Saratoga Farmers' Market

Did You Know

Chocolate’s Journey | Did You Know…

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By Himanee Gupta-Carlson

When you visit the Saratoga Farmers’ Market this Saturday, we invite you to start your trip with a stop at Something’s Brewing and have a hot drink: coffee, tea, cider, or perhaps chocolate. Then, make a stop at the Chocolate Spoon for a cookie flavored perhaps with black pepper, ginger, cayenne, or chocolate. Amid the shopping for your week’s produce, meats, and dairy products, check out some of the delectable, dark-chocolate treats prepared by Brazilian Bon-Bon. And, of course, don’t forget that Battenkill Valley Creamery at the back end of the market has chocolate milk among its many products.

These offerings of chocolate at our fresh and local market tap into a rich and amazing cultural past. My colleague at Empire State College, Dr. Dana Gliserman-Kopans, offers a few insights, gleaned from her studies of this sweet, soothing ingredient:

Monastic memories: Chocolate consumption has origins in ancient Mexico, and was primarily a substance comprised of cocoa, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla consumed in liquid form. It was diluted with hot water, milk and sometimes wine. It was taken warm. Often as it migrated from Mexico to Spain in the early 17th century, it became a beverage that fasting monks could use as a nutritional substitute for food.

Courtly cups: In Spain, the king was regarded as “the most Catholic majesty.” That position, reports Gliserman-Kopans, allowed chocolate to gain favor in courts and ultimately made drinking chocolate a stylish endeavor and a symbol of status. The practice spread across Europe after Anna of Austria, who had grown up in Spain, married Louis XIII of France, and brought her favorite beverage with her.

Bordello beverage: Chocolate generally was a late-morning drink, associated with luxury, languor, and love. It often was served in bordellos, and gained a following for reputed aphrodisiac qualities.

Children’s cocoa: All of these adult connotations of chocolate changed around the turn of the 19th century when technological processes for producing chocolate changed, creating powdered cocoa. This lightened the beverage and over time made it accessible to children who were generally discouraged from taking in other morning beverages as coffee and tea, and of course evening spirits.

As of the early 21st century, hot cocoa, in Gliserman-Kopans view, is most popularly enjoyed by children although chocolate is appreciated by virtually everyone, regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity or social status. The chocolate at the Saratoga Farmers’ Market embraces that past and present. As you consume it, embrace its past and enjoy its varied forms that in which we can partake in the present.

 

Recipe: The following link offers a new twist on the late afternoon pick-up, replacing hot chocolate, tea, or coffee with brewed cacao. It suggests preparing the beverage with milk or water, adding a sweetener such as honey, and adding the ground cacao beans to your compost, enriching our soil.

http://www.foodandnutrition.org/Stone-Soup/February-2017/Brewed-Cacao-Your-New-Afternoon-Pick-Me-Up/

 

 

 

Loving Your Chocolate … Even More

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By Himanee Gupta-Carlson

Chocolate brigadeiros from Bon Bon Brazil
Chocolate brigadeiros from Bon Bon Brazil

What defines a chocoholic? Well, maybe me. I can eat chocolate every day, or drink it. I love it as a sweet, topped with fruit, and even sometimes shaved finely over a kale and walnut salad or stirred into a savory dish like chili. I have been known to sneak a couple squares of a chocolate bar into my breakfast. And, as Valentine’s Day advances, I find that the lengthening but still cold and damp days of February increase my longing for the sweet warmth of that substance even more. As a result, I can’t help but feel heartened when I read reports that indulgences in chocolate are actually good for you.

At the same time, I realize that something as sweet, as caloric, and as sugary as chocolate can’t exactly replace whole foods. So, I wonder, what is the proper way to make chocolate a part of a balanced diet? When must one put the brakes on chocolate and say, “enough”?

My Empire State College colleague, Dr. Kim Stote, a professor of health services, has some answers to my questions. For starters, she does affirm that chocolate can be good for you. She notes that its origin likes in a tree-grown fruit – the cacao pod – whose seeds (cacao beans) are then dried and roasted.

