Last Chance Foods from WNYC

Stephanie Villani and Alex Villani of Blue Moon Fish are a little like the fish they bring to the city’s greenmarkets. They spend the winter season in warmer climates (in their case, the Florida Keys), before returning to the northeast in the spring. They’re back this year—and so are fluke, porgies and other fish.

Few foods can seem as “last chance” as a piece of moldy cheese. While some of us contemplate the age-old question of whether to cut off the fuzzy bits and eat the rest, Brian Ralph is carefully cultivating mold at Murray’s Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village. He’s the cave master at the store and oversees the ripening of various cheeses in Murray’s five cheese caves.

Eggs traditionally symbolize spring and rebirth. There’s a reason for that: As the days get longer, hens tend to produce more eggs. Annemarie Gero, a farmer with Queens County Farm Museum in Floral Park, said that each hen can produce as much as one egg a day during peak season.

Harvesting time for maple syrup is drawing to an end, and you can be sure New York producers are out tapping their trees when the weather’s right. Helen Thomas, executive director of the New York State Maple Producer’s Association, said this season ran slightly longer than usual, due to a cold March.

There’s a warehouse space near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn where pallets of wheatgrass are carefully grown in a temperature controlled environment and gently misted every three hours. Sounds like a pretty sweet life, right?

They might not be the most glamorous vegetable rolling around in the vegetable drawer, but potatoes are the stuff of life. “If there was any vegetable you could survive on totally, it would be potatoes,” said Barbara Damrosch, an organic farmer and author with Eliot Coleman of The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook. “Of all of the great world survival crops like rice or wheat or potatoes, this is the one that a home gardener can grow easily without an enormous amount of space.”

When Eberhard Müller and Paulette Satur first bought a farm on Long Island in 1997, the idea was for Satur Farms to be a place where the couple could grow vegetables for Lutèce. Müller was the chef of the famed restaurant at the time, and they thought the farm would simply be a weekend destination.

Chef John Fraser admits that cardoons look like “celery with armor.” Beneath that bristly exterior, though, there hides a delicious spring vegetable. Just be sure to snap on a pair of gloves before you start preparing them.

Cookbook author Claudia Roden made a grim prediction in her 1996 tome The Book of Jewish Food. She wrote that kubbeh, a traditional Jewish-Iraqi dish of semolina dumplings in soup, might soon disappear because restaurants and home cooks were abandoning the time and labor-intensive recipe.

Matt Lee and Ted Lee exhibit a Southern politeness that speaks to their background growing up in genteel Charleston, South Carolina. Ask the brothers about instant grits, though, and they pull no punches. The pair once described the supermarket variety as “cream-wheat bland, a cultural embarrassment” and recently declared that the white stuff is better suited for spackling walls than for consumption. 

Making cheese at home may seem like an endeavor for hardcore homesteaders, but chef Peter Berley said that making ricotta is simple. It only takes a few basic ingredients and fairly little time.

As a snowstorm comes barreling down on the Northeast, many New Yorkers will be spending some quality time indoors this weekend. For those with a can or bag of chickpeas languishing in the pantry, here’s a good task to while away some time: Peel those chickpeas and make hummus.

It’s now, around January and February, that daikon radishes begin to really sell, said Tamarack Hollow Farm’s farmer Amanda Andrews. She drives down from Burlington, Vermont, every week to sell produce at the Union Square Farmers Market on Wednesdays, and says that only diehard daikon fans really buy them when they’re first harvested in September. At that point in the year, the long, white radishes are often overshadowed by spotlight-stealing fall produce like tomatoes, squash and berries.

Making horseradish runs in Carolyn Sherman’s family. Her father, Lawrence, started tinkering with the recipe more than three decades ago.

Granola is an “invalid food” that is “thoroughly cooked and partially digested,” according to a 1893 ad for the trademarked product. That ad language may not hold up well as the slogans of today, but the winter-storage friendly ingredients of rolled oats, nuts and dried fruit still packs a hefty dose of what the 19th century ad labeled as “nutriment.”