Culinary Types

Chelsea Market:


Cooking virtually is fun, but sometimes, a little in-person culinary diplomacy is in order. The eternal search for good food brings me and Jill from Ottawa to New York City for some of the best ingredients and eating on the planet.

We arrive at New York’s Chelsea Market in late afternoon on the day before the big storm, and enter the brick façade of the former site of the National Biscuit Company. If the name sounds familiar, National Biscuit was later shortened to a catcher brand name, and yes, they make Oreos. This place must have good karma.

We’re keeping a sharp eye out for celebrities. Jill’s friend -- who wants to be known as “Medusa” -- will probably consider the weekend a bust if there are no celebrity sightings. She’s opted for a power shopping trip downtown while we explore Chelsea.

If a food market is a chef’s fantasy, our first stop would make a kid’s sweet tooth jump for joy. We stop at Eleni’s, resplendent with walls painted a shocking Barbi-pink and cake stands stacked with hundreds of luscious cupcakes in a full palate of playful pastel colors. It looks like the inside of a Crayola Crayon box.

We wander through the Italian market. I pick up bags of chestnut flour, almond flour and hazelnut flour for future pastry projects. On a healthier note, Jill purchases Farro wheat.

The halls are lined with burnished brick and stone, and are reminiscent of a journey through a Gotham City railway station. There are shops and stands tucked into every nook and cranny. A crowd of people are learning to do the tango in the lobby outside the Food Network studios.

We step into a seafood shop that smells of brine where we marvel at the ice mountains crowned with lobster, blue fish and flounder fillets.

I’m obsessed with the cupcakes. We stop back to Eleni’s and indulge in a few bites of mini-cupcakes with swirled pastel tops, just to tide us over.

We head out of the market and nearly collide with actor Victor Garber. He looks intense -- a man on a mission. Medusa is going to be awfully upset that she abandoned us to go shoe shopping. We set off in the direction of Greenwich Village. There is a Mac and Cheese - the specialty at Deborah on Carmine Street -in our future.

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