A birthday apple-picking adventure

This year, Giselle wanted to celebrate her birthday by engaging in hard manual labor...so we went apple-picking with a few friends. Our destination was Fishkill Farms in Dutchess County, NY. The drive up was quite nice - the leaves are starting to turn colors outside of New York City - and Fishkill Farms itself had a lovely view of distant mountains:


vegetable garden with apple orchard in the distance

Before heading out to the orchard, we admired a roving herd of cheese pumpkins:


yes, they are named that because they resemble giant wheels of cheese

We also visited the farm's chickens, who proved more difficult to photograph than the pumpkins, because they refused to stand still:


chicken, this was your best shot

Eventually we commenced with the hard work of picking (and sampling) a variety of apples: Macoun, McIntosh, Mutsu, Empire, Spartan, and Jonagold. Here are some gentle, apple-loving folk enjoying the beautiful fall day:


not pictured: Nykki, Charlie, Lizz

After our bags of apples got too heavy to carry, we dropped them off at the car and made a quick stop at the pumpkin patch before heading out. Apparently there's a pumpkin shortage in some parts of the country, including the Northeast - so we decided to stock up:



Then we drove back to Harlem with 25 lbs of apples in tow:



It turns out that's a lot of apples:



What to do with 25 lbs of apples? Well, we reserved a few pounds - mainly Macs, Spartans, and Empires - for eating out of hand. We used the Mutsus (the large green tart apples above) in an apple crisp and then made applesauce and apple butter with the rest. Stay tuned for more on that...

Eating our way around Iceland

Hverir geothermal area near Lake Myvatn, Iceland: extremely pretty, not actually related to food.

Greetings, dear readers! We're back from a lovely trip to Iceland (with Lizz's parents), and we're ready to report on our culinary adventures. This is by no means a comprehensive overview of Icelandic cuisine, but here are a few quick thoughts.

Icelandic food reflects the reality that Iceland has a very harsh environment, with a short growing season and poor volcanic soil in much of the country. As you might expect, summer vegetables aren't really a strength. These days veggies are mostly produced in geothermally heated greenhouses. On the other hand, Iceland has a great variety of fresh fish, as well as very highly regarded lamb, produced from sheep that are basically allowed to roam freely in the countryside, only being rounded up once a year. Since the sheep are humanely and sustainably raised, and no workers are exploited in the process, we decided to eat lamb while we were in the country.

Iceland does not really have a longstanding national cuisine. Many traditional Icelandic dishes seem to have been born of necessity, and these days are only eaten on certain holidays. (Putrefied shark, anyone?) In the past Icelandic restaurants were basically "surf and turf" (salmon and lamb), but these days young chefs are creatively building on the country's culinary strengths and creating a new national cuisine.

Some fishes we enjoyed while in the country included cod (especially a mashed salt cod dish in traditional style), halibut, salmon, and ling. We also ate a lot of lobster, especially in Hofn, a southeastern town that is the center of Iceland's lobster-fishing industry. The lobsters there are small - more the size of prawns, but quite delicious. We also tried cod chins, one of those traditional dishes that is not eaten as frequently nowadays - they were very rich, but actually had a nice flavor.

As is the reality in most of the world at this point, there is a lot of fast food in Iceland. It's easy to find hamburgers and french fries in the eateries adjoining most gas stations in rural areas. Iceland is a very, very sparsely populated country, and there are not many restaurants in most of the smaller towns, so gas stations are actually a pretty reliable place to eat. There are big American chain restaurants, but they're mostly in the Reykjavik area, and we saw few out in the countryside.

For the most part, when we needed food to go we bought prepackaged sandwiches, which are widely available at gas stations and park concession stands: usually smoked lamb, tomato and egg slices, or smoked salmon. We were pleasantly surprised to find that these sandwiches vastly outshone their American counterparts - you'd be hard-pressed to find something as fresh and tasty in an American gas station. Even the sandwiches we bought in the Keflavik International Airport were surprisingly good; a real relief after the Wolfgang Puck Express at JFK tried to kill us with their alleged four-cheese pizza.

