As the temperature in Brooklyn inches closer and closer to 60 degrees and we begin to shed our layers of clothing once again, it’s time to emerge from our cold weather cocoons. Here’s to the rebirth of spring and the rituals that keep us sane: gardening, nurturing the mind and body and learning to live sustainably.
Crown Heights lies at the center of Brooklyn’s Caribbean community, home to one of the largest expatriate populations in the US with immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Haiti, and elsewhere. Nostrand Avenue, running north-south through Crown Heights, is dotted with roti shops and groceries, making it an ideal place to shop for West Indian ingredients.
For a nontraditional, Midwestern, Polish-American (via Brooklyn) Thanksgiving, try these stuffed collards with beef and rice. Soft, succulent, and slightly sweet – the perfect cold-weather meal.
The increasingly-popular CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is a method by which members buy into a farm’s harvest before the season begins. In exchange for their funding, they receive a portion of the farm’s produce, eggs, or other products throughout the year. But what do you get in the winter? And how does one go about joining?
Tamarind is the most popular fruit that you’ve never heard of. Ubiquitous throughout South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Mexico, it’s rarely used or mentioned in the U.S. Learn where in Brooklyn to find this sweet-sour fruit and how to use it at home.
I’m sitting in Molly Neuman’s kitchen, where the punk rocker, newly incarnated as a chef and proprietor of Simple Social Kitchen, is making a tortilla de patata. She’s hardly the first musician to create a new career in food, but although it’s not quite a movement, there is something superficially similar about the two careers. “For me the connection is creativity, being able to make something from an idea,” she says, when I ask her what the similarities are between cooking and music. Of course, there’s much more to it than that.
Why is it that pumpkin-flavored food items are always better in theory than in practice? Here’s a pumpkin-flavored thing that doesn’t disappoint: Pumpkin.
