The muffin lady, sauce guy and biscotti partners from the Old Naples Farmer’s Market have a new recipe for success.
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Amy Peters packs some of her sugar-free, flour-free muffins, inside the Bliss!! Kitchen in North Naples last week. After food vendors at Third Street's Farmer's Market food were shut down by the Health Department last year, Peters decided that she wanted to open a shared kitchen for the food vendors to use so they could return to the market legally.
They’re baking, mixing and boiling together in a new shared kitchen to satisfy state requirements and to sell their products at the farmer’s market off Third Street South every Saturday.
When state Department of Agriculture inspectors cracked down on vendors selling home-prepared products and items without permits last March, muffin-maker Amy Peters decided to take action. So she rented a 1,500-square-foot commercial kitchen on J & C Boulevard in North Naples, and after months of hard work her catering and delivery company BLISS!! was born.
Before renting the kitchen Peters approached other vendors who were shut out of the market by the inspection sweep, and a group of seven people teamed up to make their home-cooked, fresh, preservative-free foods at BLISS!!.
“We have the passion and we have the art,” Peters said. “Today, not many people cook from scratch. It’s an art that’s getting lost.”
The Muffin Lady
On a weekday afternoon at BLISS!!, Peters scooped five grain fruit and nut dough into muffin tins and slid them into her convection oven. After about five minutes, the dough began to rise into plump, brown mounds and a sweet smell filled the air.
Nearby, a batch of Michael Mumm’s chili sauce sat in a large silver pot on the stove, ready for boiling, and Lori Christy and Joyce Shunney’s biscotti were stacked like Lincoln Logs on a platter.
The chefs, along with other farmer’s market vendors Connie Valentine and Michael and Lisa McDonald, share ovens, stoves, pots and pans, divide up kitchen hours and go in together on catering jobs.
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Mike Mumm, one of the vendors at Third Street's Farmer's Market, takes a phone call outside of Bliss!! Kitchen on J&C Boulevard in North Naples. Mumm and several other vendors share the kitchen to prepare their food that is sold at the market on Saturdays from 7:30 until 11:30 a.m. behind Tommy Bahama's in Old Naples.
As Peters watched her muffins, she flitted around the kitchen and discussed how she created her first sugar-and flour-free muffin recipe a few years ago. She was searching for healthy food to help maintain her weight after dropping 165 pounds, she said.
Since her first at-home experiments, tested on her husband Dan, Peters has created 22 different kinds of muffins. Her secrets are Splenda for sweetener and bases of oat brans or five grains which includes triticale, flax seed, barley, oat and rye.
On Friday — muffin day — she and her son Tyelor, 16, start baking around 3 p.m., and by 11 p.m. they have 1,000 to 1,500 muffins for the farmer’s market the next morning.
“I can tell when they’re done by their color,” Peters said, bending over to look into the oven’s glass. “They’re close.”
Since opening BLISS!! in August, Peters also caters lunches with sandwiches, salads and soups. Getting booted out of the farmer’s market gave her the impetus she needed to start the catering company, she said.
After about 15 minutes, Peters opened the oven and touched the top of a muffin with the tip of her finger— “they’re done,” she said. She transferred the muffins to an uncovered plastic bin to cool, and then stepped back, done for the day.
The Sauce Guy
That was Gatorbait chef Michael Mumm’s cue to step up to the stove.
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Mike Mumm, a vendor at the Naples Farmer's Market, prepares the sauce that he sells called Insane Hot Sauce inside Bliss!! Kitchen, a space in North Naples that he and other vendors use to cook the items they sell.
Earlier in the day, Mumm chopped about 25 Jabanero peppers and 25 Mexican chili peppers and mixed them in a large silver soup pot. The red Mexican chiles come from his backyard garden, Mumm said, because they’re hard to find in stores.
Many of Mumm’s recipes have been in his family for years, and he enjoys tweaking them to create unique, new sauces, he said. They’re named after friends and family, like the Shane’s Insane Chili Sauce that he was making Thursday afternoon.
The red and orange chili sauce is spicy, clear-your-sinuses hot when it’s raw and gets even hotter as it boils, he said, turning on the stove and stirring the mixture. On a nearby burner, 12 half-pint jars were immersed in water for boiling.
Mumm started cooking sauces for friends and family for Christmas, and finally decided to go into business in 2002 after searching in vain for a “good salsa without a million chemicals in it” at the grocery store, he said.
Canning is the old-fashioned way to preserve perishable items, and although it’s something that just about everybody’s grandmother or mother did, not many people do it anymore, Mumm said. But canning allows him to preserve Gatorbait’s salsas, jellies and sauces without using any preservatives, so “you can read every ingredient on my label and understand what it is,” he said.
After about 45 minutes of cooking, Mumm put the sauce in the hot canning jars, sealed it and dropped the filled jars into the water again for a few minutes to vacuum seal them.
The Biscotti Team
Meanwhile, Joyce Shunney and Lori Christy, the mother and daughter team behind Divine Delights catering, sat at a table in the front of the kitchen and chatted. Before they packed up to leave Mumm gave them jars of salsa for a baskets they were making and decorating to sell at the market that weekend.
Shunney taught Christy, her daughter, how to cook when she was young, Christy said; like Peters, their catering business got its start at the farmer’s market. “My mom is full-Italian and I’m half-Italian, so we’re used to big family gatherings and feeding a lot of people,” Christy said, laughing. “Most of our recipes are from relatives ... they’ve been passed down through the generations.”
The pair contribute dessert items like Italian wedding cookies and brownie tarts to BLISS!!’s catered lunches, and they like to create new recipes and to decorate gift baskets and platters, they said.
“We like to be creative,” Shunney said. “Every time you get a spark, a new idea, is when it’s the most fun.”
Shunney and Christy are usually in the kitchen baking together on the weekends, they said, while Peters is there in the morning and Mumm in the afternoon. When the chefs’ times overlap they often don’t talk much because they’re “in the zone,” but they have all become close since the challenges at the market last year, Peters said.
“They’re pioneers,” said Susan Becker, farmer’s market manager. “Amy Peters got her start at the market ... and she was so successful at making those contacts at the market that she was able to set up her own business. And then ... by renting the kitchen and having it certified she was able to help other vendors do the same.”
“And all this happened in the last six months,” Becker added. “She’s really a first.”