One fast food item which is an Icelandic national passion is the hot dog (or pylsa). Icelandic hot dogs include a significant amount of lamb along with the normal ingredients, which gives them more flavor. Everyone's favorite hot dog joint in Reykjavik is the famous Baejarins Beztu:



We had our first lunch in Reykjavik here, a pylsa with the works. It was quite good.

Iceland's other genius food invention is a concoction named skyr. We're not precisely clear on what skyr is: some sources seem to call it a cheese, others call it a relative of yogurt. In any case, it's made from whey, and it's delicious. It comes in many forms, from a custardy dessert (that is, indeed, similar in texture to yogurt), to a smoothie-style beverage, to all manner of spreads and salad dressings that are usually made with other dairy products. This is its most common incarnation:


Yes, it really does come with a spoon.

In the course of our trip we had a chance to sample many skyr variations: skyr and cream with berries, cherry skyr cake (similar in texture to a cheesecake), skyr smoothie, skyrronaise (as a dipping sauce for fried fish), and of course several flavors of the skyr brand shown above. We hear it's hard to find in the US, but highly recommend it. Of course, you don't have to trust us - take it from Stephen Colbert.

There were a few things we refrained from eating on our trip, notably whale, puffin, horse, and....zebra. (Yes, we were actually served zebra. "You know, the horse," our server explained.) Horse is actually a traditional Icelandic food. Iceland along with Japan has resumed commercial whaling, although apparently there is not actually much of a market for the meat - whales are more profitable as entertainment for whale-watching expeditions. Despite also being a traditional Icelandic food, puffins are just way too cute to eat:



As we travelled around the country, we found that Icelandic breakfast (at least in the hotels where we were staying) is fairly consistent: bread, butter and jam, sliced cucumber and egg, smoked meats, pickled herring, melons...and cheerios. And coffee. Icelanders drink a lot of coffee, not only in the morning, but in Reykjavik's many cafes throughout the day, up until the point in the evening when all the cafes start serving beer and turn into low-key bars.

As for Icelandic beer, we can't say we were overly impressed, but maybe we just didn't try the right brands. We sampled Viking (amusingly pronounced "weeking" in Icelandic, which makes them sound much less imposing), Egils Gull (which actually means "gold," not the seabird - a very different connotation), and Egils Premium (we'd recommend you stick with the Gull).

In any case, Iceland is a unique country and its cuisine definitely reflects that. We can see how one could get used to a diet of lots of quality fresh wild-caught fish and free-range meats, but of course that's not the diet that we're accustomed to. Though we enjoyed Icelandic food a lot, it's nice to be back here at the peak of the northeastern summer vegetable season. (The hunt for skyr in New York City starts....now.)

New York Botanical Garden - The Edible Garden exhibit

Despite our love of fruits and vegetables, we have not spent much time around them in their native habitat since our abortive attempt at a fire escape herb garden last summer. So yesterday, we headed up to see the Edible Garden exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden. The exhibit features an elegantly landscaped outdoor garden full of heirloom plants (from the Seed Savers' Exchange collection) as well as a collection of tropical fruits and vegetables growing in the Botanical Garden's conservatory. And that is where we saw something that BLEW OUR MINDS:



Yes, THAT IS ACTUALLY HOW PINEAPPLES GROW! They look like someone has stuck a pineapple onto a short pole and then jammed it into the ground at the center of a standard lily plant. Somehow, we had both figured that they must grow attached to the plant at the top - maybe in a tall palm tree of some kind. But apparently we were wrong.

We spotted some other familiar fixtures in our kitchen:



Amaranth - a purple variety, rather than the red-splashed green leaves we typically buy at the Indian grocery store. This type might be grown for its grain rather than its leaves, which can be used as vegetables.



It might be kind of hard to tell from the picture, but that green blob just above center is a smooth-skinned variety of avocado. It is growing hanging from a tree by a ridiculously thin stem. Who could blame us if it happened to fall into our outstretched hands......



