Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season. Catch them on the Farm to Table episode of 'Rachael's Vacation' on the Food Network.
We had a bounty crop of carrots this year. We sliced them and diced them every which way we knew how and still they kept coming. It seems like you can open almost any refrigerator in America and find a neglected bag of carrots. You use one or two in a salad and then get stumped as to what to do with the rest.
We turned to our friend Sandy Gluck who always helps us out with our overstock. The result is a sweet and spicy carrot dish that will definitely clear up crisper space in refrigerators across the nation.
Find the recipe for Sicilian Glazed Carrots after the jump...
Growers in the nation's southernmost commercial apple-producing region are fighting a change in crop insurance law, which they claim could wipe out a 200-year-old industry.
Henderson County, N.C. -- a stretch of Southern Appalachia where the first apple trees were planted by a Loyalist on the run from the Revolutionary Army -- today generates about $24 million in annual apple revenue, representing 85 percent of the state's apple crop. But the region's 150-plus growers have been hard hit in recent years by calamities including frost, wind and hail.
Owings credits the Federal Crop Insurance Program, which reimburses growers for lost apples at a rate of $9.25 a bushel, with keeping area orchards solvent. He's worried a new proposal to significantly lower disaster payouts for lesser-grade apples could prove devastating.
Alabama's struggling farmers, many of whom have converted their fields into miniature golf courses and petting zoos in hopes of boosting their revenue, are pressing the state to direct highway travelers to their entertainment complexes.
The Alabama Agri-Tourism Association will meet next month with the state's Department of Transportation to craft a plan for erecting interstate signs pointing drivers to agri-attractions, a category that encompasses everything from ice cream counters and produce stands to u-pick blueberry patches and Christmas-tree farms.
"Obviously, our attractions are way off the interstate," says Auburn University tourism specialist J. Thomas Chesnutt, emphasizing the need for signs.
Chesnutt concedes that signs are a rather old-fashioned solution to the newfangled problem of rural economic development. As he says, few tourists today load their family in a station wagon and head down the road in search of impromptu fun. Most modern vacations are plotted online.
Tomatillos and hot peppers. Photo: Brent Ridge, Beekman 1802.
Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.
Earlier this summer, when a friend gave us a few small tomatillo plants, we weren't really that interested in them. Nevertheless, we found a spot in the heirloom garden and pushed them into the dirt.
Three short months later, as we watched every blight-bitten tomato turn brown and drop from the vine, we were thrilled to have those tomatillo plants.
Oddities in the garden, we've been asked more than once what they were. One visitor even exclaimed, "I didn't know you could eat Japanese Lanterns!"
Today's the day to skip burgers and bacon -- it's World Vegetarian Day! Slashfood is celebrating the beginning of vegetarian-awareness month with lots of posts highlighting the best in fruits and veggies. They'll be a few roundups that aren't all-veg, but barring those, we're bringing you meat-free fare all day long. Check back here for posts on vegan wine, the best in vegetarian cookbooks and food festivals, plant-based recipes and more.
An autumnal feast. Photo: Brent Ridge, Beekman 1802.
Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.
One of the true pleasures of life on the farm is walking out to the heirloom vegetable garden to decide what looks good for dinner. All summer, we've been sharing some of our own recipes, but we're not the only ones out there with a backyard garden and a little creativity. There are thousands of you!
We decided to hold a contest to see who came up with the best impromptu recipe from their garden this year.
And guess what? One of the most influential gardening chefs in the world, Alice Waters, is going to help us choose the winner. We'll even prepare the winning recipe and put it right here. You and your recipe could be famous!
To get you started on the right track, we're giving you one of our favorites this season.
Thanks to an agricultural education collaborative that's planted the state's leading crops between the State Capitol and the North Carolina Legislative Building, North Carolina's halls of power are lined with cornstalks and tobacco leaves.
"It's been a great way to take the museum outdoors and let people reconnect with where their food comes from," says North Carolina Museum of History youth and family programs coordinator Emily Grant, who worked with the state's Department of Administration and Department of Agriculture to create a series of agricultural vignettes in decorative planters where maple trees and azaleas once grew.
"Our standard landscape planting was starting to die out from the drought," Grant says. "We thought we could pick out plants from North Carolina to talk about plant use and abuse."
The project this year took more than five planters of varying sizes. "We don't have a big lawn where we can just plow the back," Grant says of the urban museum, sowing seeds for a Three Sisters garden of beans, corn and squash; cotton; tobacco; sweet potatoes and peanuts.
Few American festivals celebrate a foodstuff as archaic as this weekend's Buckwheat Festival in Preston County, W. Va., which annually showcases a dish the New York Times deemed outdated nearly a century ago.
"According to millers, the consumption of buckwheat has fallen off not less than 30 percent in the last five years," the paper reported in 1910. "Where once the mounds of well-browned flapjacks, flanked by the molasses jug, reigned supreme at the breakfast table, now the patent breakfast foods alone are to be seen."
