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Uptown Farmers Market partners with Local Restaurants and C-CAP for Summer Chef Series. Series strives to inspire and educate home cooks using seasonal Arizona products.
Uptown Farmers Market has joined forces with local restaurants, chefs and C-CAP to host its Summer Chef Series at the market each Saturday through the summer 2015. Each week, the Summer Chef Series will feature a different chef from throughout the valley using seasonal Arizona products to inspire and educate home cooks. We have two goals for this Series. The first goal is to help customers learn how to transform seasonal items into simple, delicious summer recipes; over and over we see this is best accomplished through a personal demonstration at market. The second goal is to help our customers learn which restaurateurs are actively engaged in sourcing locally and show that we, as a market, support these restaurants.
“The idea of a summer chef series came from a conversation I had with Chef Justin Beckett,” says Bo Mostow, Uptown Farmers Market Manager. “He wanted to get involved and I wanted to implement an educational market component. We see so many folks who don’t know the name of certain vegetables, let alone how to prepare them. So, together we worked out the details.” Mostow continues, “What started as a small, fun project quickly grew as we threw this idea out to the neighborhood, local businesses and chefs.”
While the Summer Chef Series is still in development, the current chef line up includes Chef Jimmy Ducas and Chef Joe Hobsen of Lon’s at the Hermosa, Chef Rebecca Tillman of The Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak, Chef Justin Beckett of Beckett’s Table and Southern Rail, Chef Wade Simpson of Bistro on Wheels, Chef Matt Fenton of Tarbell’s and Chef Bernie Kantak of The Gladly and Citizen Public House, with additional chefs in talks for August.
C-CAP has created an internship for this series, and will have students on site assisting the Chefs with demonstration and sampling. In addition to the weekly demonstrations from local chefs, the Summer Chef Series will feature a raffle for four $50 gift certificates to the featured restaurant of the day. All products & recipes used in the chef-driven demonstrations will be locally produced and highlighted on recipe cards.
“Initiatives such as the Summer Chef Series provide us a forum to highlight exactly what farm to table food means, “says Chef Joe Hobsen of Lon’s at the Hermosa, “while at the same time educating the community and practicing Michael Pollan’s concept to ‘shake the hand that feeds you’.”
