Farmers’ Market-to-Plate Cuisine

The Pawtucket Wintertime Farmers' Market at the Hope Artiste Village is the jewel in the crown of Rhode Island’s direct-to-consumer food scene. After breaching the new Bread Lab at the entrance, the intrepid market goer has to run not one, but two gauntlets through the main hallways of the beautifully restored old mill building. With only increasingly heavy canvas bags to protect you, you snake around stall after stall of everyone who is anyone in our local food scene. It’s like a compendium of Rhode Island’s farmers and food producers, and though the character changes for winter, it’s as vibrant as ever, making it easier to eat local year round. With the market as guide, you’re always eating locally, and in season.

In season needn’t be written in stone though, even at the market. Thanks to the careful storage techniques of some of these farmers, we can cheat the seasons a little with the right recipes. We don’t normally think apples in winter, or if we do, we think sawdust. This recipe is for a Somerset farmhouse style cake, originally made to use windfall and reject apples, making it a good use of stored apples from Barden Family Orchard. Their cooler-stored apples are the best you can find in winter, and the taste is well preserved, but of course their texture isn’t as good as when they were picked. Baked in this recipe, adapted from The Great British Book on Baking, you'd never know it's not the peak of the harvest.

Pawtuxet Village Winter Farmers' Market Pilot
There may be a new winter farmers’ market to add to Rhode Island’s brimming portfolio in Pawtuxet Village, but that depends on you. The market is something of a pilot program, and only begins to fill the massive gap between winter markets in East Greenwich and Pawtucket. The market will initially function differently than most to test the waters. While there will be a small number of vendors onsite, rather than shopping around, you place an order ahead of time from available goods the day before, and your basket of goods will be assembled and ready for pickup from 5 to 7:30pm at the Little Falls Cafe on Broad Street. Think of it like a CSA, but with no dirt under your fingernails. 2166 Broad Street, Cranston.