A Market-Fresh Family

By Lynn Roberson
BT Contributor

Beneath her Seeley’s Gourmet Garden canopy, Kerry Seeley has set an immaculate white tablecloth with iced containers of her signature hummus, as well her mild, medium, and hot salsas, and a black-bean salad she recently invented. A generous bowl of corn chips is at hand, and Seeley, smiling, invites a Saturday morning shopper at the Upper Eastside Green Market to “go ahead and try them all. Find what you like best.”

Gesturing to a rainbow of produce artistically arranged in wicker and reed baskets, Seeley adds, “The hummus is really good with these beefsteak tomatoes. Make a sandwich and use hummus instead of mayonnaise.”

The shopper says she “can’t decide which is best” while Seeley packs three hummus picks at a discounted price and weighs the selected vine-ripened tomatoes. She then pops a rotund purple and white Sicilian eggplant into the shopper’s bag. “These are so sweet,” she says. “You just slice them and throw them on the grill. No salting, no soaking.”

The 26-year-old founder of Seeley’s Gourmet Garden is the product of four farm-and-produce generations. Her great-grandparents sold their own fruits and vegetables from a roadside stand in Michigan. Her great-aunt and great-uncle settled in Margate to cultivate a U-pick farm that fell prey to development in 1994. In Pompano Beach, her grandfather founded the open-air McNab Produce, which burned down in 2002. “After the fire, my mom and my uncle rebuilt the store six blocks away and called it By Their Fruit,” Seeley says. “The store was air-conditioned, and it had a kitchen.”

There, the younger Seeley says, her roots caught up with her. “I was in Pompano, working in the food industry, but I wanted to help my mom with the store. The kitchen inspired me. I could use our fresh Florida vegetables, spices, and herbs to start my own product line. So in 2005 I quit Starbucks to concentrate on Seeley’s Gourmet Garden hummus because it’s something that I really like to eat.”

Now the college-trained photographer, who focuses on “capturing motion clearly,” is in constant motion herself. Using a basic two-burner stove, a food processor, and minimal space, she experiments with flavor, texture, color, and taste constantly. “I get an idea from a batch of smoked Spanish paprika,” Seeley says. “I try it out to see if people like it. A meal at a Thai restaurant can send me off in another direction. Newly dug horseradish roots led to my horseradish hummus. Florida milk-and-honey corn hopped into the black bean salad along with Bulgarian feta cheese. I see. I mix. I taste. If the flavor infuses well, if I like it, then I’m happy. I refuse to sell anything that I don’t like, even if other people do.”

Comparing Seeley’s products to grocery store brands, the ingredients are startlingly dissimilar. Commercial hummus, whether refrigerated or in a nonperishable jar, generally contains chemical preservatives like sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate. Then there is that other suspicious ingredient: “natural flavors.” Store salsa contains the same preservatives, plus phosphoric acid, calcium chloride, sodium bisulfate, and xanthan gum. Doesn’t that sound tasty?

On the other hand, Seeley sets aside a whole day for hummus-making. Fridays from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., she puts down her 16-month-old son and locks herself in her Pompano Beach kitchen. Working in batches, she creates nine flavors of the Middle Eastern garbanzo bean delicacy. Fresh garlic, dill, rosemary, coconut, lemon, horseradish, chipotle, and cilantro, plus red, green, and jalapeño peppers come straight from the fields to Seeley’s hands. When they emerge — mixed with sea salt, olive oil, tahini, garbanzos, and a tad of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) to retard spoilage — Seeley’s Gourmet Garden hummus travels directly to an array of Saturday and Sunday green markets.

She rises at 5:00 a.m. Saturdays to load the hummus headed north for West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Wilton Manors, Delray Beach, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and Lake Worth. She chooses to helm the Upper Eastside location on Biscayne Boulevard. On Sundays she repeats this solo performance, anchoring the popular Las Olas Green Market in Fort Lauderdale.

By 9:00 on a recent Saturday morning, Seeley had already set up seven tables full of squash, fingerling potatoes, sweet onions, tomatoes, pink grapefruit, and honey bell oranges from Immokalee, flats of Plant City strawberries, baskets of mushrooms, bunches of chives and rosemary, plus three coolers of her gourmet products. After seven hours of brisk sales, when the 3:00 load-out time came, Seeley packed the unsold items into her van in less than an hour with a bit of help from a friend. “This goes back to the fridge in Pompano, and then off tomorrow morning to Las Olas,” she says.

“Food is hard work,” Seeley notes. “I don’t know that I want my son to follow along in the family footsteps. But my company is really all-American in the best sense of the phrase. People ask me if I’m from Lebanon, Greece, Colombia, or France, and I love that because I’m a mix of many things, and it comes through in my food. I’m open to anything that surprises and delights.”

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