I was 19 years old the summer I spent two weeks helping to build a wall around a schoolyard in a rural Turkish village. During breaks, villagers expressed their gratitude (or maybe just entertained their own curiosities about us) by offering us a drink called Ayran. It’s a salty yogurt drink that on those hot,…
Category: How To
{community} Be a Dinner Elf
Food is much more than a series of nutrients and calories. Food brings people together to celebrate the good times and helps sustain us during the tough times. Some recipes are infused with memories and help honor important people and times in our lives. Food is at the center of any good get-together: a casual…
Lard {Yes, that’s what I said: Lard.}
I should admit that, straightaway, this task was a stretch even for me. In a moment of pure curiosity (lunacy?) and inability to turn down a good deal, or a free deal, I graciously accepted a cooler full of pig fat from a local farmer. Josh from West Wind Acres had a few pigs processed,…
{How To} Butter…and Accidental Crème Fraiche & Buttermilk
This past Tuesday, Nick and I learned that Meadowbrook Farms won’t be able to bring us the butter we use every week from The Country Creamery in Canestota, NY any longer. The news was a bit alarming; we use 18 lbs of the stuff each week for croissants, scones, muffins and cookies. We love its…
{community sharecropping} How to Braid Garlic
This year we harvested our garlic on July 10, let it dry for two weeks and then decided to braid some of it. Most years we make a mixture of hard and soft neck garlic braids but this year we were only able to braid our soft neck garlic. While we can usually braid the hard…
{Dispatch} from a small kitchen
Editor’s Note: We are interrupting today’s normally scheduled post* to bring you the coolest rental kitchen of 2011 which happens to belong to our contributor Christine! Do you have a teeny kitchen? Do you need inspiration on what to do with said space-challenged room? Where to place all those gadgets when you have no drawers…
{garlic scape week} Infused Olive Oil!
The final product of this project was, to me, reminiscent of jars of formaldehyde, filled with dead snakes and sitting on the shelf of a biology classroom. Now that I’ve whetted your appetite, let me lure you further by emphasizing the ease of creating garlic scape olive oil. I got the idea from a Martha…
{RECIPE WEEK} Garlic Scapes Are Your Friend.
It became clear a few weeks back that the ladies of FSC love their garlic scapes. Recipes began appearing in the draft bin; pesto, tzaziki, infused oil and half-sours with scapes. We will spend the next four days exploring the magic of the green whirly scape, the stalk that shoots up out of the ground…
{How To} Fancy Food Club
When I was young I remember my parents hosting dinner parties for their friends. I also remember them cooking fancy meals for each other. I will never forget them eating escargot and feeling totally freaked out as a five-year-old watching them eat it. I just always thought this is what adults did with their friends….
{Simple} Homemade Yogurt Cheese
When we moved to upstate New York around twenty-five years ago, we became friends with Martha and Seth from Slack Hollow Farm in Argyle. The first time we went over to their house for dinner, Martha gave us some soft goat cheese she had made. I was so impressed and enthusiastic about their advanced state…
{COMMUNITY SHARECROPPING} May is the Time to Plant Your Garden
May is planting season in the community share cropping gardens. We already planted cover crops (more on those in a future post), winter wheat and garlic last fall; those are all coming in now. We had a wet, late spring in upstate New York, so didn’t get much going in April. Usually we have peas…
{community sharecropping} Composting 101
It is May, which means that the community sharecropping season, in which we garden on other people’s former lawns, has begun. They are the lawn lords, my husband is the fanatic sharecropper, I am his opinionated side kick. We had a cold, late, wet winter, so couldn’t really get into the gardens with equipment until…
{Paneer} Simple Homemade Frying Cheese
Back in the day when we lived in the country and had milk goats, I used to make different kinds of soft cheese on a regular basis. The easiest of the cheeses was paneer, an Indian frying cheese used in curries. I hadn’t made it in years but decided to try it with cow’s milk…
{Easter} Veggie-Dyed Eggs
Editor’s Note: This is Erika’s second post where she rocks the Kilpatrick Family Farm veggie-dyed Easter Eggs. Our newest contributor introduced herself in her first post. Her first contribution was an insight into her food philosophy…in case you missed it. -Christina {from L to R: carrot, golden beet, red beet, and onion skin***} I decided…
{photo diary} The Big Boil
We have moved beyond the “tapping sap” stage to the “big boil”. Dianna & Michael are in the midst of their 2011 maple syrup season and had their “big boil” on two separate days this year. I won’t go into the details because Dianna will be writing up a recap of this year’s antics in…
