WNYC's Last Chance Foods

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. “We need to have days that are above freezing, but an optimum temperature is around 40 degrees during the daytime,” Thomas explains. “The tree recognizes that it’s warm enough and time ...

Dale Talde latched onto raw bar seafood culture like a barnacle to a pier when he came to New York City in 2005. He likes them raw, but I prefer them fried, like my guests in the lightning round of questions that is the Stir Fry. Talde put on a game face as the questions came his way, but I detected some flinching when I asked him about his vacation plans this year. He had to repeat the question.  "Vacation plans?"   ...

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? Stewart Borowsky, also known as the Union Square Grassman, has been growing wheatgrass and selling it at the Union Square farmers market since 1994. He sa...

He's known as "The Grassman" at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan, but don't get any crazy ideas about the type of plant he's pushing. Stewart Borowsky grows wheatgrass in a building in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, right across Third Avenue from a low-slung brick building that used to be the manufacturing hub of the South Brooklyn Casket Company. Come to think of it, that in itself is a crazy idea. But the sight of all those caskets, ready for shipping, was not Borowsky...

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 survi...

Barbara Damrosch of Four Season Farm grows food in Maine, where she's got to be prepared foraverage minimum temperatures between -10 and -15 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine my surprise, then, when the cookbook and gardening author proved she was equally ready for the searing heat of the Stir-Fry.  She was not unnerved by the prospect of a lightning round at all, star...

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. Now, three decades la...

Eberhard Müller no longer cooks, but he was sizzling in this week's 60-Second Stir-Fry. The former chef of the classic French restaurants Le Bernardin, Lutèce, and Bayard long ago set aside his toque for a pair of overalls, overseeing Satur Farms' North Fork and Florida operations with his wife, Paulette Satur. So, I forgive him for not answering...

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. “You have to be careful of the thorns because they are pretty... sticky,” says Fraser, who heads the award-winning restaurant Dovetail on West 77th Stre...

John Fraser, creative kitchen mastermind behind the Upper West Side restaurant, Dovetail, sizzled and sputtered right off the mark in his time under the heat lamp of Stir-Fry scrutiny.   "Oh, don't do that!" he pleaded, when I asked him what restaurant he eats at when he's not at his own. "Too many friends in the business," he told me later.   Even thou...