The Local Food Report

My husband’s grandmother kept a big garden for years—roughly 15 by 30 feet, and always filled with beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peas. She passed away a few years ago and the land is still in the family, but over the past few seasons it’s been neglected, and now it’s overgrown.

Kefir is the Russian word for a sour-tasting drink made with cow's milk. It's often confused with yogurt. This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay talks with a woman in Wellfleet making her own kefir and learns how the beverage is different from other fermented dairy products.

Peter Burgess is as interested in the history of farming as he is in the practice itself. His farm in Truro is called Sixpence Farm, after a silver coin he found in the soil that dates back to 1689. Burgess focuses almost entirely on fruits and vegetables that would have been found here over a hundred years ago. On the day I visited, he told me about the apple varieties he planted, and why he chose them.

The farm bill started off as a New Deal program in the 1930s to supply emergency aid to farmers who were economically hard hit because of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Over the last 85 years it’s grown and morphed into a huge omnibus piece of federal legislation that impacts everything we eat in this country.  

Shrub is a colonial soda made with fresh fruit, vinegar, and sugar. This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay talks with a Wellfleet cook using local beach plums to make this old-fashioned soda.

Summer's sweet corn evokes memories and simple deliciousness beyond the familiar grilled or boiled slathered with butter. There's old-fashioned kitchen wisdom in using up the silk and the cobs.

For decades, small vegetable farms on the Outer Cape have been struggling. Real estate prices are sky high, making it difficult to keep small farms economically viable. But over the past ten years, the local food movement has created new demand. And now that Massachusetts has legalized cannabis, some small farmers want to use this cash crop to help their vegetable farms thrive, and even expand.   

You've probably heard of chervil, lemon basil, and lemon verbena. But have you ever cooked with them? This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay talks with several local growers about these unusual summer herbs—what the plants are like, and what to do with them in the kitchen. 

During the summer, a bright orange flower weaves through your daily commute. Daylilies pop up along roadsides and bike paths, cemeteries and soccer fields, even in the cracks between pavement. Long admired for their beauty, these prolific invasives are also edible. In this episode of The Local Food Report, horticulturist Laura Swain demonstrates how to turn daylily flowers into a potluck showstopper.

The day I find the blueberries is hot. My computer malfunctions, protesting the heat, maybe, just in time for a looming deadline. I’ve brought my girls up the road to their grandparents, and I’m supposed to be working. I start repairs: a backup, new software, and finally, an operating system update. 3 hours to complete, the screen tells me.

Fermenting Ginger Beer can eat up the sugar and leave behind that dry unmistakable tang of ginger. This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay heads to Truro to talk with the founders of Farmer Willie's Craft Ginger Beer, Nico Enriquez and Willie Fenichel, about why they got into making fermented beer and how the process works. 

A green twiggy thicket in a Mashpee forest may look unremarkable to the untrained eye, but to Elise Leduc it's an endless feast of wild edible plants.

Have you ever noticed how some blueberries are light blue and others are dark navy? How some are tart and some are sweet? Some tiny and some huge? This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay talks with the owner of a pick-your-own blueberry farm in Dennis about what varieties he grows and why. 

Strawberry season, in my family, is a religious thing. We pick strawberries in late June every year, all together, no matter what. 

When I go out foraging I figure the worst things that could happen are mosquitoes, poison ivy, ticks - always ticks, and maybe some surly local wildlife.