It’s officially fall…

It is that time of year. Plants are starting to die out in my flower beds. I pulled out the calendula carcasses; the irises and sunflowers are long gone, the mint is disappearing and the potted fig trees are starting to go dormant.

This is a great time of year to be a forager. Spring is awesome for fresh greens, and there are still some greens to be had, but fall is time for stocking up on winter protein sources. The area around where I live is full of pecan, hickory and black walnut trees. The trick is to get to some of the nuts before the other creatures clean house.

The squirrels managed to completely remove every pecan from our backyard tree, picking and eating the nuts before they were even ready to drop. This isn’t bad news necessarily as the tree is pretty small compared to all the other neighborhood trees. In looking around at the giant trees, it looks like this will be a good year for pecans, which is great since there has been a drought of the nuts over the last three years. Last year there weren’t any at all.

I am pretty sure that I can pick up at least twenty five pounds of pecans this year. I have plenty of plans for them including trying to make some cooking oil and also lots of baking ideas. Supposedly it takes four pounds of nuts to make one pound of oil.

There are also signs that the hickory nuts are starting to drop right now. Last night I took a walk to the closest tree and saw plenty of the nuts smashed in the street. I will start checking the area every day from now on in hopes of netting a few pounds of the hickory meat. These nuts are great for baking, but it is too much of a pain in getting everything out of the shell to make good out-of-hand eating. A hammer and pliers are needed for hickory and black walnut whereas the thin walled pecan can be shelled pretty much intact.

Another thing to look for are ground nuts, also known as chufa or yellow nutgrass. These are not really nuts, but rather a grass-spreading tuber. These small tubers are used to make traditional horchata and can also be roasted or even eaten raw. There are plenty growing in my front yard. Most folks try to rip out nutgrass, but I have been encouraging their growth ever since Noel pointed out the abundance. The tubers will get bigger with some management, but right now they are pretty small.

If anyone is interested in foraging in the city, let me know. I am always looking to learn to identify new wild edibles in an urban environment.

Elba, NY, population 670 in town, maybe another 600 in the village. A small town by anyone’s measure and the place where I spent my first few school years and every summer until I was 21.

I lived in the village part of Elba, what seemed to me a massive area of farmland and sparsely spaced houses. But just like everywhere else, the old Miller Road of my youth has been subjected to the pervasiveness of new home building that occurs on farmland everywhere. Farmers grow old, tire of the long days, and, with no one willing to step up and continue to farm the land, sell the property off in one acre plots, the perfect size for modular homes and above ground pools. So it goes that factory built homes invade the unique landscape of hand built structures meant to stay in the family for generations, not just until the divorce.

My summers in Elba were mostly filled with work. Working on the Starowitz farm until I was 17, then taking a grocery store job at Bell’s while I finished my senior year at LeRoy High School. When I turned 18, it was factory time for me. Every day after school I would walk to Bok Industries where my Mom also worked. Every night after school I put rivets in three ring binders, pressed bales of recycled vinyl and cleaned toilets. I had already told myself that this was my life, and I had to get used to it. Then I went to college and ruined this whole scene.

The usual signal that my summer was coming to an end was the Elba Onion Festival, a pre-Fall celebration of the one product that the small town of Elba was supposedly well-known for – the onion. There were other celebrations in neighboring towns for other crops, processes, industries and whatever, but I really stuck to this one festival every year.

Usually held in the beginning weeks of August, the festival came to indicate a time to reflect on the previous several months of work and the return to school. It was pretty common for me to request time off from my jobs during this particular weekend. It was a time to catch up with people I hadn’t seen over the previous year, or even maybe for a couple of years. It was time to play a low stakes game of DARTO (yeah, just like BINGO), gorge myself on mini-donuts and Polish sausage, bet quarters on white rats that ran around a spinning wheel (dropping into various colored holes) or hang out near the beer tent late at night waiting for someone “on the inside” to toss unopened cans of Busch beer over the fence.

The festival had at its heart a fundraiser for the town’s volunteer firefighters and rescue squad. Every year their was a raffle for a brand new car, a Cadillac in the old days, but now a Ford Mustang, real Western New York type vehicles.

Small bags of onions were given to all the folks who came and bought tickets for the raffle. I always grew up under the assumption that the onions were from Elba farms and farmers, but it turned out that the onions (at least back in the eighties and early nineties) were from California and were most likely “old crop”. I shudder to think of where the onions come from now, these one pound bags of goodness, symbolic of the local community, most likely trucked in from the heavy onion producers of Central and South America. I can only hope that this isn’t the case and the onions they give away now are the real deal, locally farmed, harvested and bagged.

The food disconnect back then was more apparent than ever, just the fact that you can hold a celebration of your town’s biggest product and think nothing of importing that product in order to give it away with every raffle ticket. I’m sure the irony was not lost on some of the organizers of the event, but as they say “the show must go on.”

But good things are happening in Elba. One of the state’s largest organic farms in located in Elba. Porter Farms currently runs a CSA for three hundred or so families and delivers to Whole Foods and Lexington Food Co-op in Buffalo. The farm is right around the corner from where I grew up, but it has only been growing organically since the late nineties, after I had moved away.

There is also a large farmer’s market in Batavia, NY that operates twice a week. Last time I visited the market there were several organic farms represented, something I would have never seen when I lived there. The momentum for local and organic is getting into every small town out there. When they see the success, more farmers are willing to give organic a try and more small town consumers are pushing them along. The local food movement can only have a positive effect on the folks still farming and also encourage a new generation to get back to the farm and maybe grow some onions.