Corn flakes weren't the only culprit in buckwheat pancakes' disappearance from the American table: As new chemical fertilizers facilitated the farming of wheat, most growers abandoned the substitute crop. Buckwheat fields -- which occupied more than 1 million acres of U.S. land when the Times printed its buckwheat lament -- accounted for just 50,000 acres in 1964, when the USDA last bothered to count.
A few of those buckwheat farmers, no doubt, lived near Preston County, which pinned its economic hopes on the plant during the Depression.
Yesterday in Washington, D.C., Tom Vilsack, the Agriculture Secretary and Kathleen Merrigan, the Deputy Secretary, announced a new USDA initiative, "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food." Officials say the almost $65 million program will "begin a national conversation to help develop local and regional food systems and spur economic opportunity."
"An American people that is more engaged with their food supply will create new income opportunities for American agriculture," said Vilsack. He also posted a video on You Tube outlining the details of the program. On a consumer level, part of this initiative means knowing where your food comes from, beyond the grocery store produce aisle, as well as bringing locally farmed fruit and vegetables to schools.
The program will also help smaller farmers ship meat and poultry across state lines, in order to boost rural economies and small agriculture businesses. There will be changes to existing USDA programs that cut down logistical and bureaucratic road blocks that make sustainable local agriculture more costly and more difficult.
Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.
When we first moved to the Beekman Farm, we knew really nothing about farming. Most of what we now know we learned from talking to our neighbors, local farmers with years worth of experience. We felt it was time to say "thank you," so the Beekman Farm is hosting a Harvest Festival in historic Sharon Springs, N.Y., to celebrate local farmers. The festivities will conclude with a five-course meal at the American Hotel , with primary ingredients (from the butter to the bourbon) that are all locally sourced.
While the festival was a year in the planning, there are some very worthwhile things that you can do to say "thanks" to your own local farmers. Here are a few ways to get started:
• Didn't even know there were farmers in your neck of the woods? Then a good place to start is at localharvest.org. Plug in your ZIP code and in an instant see what's growing near you.
Shaping fruits and vegetables as they grow on the vine is nothing new. John Czeski, an Ohio farmer, was harvesting pumpkins with human faces in the 1930s. But these adorable baby Buddha pears take playing with food to a whole new level.
A Chinese farmer been tinkering with modified pears since 2003, and this year he's reportedly grown 10,000 edible Buddhas. But are they too cute to eat? Tell us what you think in the comments below!
Hey, wait a sec! Are you really about to dump out the rest of the too-big coffee you ordered this morning, drank a third of, forgot about and let get lukewarm? Come on, pal -- you think this stuff grows on trees?
Well, actually, it kind of does -- except they're more like bushes. And the beans that we enjoy roasted, ground and percolated in the morning are actually seeds, not beans: They're more like a cherry pit than any legume you put in your famous Super Bowl Sunday chili. And much like every other fresh fruit or vegetable we enjoy, the beauty and deliciousness of a coffee is fleeting, seasonal and really labor intensive.
Read more about coffee's journey from seed to cup after the jump.
Few leads are reported at this point, but police are speculating as to all possible motives, including the case of a jealous farmer.
"We're looking at the possibility that it may be a grower that's had a failed crop and he's substituting through theft," Zander said.
Police do believe the timing of the thefts shows the thieves are in the know.
"Somebody has the knowledge that cucumbers are being picked at the appropriate time, they're being stored in boxes, buckets or bags -- and overnight the thefts are occurring," Zander tells ABC News reporter Pete McDonald.
Even if there was a lead, Zander admits it is hard to determine which cucumbers are the stolen ones.
Embezzled cukes could be sold right under investigator's noses at local grocery stores and markets, as there is no way to detect a cucumber's origin.
Law enforcement officials are blaming current economic woes for the resurgence of a very old-fashioned crime: cattle rustling.
Cattle farmers across the South are coping with an uptick in livestock theft that they claim could endanger their livelihoods. According to the Alabama Department of Agriculture, the state this year has already surpassed the number of cattle theft incidents recorded in 2008, with more than 200 cows swiped since January.
"They're getting the cattle, taking them and selling them," explains Billy Powell, executive vice president for the Alabama Cattlemen's Association.
Powell believes the rise in cattle crime reflects the desperation of some rural Alabamians. As anyone who's ever wrangled cattle will attest, cows are strong, dumb and feisty, which makes them notoriously difficult to move. There's a reason Hollywood assumed it took guys like John Wayne to get the job done.
"It's a lot easier to steal ATVs and riding lawn mowers," Powell says.
A national organization devoted to combating hunger has found a way to wring good works from the South's most notorious prison farms.
The Mississippi office of the Society of St. Andrew, which identifies itself as "America's premier food salvage ministry," last month joined with the Mississippi Food Network to start collecting surplus produce from the Mississippi State Penitentiary -- commonly known as Parchman Farm -- and distributing it to 350 food pantries across the state.
"It's a win-win situation," program coordinator Jackie Usey reports. The program has already collected 40,000 pounds of squash from Parchman's fields.
What Can I Get You Folks? - Server Revenge
Reality-Show Celebrities Serve Up Chef Curtis Stone's 'Hundred-Dollar Burger'
Foods Celebrity Chefs Hate