Like many researchers, however, Stote suggests that not all chocolate is created equally. She draws a distinction between dark chocolate and milk chocolate, the latter of which contains significantly less chocolate liquor (which is the result of the processing of cacao beans from which the natural product of chocolate is derived). Milk chocolate also has a slightly higher number of calories, a higher level of cholesterol, and lesser amounts of dietary fiber, caffeine, and theobromine, a compound sometimes used in the treatment of high blood pressure.

Chocolate cheesecakes from Argyle Cheese Farmer
Chocolate cheesecakes from Argyle Cheese Farmer

Stote cites a number of studies that have found chocolate – in small quantities, again – to be useful in reducing high blood pressure, staving off heart disease, and, if kept to 90 to 100 calories a day, in supporting weight management. She further notes that chocolate has been found to help suppress appetite and to offer temporary elevations of mood.

But she also advises that the healthful intake of chocolate is all about moderation. To improve your health, manage your weight, and perhaps maintain good spirits, the best level of chocolate consumption is 1-2 ounces of dark chocolate daily, or 1 tablespoon of cocoa.

So for chocoholics, what might that mean?

A cup of hot cocoa for breakfast? A couple squares of dark chocolate before retiring for the night? Chocolate shavings over well, whatever you wish. And perhaps this recipe from The Splendid Table, shared by another one of my Empire State College colleagues, Dr. Dana Gliserman-Kopans:

 

The Duke’s Hot Chocolate

from The Splendid Table
5 minutes prep time; 5 minutes stove time.
Serves 4 to 6.

Hot chocolate holds on the stove for an hour or longer, and can be stored in the refrigerator for 2 days.

Ingredients

* 1-1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
* 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (or the seeds scraped from the inside of a whole vanilla bean)
* Generous pinch of salt
* 1/8 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper (optional)
* 1/2 cup sugar, or to taste
* Fine-grated zest of a large orange
* 3 cups water, or half-water, half-milk, or half-water, half-cream
* 10.5 to 12 ounces bittersweet chocolate (Lindt Excellence 70%, Valrhona 71%, Scharffen Berger 70%, Guittard L’Harmonie 72%, or Ghiradelli 70% Extra Bittersweet, in our order of preference), broken up

Instructions

1. In a 3-quart saucepan combine all ingredients except the chocolate. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 2 minutes.

2. Pull the pan off the heat, let it sit a few minutes, then whisk in the chocolate until smooth. Taste the chocolate for sweetness and enough allspice. Serve hot.

 

Salads Year Round | Did You Know…

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By Himanee Gupta-Carlson

Did you know that you can grow greens for salads year round? Without a greenhouse. Without grow lights. Without a heating mat.

Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening book coverPeter Burke has come up with an ingenious idea for year round indoor salad gardening, which he shared in a workshop at last year’s Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY)’s annual Winter Conference and details in his book Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening. The idea is simple: you round up a bunch of small containers (Burke proposes the aluminum bread tins that you might have received gifts of fruitcake and zucchini breads in), a few growing implements, and a ton of seeds. You soak the seeds overnight. You also will want to soak newspapers or other acid free papers in water, and in a separate bucket some standard germination soil mix in water.

From there, you place a ½ teaspoon of sea kelp and 1 tablespoon of compost in your container and mix them together. Spoon your soil mix on top, level it so that it lies about ¼ of an inch from the top and drain the water from your seeds. Then, spread the moistened seeds over the soil so that they are touching one another but not overlapping. Cover the seeds with your water soaked newspapers and place them in a warm, dark place. Forget that the containers exist for four days.

On the fifth day, retrieve your containers, remove the covers and water the containers. Keep these containers in a well-lit windowsill, watering them with about two to four tablespoons daily.

