Last Chance Foods

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.

For bivalve lovers who follow the R rule, April is the last month to indulge in clams and other bivalves until September, the next month in the calendar that contains the letter R.

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.