This might be our favorite rhizome (and that is, actually, saying a lot) - if you look carefully at the tan patch at the bottom of this picture you will recognize the unmistakable shape of a piece of ginger! Those green bamboo-looking stems were growing straight up from the ginger "root" itself.



True addicts will recognize this as coffee. But only true addicts. (It's green because it is not ripe yet - later on it turns red, and then the coffee "bean" itself - actually a seed - is removed and roasted.)



Ok, this is not a vegetable, but a hipster panda would definitely like this bamboo. For some reason we found the stripes very aesthetically pleasing. Then we returned to the vegetables, and espied -



-some purple okra! It was growing on short, foot-tall plants. The leaves look like maple.



Sadly there were no melons to be seen, but this vine is the bitter melon plant - one of our favorite Indian grocery store purchases (and one of our favorite cucurbits).



This would have been more of a shock if we hadn't already learned (thanks, Wikipedia) about how cashews grow, but - that is a cashew fruit! The red part is actually sweet and is made into a drink in many countries. The weird kidney shape hanging off the bottom is the cashew, encased in a hard and very poisonous shell. Harvest has to be done carefully to keep the toxin from getting into the fruit juice.



Here, we have a chenopod family reunion: at top is our old friend quinoa, a useful South American staple whose seeds are treated as a grain. Apparently the leaves are also edible, but we don't get those around here. (If you are a farmers' market dork, you might notice that the leaves look a lot like lamb's quarters, an invasive weed around here that also happens to be a tasty and cheaper approximation of spinach.) At bottom is epazote, an herb which is a relative of quinoa and which is used sparingly in Mexican cooking to give refried beans and other dishes a distinctive flavor. The herb itself is more than distinctive - some people think it tastes like gasoline. You probably just have to get used to it. (Interestingly, epazote is also invasive in our region and apparently grows all over Central Park!)

After exploring the wonders of the greenhouse, we headed outside to see the lilies and lotuses growing in the conservatory's ponds:



(Gigantic lotus flower - Lizz for scale.) In addition to being a religious symbol, an extremely pretty flower, and a superhydrophobic nanostructured material, lotuses are a food! Their rhizomes, usually erroneously called lotus root, are weird tubular structures revealing a lacy pattern of holes when you slice them open. In the center of their flowers are these truly bizarre structures:



After pollination, the flower petals fall off leaving this seedpod (which looks like some kind of electrical plug). It slowly dries out, and the little dots expand to reveal dark lotus seeds, which can be ground into paste, mixed with sugar, and used in the pastries of several Asian countries.

On our way to the rose garden, we passed a tree that had dropped a million small, apricot-like fruits on the ground. Imagine our surprise when we looked at the tag and discovered it was:



PRUNUS MUME, OUR FAVORITE APRICOT! Ok, more specifically, it is the small fruit usually called a "plum" which is used to create Japanese umeboshi, a pink pickle flavored with shiso leaves (and much beloved by Giselle). They are also used to make Japanese plum wine. Despite much temptation, we resisted eating them out of hand.

Incidentally, just try saying "prunus mume" and not feeling happy.

We also encountered this innocent-looking vine:



Not much going on now, but this is the hops vine, known and loved by beer drinkers everywhere.

Last we visited the rose garden, now in full bloom:



Here is Lizz posing like a Greek statue amidst the flowers.



This is Giselle's favorite color of roses. But fear not, this DOES relate back to food (considering that this is a food blog):



What you see there are rose hips, the fruit of the rose bush! They are the expanded ovary of the pollinated rose flower, which grows like that after the petals have fallen off. These are used to make jellies and jams, and are sometimes candied. It might seem surprising that rose bushes make an edible fruit, but the family rosacea actually includes many well-known fruits, such as apples, cherries, and apricots - yes, including prunus mume.

Incredibly, we made it through the afternoon without illicitly harvesting any of these delicious fruits and vegetables, and returned home to cook dinner with our decontextualized ones.