Spooky Apple Cider

Every Halloween table deserves a showstopper, and this one happens to be easy. Fill a punch bowl with apple cider, then float a handful of apples on top, each one carved into a grinning skull or pumpkin.

Recipe Roundup: Kale

By mid-October, the mornings have a chill and more leafy greens start to show up on the Farm Stand, including kale. Its leaves hold up to heat, soak up a good broth, and cook fast enough for a weeknight dinner. Cooler weather also tends to sweeten kale, so the bunches that arrive this time of year often taste milder than the ones from midsummer.

Fat Toad Farm

In 2007, Judith Irving, Steve Reid, and their daughter, Calley Hastings, brought home a single French Alpine doe named Jupiter. They had a modest plan for a backyard homestead on their property in Brookfield, Vt. What grew out of it was Fat Toad Farm, and eventually, one of the more beloved caramel sauces in the country.

Cooking with Beans

A pot of beans costs almost nothing, takes almost no attention, and keeps in the fridge for the better part of a week. What it gives back is protein, fiber, and a depth of flavor that most pantry ingredients never reach. They are also, it should be said, one of the more forgiving things you can cook.

Oaktown Spice Shop

Before there was an Oaktown Spice Shop, John Beaver spent his days at the grinding mill of a spice shop in his hometown of Milwaukee. The work taught him valuable lessons about the spice-making process that he would carry with him. For example, the moment a whole spice is ground, it begins to release its oils, and from there the flavor only fades.

Jujubes at Rock Front Ranch

Alisha Taff grew up visiting her mother's friends, the kind of households where children get spoiled with something sweet before they leave. What she got was jujubes. She says they were just sweet enough to be considered candy in her eyes. She had no idea at the time that she was eating a fruit people have been cultivating for 4,000 years.

Deaf Awareness Month: pi00a and Bumbleberry Farms

September is National Deaf Awareness Month, an observance with roots in the World Federation of the Deaf's first congress in Rome in 1951. Two of the makers in our Farm Stand have their own place in that story.

All About Skyr

Skyr looks like yogurt, tastes something like yogurt, and sits right there in the yogurt aisle. But it isn't yogurt, technically. The distinction comes down to a small amount of rennet (the same enzyme used to turn milk into cheese) added alongside the culture that gives skyr its familiar tang. That one ingredient is enough to classify it, in the eyes of dairy science anyway, as a cheese. But don't rush to put it on your cheese board just yet.

Brain Boosters

Nobody has ever fixed the way they eat over a single weekend. The foods that do the most for how you think and feel work on a slow schedule, across weeks, and they only work if you keep eating them. A few small changes, repeated until they stop feeling like changes, are what hold.

Sustainable to Our Roots

Decades ago, on the family farm, Kathleen Barsotti asked her teenage son which part of it he thought was the most sustainable. He gave the answers a boy eager to prove himself would give: the land, the water, the seeds, the customers. The most sustainable part of the farm, she said, was the bottom line. Without a profit, the farm would disappear, and every good thing it did would go with it.

Simple After School Snacks

The hour or so before dinner is never easy. Backpacks drop by the door, someone opens the fridge hoping for something good, and a meltdown can start before dinner is even close to ready. Have a quick ready-to-go snack can help! With summer ending and school back in session, now is a good time to think about what to keep on hand.

How to Make Zero Waste Strawberry Syrup

Most strawberry recipes start the same way: Hull the berries, trim away the leafy cap and the pale shoulder, and drop what's left into the compost without a second thought. It's such a routine motion that most people never stop to wonder what they're throwing away. Strawberry tops, as it happens, hold onto a surprising amount of the fruit's flavor and color, enough that simmering them down with sugar and water produces a vivid strawberry syrup.

How To Make Herb Salt

The hardest part of making herb salt is deciding which herbs to use. From there, it's simple and there are endless uses. It's great sprinkled over a fried egg or a tray of roasted vegetables, it does the work of seasoning and garnish at once, and it happens to be one of the more forgiving ways to use up extra dill or parsley before either one wilts on the counter.

Girl Meets Dirt

On Orcas Island, people show up at Audra Lawlor's door with boxes filled with plums, apples, quince, or whatever their yard gave up that week. Some of it arrives by ferry from neighboring islands, and some of it comes from folks who want nothing more than a jar of preserves in return.

How to Peel Tomatoes (Quick and Easy Method)

Anyone who has tried to peel a ripe tomato with a paring knife knows how it usually ends, with more fruit lost than peel removed. Peaches have the same problem, their fuzzy exterior clinging just as stubbornly to what's underneath. The fix for both is a quick trip through boiling water, a technique called blanching, which loosens the peel without cooking the fruit itself. While the method is nearly identical for each, timing is important.

Reviving Wilted Produce

Open the crisper drawer and there is a chance something in there that has wilted. The good news is that wilted produce has almost always lost water, and there is a simple fix. How you do it depends on the shape of what's wilting — veggies with a solid stem or stalk take up water from a cut base, but leaves, herbs, and smaller vegetables need a full soak instead.

Durst Organic Growers

Jim Durst will tell you that good vegetables begin underground. Feed the soil, he likes to say, and it will feed the plants. Jim came to that idea early, falling for organic farming as a young man and going on to help spark the sustainable farming movement that took root across the Capay Valley.

Recipe Roundup: Zucchini

While zucchini is technically a fruit, almost no one treats it like one. This summer squash has a mild, slightly sweet flavor and a high water content that make it as refreshing as it is easy to cook with. It crisps into chips, disappears into a cake, holds its own in a quiche, and turns delicate when sliced thin for a summer salad. These four recipes include savory and sweet ways to use zucchini and will inspire you to keep zucchini in regular rotation all summer long.

McEvoy Ranch

It was the early 1990s when Nan McEvoy fell for a quiet stretch of rolling hills outside Petaluma, Calif. The 550-acre property had been a dairy farm and it was still zoned for agriculture, which meant she had to grow something. Friends suggested she keep it simple — maybe plant a few trees and leave it at that, but Nan was not a simple-project sort of person.

All About Fingerling Potatoes

The fingerling potato doesn’t look like much at first. Small and knobby, it tends to get overlooked in favor of bigger, more familiar spuds. Once you start incorporating them in your own cooking, it becomes clear why farmers have been growing these elongated heritage varieties for centuries.