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Featuring foods, entertainment and events for children and families, the Grand Market will take place each Saturday through Oct. 29 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Ruby Dee Park at the Library Green on Huguenot Street between Lawton Street and Memorial Highway.
Jennifer Grossman, a farmer who also helped coordinate the Catskill vendors, presented the French guinea hens she raises on her Mauer’s Mountain Farms, as well as a basket of eggs that would look unusual to anyone expecting the pure white, uniformly sized eggs from a supermarket. These were a more natural collection, coming in a variety of sizes and shades of beige, partly because they still held their “bloom,” a natural protective coating that gets washed off mass-produced eggs before they reach the grocery store shelf.
“That’s part of the beautiful variety,” Grossman said. “They’re delicious. The texture is different and the color is brighter and the flavor is richer. The yolk is a more vivid color, too. When you see a bright yellow or an orange yolk – those birds have been eating well.”
Shoppers who sampled the bounty from the Catskills were also supporting sustainable farming and healthier methods of producing foods. And in supporting them, Westchester residents were helping to protect the water they drink and use for cooking and bathing. The Catskill farms practice farming methods that are easy on the environment and that preserve the purity of the water in six reservoirs in the region. That water serves 10 million people, including customers in Westchester and New York City.
Deacon Weeks who runs a small family farm in Milford, N.Y., with his wife, said his pigs are raised in a pasture, and his cows are mostly grass fed. When they are fed grains, they are treated to spent grains from local brewers, which would have been thrown out, Weeks said.
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