditional gift? Then take along The Bronx Greenmarket Hot Sauce, The New Greenmarket Cookbook (perhaps to serve as some inspiration for your host for next year’s menu), or a snazzy GrowNYC apron. The cookbook is available at a number of Greenmarkets around the city, and the apron and hot sauce (along with the cookbook) are available at Union Square Wednesdays and Saturdays.

We hope you’ve found some inspiration from this list. We’d love to see what you’ve picked up from market, too. Just take a picture and Instagram it. Make sure to use #GMKTthanksgiving!

Have an incredible Thanksgiving. We know your hosts will love anything you bring them, especially if it’s from Greenmarket. 

Talkin' Turkey

November 14, 2014
Posted in Greenmarket | Tagged thanksgiving, Turkeys, holidays

Do you have any idea what goes into raising a turkey? When talking about the birds that have become so synonymous with this time of year, we realized we didn’t know much, either. Luckily, we have access to some of the best turkey farmers in the region, so we rushed right over to Zaid Kurdieh of Norwich Meadows Farm and Maria Quattro of Quattro's Game Farm to learn exactly what goes into raising the centerpiece of many Thanksgiving tables.
 
For Quattro’s Game Farm, everything starts from the egg. They keep their favorite birds from the past year and mate them, selecting the eggs that will go on to be the next year’s Thanksgiving turkeys. The eggs are then incubated, hatched, raised, and processed on the farm. Norwich Meadows Farm also raises and processes on the farm, but buys their turkeys when they’re poults, getting them when they’re newly hatched and raising them from there and from what we’ve heard, raising turkeys is a lot of work. A friend of Zaid’s warned him when he first started to raise turkeys that “a turkey in its first few weeks of life is just looking for a place to die.” Sounds harsh but, in fact, during those first couple of weeks, the farmers have to keep a constant eye on the poults – ensuring they eat their food, making sure they don’t drown in their drinking water, and preventing them from commingling with the chickens. Unfortunately, even with keeping a constant eye on them, a lot of them still won’t make it. This year, Zaid started with around 190 poults and will be processing around 140. 
 
After four weeks, the critical time for a poult has passed and the turkeys are much more independent, although the farmers can’t relax too much. Turkeys are feisty creatures that have a herd mentality and have been known to take down electric fences without too much effort, electric jolts and all. Plus, heritage breeds and wild turkeys fly (domestic ones, not so much). Not far, mind you, but they still fly. It is for this reason that Zaid only raises domestic turkeys. He doesn’t want his turkeys to fly off his property and onto a nearby road where they could get hit by a car. Quattro’s raises domestic, heritage, and wild turkeys but they also have a lot of property and are not as worried about them getting hit by cars. They do, however, end up picking them up from neighboring farms fairly regularly. In fact, on the day we spoke with Maria she told us the heritage turkeys had once again made their way onto their neighbor’s farm and her father had gone to retrieve them. I guess we can’t blame the birds for wanting to spread their wings a little bit! 
 
After they've hatched and lived through the early weeks, eaten well, roamed freely while avoiding colliding with a car or being eaten by a predator and are generally speaking, happy and healthy, it’s time for processing and delivery to New York City Greenmarkets. Both Quattro’s and Norwich Meadows have on-farm processing and control the process from start to finish. Quattro’s is a much larger operation than Norwich Meadows and raises around 400 turkeys so it can sometimes take a few days to finish processing them all. Norwich Meadows processes far fewer turkeys but they are also Halal, so only Zaid can process the turkeys. It takes him at least a day to get through all of them. Then comes the plucking, the cleaning, and the packaging. 
 
As you can see, there is a lot of hard work that goes into raising and processing each of these birds but it is all worth it for these farmers so you can have the best tasting bird out there on your table. The turkeys Greenmarket farmers sell you have lived healthy, well-fed, wandering-outside-in-the-sunshine kind of lives, and they undoubtedly taste better for all of those reasons. Plus, it’s pretty great to know that the turkey you enjoy on Thanksgiving was raised and processed by the same person that sold it to you. You can ask the farmers questions about exactly how the turkeys were raised, what kind of food they ate, and even hear fun stories about the turkeys roaming (or flying) free and they’ll know the answers. When you buy directly from a local, family farm, you know they care and want the best not only for their turkeys but also for their customers.
 
We’d be remiss to leave out how Zaid and Maria celebrate Thanksgiving on the farm. Zaid takes one of his birds to his sister’s house, where she cooks it the traditional method by roasting it in the oven. Turkey isn’t too common in Middle Eastern culture (Zaid’s mother is American and his father is Palestinian), but they still eat it once a year on Thanksgiving. Maria’s grandmother, Carmella (the owner of the farm), has cooked Thanksgiving turkeys for years so it’s just second nature to her. She stuffs the turkey and roasts it. One thing she doesn’t do? Brine her turkeys. Maria explained that the salt in the brine gets into the meat and masks the natural flavor of the turkey. “If you’re paying for these delicious turkeys, why would you want to hide the flavor?” Maria asked. 
 
As we all sit down with our family and friends to celebrate around nature’s delicious fall bounty, let us all remember to be thankful for our farmers and the hours they toil each year to bring us city dwellers fresh, delicious, healthy food. We’re also pretty grateful we’re not going to get a call from the neighbor during dinner to come pick up a wayward flock of turkeys!
 
For more information on our Greenmarket turkey producers, visit our Turkey buying Guide here.

We're Spicing Up The City With The Bronx Hot Sauce!

November 10, 2014

This is a momentous year for GrowNYC. Our gardens have released their very own product, aptly named "The Bronx Hot Sauce," which hit shelves late last month. The fiery green condiment was concocted by acclaimed chef King Phojanakong, a native of the borough - just like the serrano peppers the sauce is made of. 

Packaged by Farm to Table Co-Packers and wrapped in a sticker designed by John Jaxheimer, the sauce is the result of GrowNYC's collaboration with Small Axe Peppers, who donated 3,500 pepper seedlings earlier this year, and R&R Produce Farms, who augmented the supply for peppers needed for the first production of the hot sauce. R&R Produce Farms happens to be one of our FARMroots program's most notable success stories (the program provides training and support for recent immigrants looking to farm in the Northeast).

With the fiery contents of this five ounce glass bottle, the Bronx officially asserts itself as the next big culinary destination for local food in the five boroughs. "I'm thrilled to see our developers and community gardens join together on this wonderful venture," said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. "The Bronx has an amazing food culture, and 'The Bronx Greenmarket Hot Sauce' will only add to the great flavors our borough produces each and every day. GrowNYC and Small Axe Peppers have developed a product that not only tastes great, but also supports our local community gardens. That's a 'win-win' for our borough, and I hope epicureans from all over the region enjoy our borough's latest food creation." Hooray for the Bronx!

Moreover, the funds from The Bronx Hot Sauce sales will go right back to maintaining and developing our local gardens - in one delicious, sustainable cycle. We are proud of our gardens and everyone who has worked hard to make this product a reality. "GrowNYC's Greenmarkets have always been the best source for locally grown food fresh from the farm," says our Executive Director Marcel Van Ooyen. "Now, through this partnership with Small Axe Peppers, we are furthering our support of local farmers by purchasing their products and turning them into a delicious hot sauce that can be enjoyed by all New Yorkers." 

We hope you grab your own bottle of The Bronx Hot Sauce and try it on a recipe soon. It's sure to warm you right up this winter! You can find The Bronx Hot Sauce in these locations, with many more to come:

See where you can buy the hot sauce at BronxHotSauce.com.

Check out The Bronx Hot Sauce in the press: The New York Daily News and The Wall Street Journal.

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