Burke says that generally the green shoots will be ready to be clipped with scissors and eaten within three to four days of being in your windowsill. He advocates planting five small containers at a time, each one with a different seed, and to get into a routine of doing this planting on a daily basis. In this way, he says, you have the potential to have salads made from your own freshly harvested greens every day. The salads can include almost anything, but he has a fondness for pea shoots, radish and kohlrabi sprouts, kale and small lettuce greens.

So does it work?

I went home from the NOFA-NY conference with a container of pea seeds that I’d planted, courtesy of Burke’s workshop. The peas did sprout, and I did have greens – greens that I combined with farmers market purchased salad greens, sliced winter radishes, carrots and turnips, and occasionally pumpkin and squash seeds. In this way, my little garden lasted nearly three weeks. Inspired, I tried doing my own planting of five more containers. I have to admit that I didn’t follow directions as well as I could and had marginal success. But the idea intrigues me, and I hope to give it another, more focused try this winter.

Details on the book: Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening, Peter Burke, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.

A Winter’s Salute to Kale

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By Himanee Gupta-Carlson

Admittedly, kale jokes abound. But that’s only because this green leafy vegetable – once primarily the domain of fancy plate garnishes – has evolved into a farmers’ market staple year round.

Shannon Cowan describes kale in a blog piece for Earth Easy (a website devoted to sustainable living) as the “workhorse of your winter garden” and urges year-round gardeners to keep the crop going for its beauty, its flavor, and nutritional content.

While I would like to say that I follow Cowan’s advice, I have to admit that my own garden’s kale usually loses at least its beauty and flavor by late December. After repeated hard frosts, snowstorms, and freezing rains followed by thaws, my own kale starts to look rather limp and spindly. It retains a semblance of its freshest in-season flavor, but is not, quite frankly, what it was in October. I am happy at this point to acquire my weekly stash of kale from the produce vendors at the Saratoga Farmers’ Market. This experience also gives me the chance of sampling many different varieties of kale, ranging from curly to winterbor, to purple to red.

A couple of weeks ago, I spotted a particularly striking bunch of kale. The leaves were grayish green but flecked admirably with thin veins of purple. The kale, at the Gomez Veggie Ville stall at the market, is known as “coral”. The Gomez family started the crop in early fall for its late fall and early winter markets. It is now keeping the plants growing and harvesting fresh from their greenhouses in the most brutal months of January.

Coral was crisp, thick, and tasty – full of the kind of fresh succulence that my taste buds seemed to be craving after the holiday months of rich sauces, big meats, and bottles of wine. The stems were stock and thick, and might serve as a potential addition to a meat stock or vegetable broth down the line. The leaves, however, were kale through and through, though they did seem heartier than the spring, summer, and fall selections. I found that they took a little more time to cook, maybe three or four minutes more.

Searches of the Internet did not give me a seed variety for “coral kale.” Instead, I found that it was listed as an ornamental and not generally eaten. This kale, however, tasted quite lovely. Try using my classic preparation: thinly sliced garlic sautéed in oil, the kale washed in cold water and steamed for about five minutes before being tossed into the garlic and oil with a sprinkling of black pepper on top.

 

 

What the Full Moon in January Means for Maple Syrup

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By Himanee Gupta-Carlson
Maple Syrup 2 by Pattie GarrettThursday, Jan, 12 is the first full moon for 2017. At the Slate Valley Farm, Pat Imbimbo and his daughter Gina will mark the moment by beginning to tap their maple trees for the sap that will produce their syrup for this year.

The logic of when to tap and for how long is based somewhat on science and somewhat on knowledge gained through experience. Look up “when to tap maple trees” on the Internet and you’ll quickly discover that:

• Sap flows when daytime temperatures are above freezing, or 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and night temperatures are below freezing.

• The fluctuation in day and night temperatures creates a pressure in a tree that encourages sap to flow.

• The best sap for making syrup usually comes early in the sap-flowing season.

Typically, maple sap flows between mid-February and mid-March. But in a world ruled by frequent year-to-year shifts in the weather cycle, the flow might start much earlier. It might run quite a bit later.

