Local Flavors

"Going local" is a subject you've heard about many times in the last few years. You can't celebrate "local" without talking about food. Todd Moe visited a community garden in Saranac Lake and talked to Green Circle founder Gail Brill about the upcoming "Farm2Fork Festival" on September 4th in Riverside Park. The event will include workshops, cooking demonstrations and, of course, a chance to eat locally grown food.

Cheese will be the topic of a series of lectures around the region this month. The authors of the new book, The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses, will share their love of cheese and what they learned during four years of research. Russ Hall and Peg Rooney met cheesemakers, breathed the aromas in cheese shops and made many different cheeses in their kitchen. Hall and Rooney were early fans of New York cheddars and cheese curds. They spoke with Todd Moe about their book, and what they call the “Adirondack Crescent”.

It’s county fair season in the North Country. And that means it’s also fried food season. Fried dough, French fries, funnel cakes. At the Lewis County fair last week in Lowville, David Sommerstein bumped into some “X-treme” frying: fried oreo cookies. He sent this Heard Up North.

NCPR and TAUNY, Traditional Arts in Upstate New York, have been keeping track of gardens across the North Country in a project we call The Garden Plot.

At midsummer, our plot has grown, just like the gardens we've been watching. Martha Foley talks with TAUNY's Jill Breit about what we've learned from gardeners about growing vegetables and collaborating on the internet.

One of the highlights of Burlington's summer is the yearly "brewfest" on the waterfront. It brings brewers and beer fanciers together for a big, cheery, Canadian-American party. As Angela Evancie found, there's serious tasting going on, with some unexpected elements.

Last week, David Sommerstein reported that a shortage of meat cutters and slaughterhouses is a limiting factor in the growing trend to eat local. He visited New York State’s only certification program for butchers, at SUNY Cobleskill. (see link below)

Turns out Americans across the country are learning the details about how their meat is butchered. Many self-described foodies are taking classes where they work with experienced butchers, donning aprons and using cleavers, saws and hatchets to cut up slaughtered pigs and other animals.

Organizers say the classes indicate the public's growing interest in how the food they eat affects their health and the planet. They say that interest is driving more people to shop at farmers markets and even raise chickens in their backyards.

Canadian chef Steve Mitton, co-owner and head chef of Murray Street Restaurant in Ottawa’s Byward Market, is part of that broad culinary movement.

Mitton's kitchen combines creativity with efficiency, using techniques he learned from butchers in Germany, where eat local is nothing new. He told Lucy Martin his apprenticeship was kind of an accident. More...

The town of Essex, along Lake Champlain, is one of those bucolic spots in the North Country with views of the lake, blue-gray mountains and rolling green pastures. Kristin and Mark Kimball run Essex Farms, a sustainable farm where they do most of the work with teams of draft horses instead of tractors. They run a CSA and raise pasture-fed cows, chickens, pigs, bees and immense fields of veggies. We visit the farm's bovine beauties for today’s Heard Up North.

Hot and spicy was the order of the day at the Lake Placid 5th annual I Love Barbecue Festival to benefit the Shipman Youth Center. Competitors braved high temperatures for three days as they cooked up some delicious meat. Sarah Harris visited the festival, sampled delectable barbecued chicken and has our story.

Mostly gone are the days of the neighborhood butcher. They may never come back. They've been replaced by vast meat processing plants putting out shrink-wrapped cuts for supermarkets. But foodies and locavores are fueling a demand for meat raised, killed, and butchered closer to home. The problem in the North Country and much of the Northeast is there aren't enough slaughterhouses or meat cutters. David Sommerstein visited New York's only certification course for the next generation of butchers. More...

A century ago - even just 60 years ago — raising your own chickens wasn't unusual. Now, most of us get our eggs in cartons, and our chicken wings wrapped in plastic.

But there are a growing number of people nationwide who are reviving the art of chicken rearing. As part of a collaboration with Northeast stations, WNYC's Amy Eddings reports on backyard chicken farming in an unlikely place.