Saturday Shopping in NYC

We’ve been in New York City for about a week on our “winter” vacation. All three of Steve’s daughters live in Brooklyn within one square mile of each other, in the Clinton Hill/Prospect Heights neighborhood. Not surprisingly, our interests this vacation were food (me) and furniture (Steve) with a healthy bit of art thrown in.

Among the highlights– and really, it was all good– was accompanying Marjorie Steinweiss on her Saturday shopping. Every Saturday she leaves early and spends about 5-6 hours doing the shopping for the week. She takes the same route and hits the same stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn. There are others on the route she knows from these years of shopping, including a man who turned out to be a second or third cousin, who now lives in Paris. They knew each other on the route for years before they figured out this connection.

This is a story best told in photos, so I’ll just post them with some captions.

Marjorie picked us up at 7 a.m. We skipped the farmer’s market in Prospect Park because it’s really too early in the season for the vendors she likes. We made a quick stop at Murray’s Bagels in the Village for bagels and coffee and then hit the farmer’s market in Union Square, the Union Square Greenmarket. Greens had arrived! Many farmers from Rockland County, NY, and from New Jersey were there for the first week of the season.

That included the last remaining mushroom grower in New York State (or so she claimed). Marjorie greeted shoppers and some of her favorite vendors with kisses. I talked to a woman about how to cook kale and learned the benefits of burdock root.

 Next stop: Grandaisy Bakery. Really, really good bread.

Gigantic wheels of Parmesan.

We waited with the others on the route for Di Palo’s in Little Italy to open. We were there an hour, tasting and buying cheese. I bought my one and only souvenir, a salami, to bring home. The place was filled with these foil-wrapped chocolates from Italy for Easter.The owner, Lou, also had some fine bottles of olive oil he hadn’t even taken out of the box, that he sold to the people on the route (and presumably, later, anyone who wanted one). The name was the Italian word for a little mountain refuge, which sounded a lot like a hunting cabin. He told of hiking in the Alps and coming to one of these, where any traveler could make a fire, eat and sleep.

The final stop for us was Sahadi’s back in Brooklyn. (Marjorie still had the fish and meat markets to get to.)

Sahadi’s had nuts and Mediteranean food. We had a light lunch of spinach spanikopita and headed up Atlantic Avenue to look in some vintage furniture shops. Then we met up with Steve’s daughters for a real lunch at Pies and Thighs, where Marjorie’s son, (Catherine’s boyfriend) Homer used to bake pastries and make the donuts.

By evening, after a long walk through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, we were back in the Village for dinner with friends at Alta, a tapas place on 10th street, that was fantastic. (But what is it with restaurants being cash only? Every restaurant we went to, including two nice ones, were cash only!)

We headed back to Brooklyn after dinner (for a quick stop in at a birthday party in Williamsburg for Homer).

Walking to the subway, we passed Murray’s Bagels, the place where we’d begun that morning.

The next night, we were lucky enough to be invited to the Steinweiss home in Brooklyn for dinner, where we feasted on fresh greens and bruchetta made with stracciatella cheese and sun-dried tomatoes on bread from Grandaisy.