Slate Valley Maple syrup Evaporator
Slate Valley Maple syrup Evaporator

Tapping is rooted to some extent in Native American traditions, with some believing that the art of syrup making was one that tribal members taught European settlers in the initial years of contact. According to the University of Vermont at Montpelier’s History of Maple website, written accounts of tapping trees for sap date back to 1557. The practice of boiling sap to reduce the water content necessary to make blocks of maple sugar was in full force by the 1700s, and was shared by the indigenous Americans and colonial settlers alike. Syrup making came into being around the Civil War.

Slate Valley, which is featured in the Jan. 12-18 edition of Saratoga Today, aims to make about 600 gallons of syrup this year. This means gathering a lot of sap as it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup. Timing is critical in this respect because once the trees start blooming the sap ceases to flow.

Gina, of Slate Valley, notes that her father has long followed the tradition of putting the taps in the trees on the first full moon in 2017. “We’ve always followed that tradition,” she says. “I wait for him to tell me it’s time, and I put the taps on the trees.”

With that in mind, Slate Valley and other maple syrup makers are prepared for the magic moment when the temperatures hit the “sweet spot” of being above freezing in the daytime and below freezing at night. That’s when the taps are opened to collect the sap as it begins its annual flow.

Friend-ing the Saratoga Farmers’ Market

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By Himanee Gupta-Carlson

food-fact-4As one of the organizers of the Friends of the Saratoga Market volunteer group, I’d like to thank the regular shoppers, first-time visitors, community organizations, farmers and other vendors, and most especially the market administrator for making 2016 such a rousing success for the Saratoga Farmers’ Market. I’d also like to invite you in 2017 to become a friend of the market and join our ranks.

First off, kudos to market administrator Julia Howard who carried out a vision for helping to make our market a force for building community in Saratoga and beyond. In 2016, Howard organized an Easter extravaganza, a spring festival of workshops, the first ever summer Power of Produce Club for children in Saratoga, a series of do-it-yourself workshops in the summer Wednesday market, a taste of the market festival, a holiday bazaar, and much more. Thanks to her efforts, the Saratoga Farmers’ Market enters 2017 energized and eager for new growth.

Now, who are the Friends of the Market and what do we do? And, why do we want you to join us?

We established ourselves informally in 2011, after a longtime market shopper suggested that the market could use a citizens based support group to serve as a bridge between shoppers, vendors, and the community. Our membership remains small but solid. Our roles are easy to learn, and focus on relationship building that is in line with our mission to help the market continue to thrive.

At about this time last year, market administrator Howard threw us a challenge. The challenge was to help her make the market more of an outlet for creating a sense of community. This challenge expanded our existing roles considerably. We currently:

  • – Manage a Veggie Valet service during the Saturday summer market and a Friends’ table during the winter market. Here, shoppers can leave bags, coats, strollers and anything else during the winter market.
  • – Provide relief to vendors by handling transactions at their stalls so they can take restroom breaks, grab a bite to eat, and/or shop for their own weekly supplies of produce, meats, and dairy items at the market.
  • – Write weekly Saratoga Today articles and provide recipes on seasonal foods, the vendors at our market, and other market events.
  • – Help capture the energy of the market through photographs.
  • – Operate a fledgling compost drop station and recycling effort.
  • – Coordinate a food donation program in which market vendors and generous shoppers are able to donate fresh and local produce and other items to the Franklin Community Center food pantry.
  • – Assist market staff with token transactions, general questions and answers, and in a few cases, we have been asked to help clean up spilt milk.

food-fact-2As our roles expand, the need for more help has intensified. We invite you to join us and share your talents. We welcome those who would like to contribute to the weekly Friends’ corner in the newsletter as well write articles for Saratoga Today. We also can use help in getting the word out on our recycling and composting efforts, and with our booth at the weekly market. We also are always looking for new ideas to support the market.

To contact us: e-mail friends@saratogafarmersmarket.org with a statement expressing your interest.

Happy New Year from the Friends of the Market.

Saratoga Farmers' Market