Dear Reader –

I have an assignment for you and me. We are going to enter the mainstream food waste river, together. We are going to pick a grocery store in our neighborhood, we are going to approach the produce manager or, preferably, a produce worker, and ask for a day’s worth of bruised fruit. We’ll tell them we prefer apples and pears, that it is for an art project or whatever it is that you want to tell them, that you will pick the fruit up on such and such a day at such and such a time. We won’t leave them hanging.

We are going to salvage twenty or so pieces of fruit and make them into apple/pear sauce. I do this with bruised fruit at work where bringing home culls is standard practice, but it would be interesting to expand the reach into more hostile territory. Directly engaging workers and collecting the waste of their day’s work is not something most of us think about, but I am asking you to put aside any fear you have of approaching these folks. They are just like you and I – a stomach to fill, rent to pay and dreams of how to spend a day off.

If anyone says they can’t give you fruit for legal reasons, let them know that (at least in North Carolina) there are laws protecting grocery stores that give away food. Specifically,

Chapter 99B. Products Liability.

§ 99B-10. Immunity for donated food. (a) Notwithstanding the provisions of Article 12 of Chapter 106 of the General Statutes, or any other provision of law, any person, including but not limited to a seller, farmer, processor, distributor, wholesaler, or retailer of food, who donates an item of food for use or distribution by a nonprofit organization or nonprofit corporation shall not be liable for civil damages or criminal penalties resulting from the nature, age, condition, or packaging of the donated food, unless an injury is caused by the gross negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct of the donor. (b) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any nonprofit organization or nonprofit corporation that uses or distributes food that has been donated to it for such use or distribution shall not be liable for civil damages or criminal penalties resulting from the nature, age, condition, or packaging of the donated food, unless an injury is caused by the gross negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct of the organization or corporation.(1979, 2nd Sess., c. 1188, s. 1; 1989, c. 365; 1991 (Reg. Sess., 1992), c. 935, s. 2; 1995, c. 522, s. 1.)

Arguably we are nonprofit organizations unto ourselves. If you have success or failure accessing the waste stream in this way, please let me know by posting a comment. Once you have the fruit, here is the quickest way to make some sauce.

Here is the type of fruit that I bring home: bruised, cut, nicked and extremely overripe -

1 – Wash, core and peel the fruit. I usually only peel the worst looking fruit in order to cut out the bruises and such as well as any overripe skins. For apples, get yourself a $4 apple corer. You will go through the apples really quickly especially if you don’t have much trimming to do.

2 - Put all the fruit in a large stockpot. Add any sweeteners or spices that you like. I added honey and some cinnamon from The Stash. Also, add a little bit of water so that the bottom pieces are not scorched as you bring the temperature up.

3 – Heat the mixture to a boil then reduce the heat to a simmer.

4 - Stir the mixture often. Use a potato masher to crush the sauce. You could also use a blender to get more of a grocery store sauce consistency, but I prefer having lots of fruit chunks in my sauce.

5 – When the sauce is the sweetness and consistency that you want, you can simply fill containers and stick them in the refrigerator or you can go through the process of canning the sauce for storage. I eat it so fast that it isn’t worth my time to can it.

6 – Enjoy the sauce on waffles, ice cream, sourdough pancakes, whatever!

Wednesday morning is usually when I expect a “random” visit from Belle and John Shisko, an older farming couple who bring me various things like kale, garlic and jalapeno peppers to sell at the store. Originally from Brooklyn, they bought 80 acres of land many years ago in Holly Ridge, about 35 miles northeast of Wilmington. They bought the land when there was nothing else around. Now their place in the world is being encroached upon by development just like every other rural paradise in America. And John will tell you about it if you’ll listen…

Sometimes the Shiskos will bring me random things to try, give my opinion on or to see if I might like to try and sell the random thing. Sometimes it is a weed such as “wild basil” or various nuts or their very own mutant sweet peppers. They also bring me flower bulbs and other things to plant in my garden at home or in the co-op garden behind the dumpsters.

Despite my best attempts at crankiness, some people can see right through it and understand that sometimes folks like me like to be engaged and sought after. I do like their visits, but sometimes what they bring is too much to handle. So I do my best to accommodate these gifts and attention, giving away many of the things they bring simply because I have no room for them.

If they miss a few weeks coming to the store, I kind of wonder what they are up to, whether the drought has messed with their plants too much or if they are simply done visiting for the year. Such is the give and take, the wonder and excitement in a relationship that lasts no more than twenty minutes at a time, once a week for thirty weeks out of the year.

Today they brought in a bucket of jujube fruit (Ziziphus zizyphus), also known as Chinese date. The variety they have comes off a tree that can grow to forty feet tall, but they try to maintain it at twenty-five feet. The fruit is about the size of a cherry. It is usually eaten when it turns brown, and it has a dry apple flavor. According to John’s folk science, eating a dozen of the fruit before bed will induce restful sleep. The fruit can also be left to dry on the tree and will become the consistency of a date with comparable sweetness.

As I sampled a jujube fruit, nibbling around the hard nut inside the flesh, I asked if the tree could be grown from seed. “Do you want a tree?” John asked. I wasn’t sure how to answer since I have never specifically asked him for something in the four years he has been coming to see me. I managed a “yeah, sure” answer that may have made me look more or less like an indifferent jerk. Nevertheless, he promised to bring me a tree – eventually – and I told him I’d find a place for it.