Bachlelorette's Liqueur

Christopher is out of town, and in addition to having a "lost weekend" with my sister Mary and going out for mixed drinks with my ladyfriends, I am taking advantage of having the house to myself by engaging in a number of complicated, messy kitchen projects (for instance, learning to make mayonnaise).

My parents, who are also out of town (separately), dropped off a big basket of peaches just before they hit the road for two weeks. Their peach tree has started producing like crazy in the past couple of years, and my world is a better place because of it.

The confluence of these two events has led me to experiment with peach preservation. However it is hot as holy hell here right now, as it is pretty much everywhere else in the United States, and I cannot bring myself to endure canning. The other day I heard someone say, "Satan called, he wants his weather back." That pretty much sums up how it's been feeling here, and I am not about to fire up the stove and stand over steaming pots in the middle of the worst heat wave anyone can remember.

So I turned to this book, which I raved about in more detail last year, for assistance.

I found a great heat-free recipe for "Officer's 'Jam' or Bachelor's Liqueur" which is basically what is known in the South as Brandied Peaches, but without the canning.

Here it is. Since I'm bachin' it this week, I changed the name.

Bachelorette's Liqueur, or Brandied Peaches Sans Heat

Ingredients:

Peaches

Good Brandy

Sugar (roughly the same quantity as the fruit or less)

1. Cut fruit into pieces and remove pits. Layer it into a stoneware pot or a crock with a lid. After each layer, add sugar (I used far less sugar than fruit). Do not stir.
2. After all the layers are in the crock, pour in enough brandy to submerge everything. I topped this off with a plate that fit down inside the crock to prevent any air exposure for the fruit.
3. You can keep adding fruit as it ripens throughout the season, just keep topping with sugar and adding brandy. Again, do not stir.
4. Mrs. Defacqz of Switzerland who submitted the recipe to Terre Vivante says that the mixture should be allowed to sit for at least 6 months, and is really best after a year.

I'm letting it sit in my 2-gallon crock, alongside the apple cider vinegar in the next crock over.

I'm guessing it's going to be ridiculous over some vanilla ice cream. I'm not sure if I can wait six months.

Homegrown Foods in the Wintertime

Canned foods and bottled meads and ciders ready for action...

The path from gardening to food preservation is a short and well-traveled one. In the ongoing quest to eat from our garden year-round, I've gone further and further down that path over the past few years. It's been a sweaty journey (standing over steaming pots in August) but a satisfying one.

I loved this recent story on NPR about the home canning renaissance - it made me feel a little less odd, or at least not alone in my oddity, as I perused my shelves and cabinets full of homegrown items.

Christopher finally had to build more shelves for food storage this year, as my jars of canned goods had begun to creep across the floor and down the hallway and our clothes were being squeezed out of the closet by winter squash and sweet potatoes.

We have finally reached the point this year where we really can eat homegrown foods every day in the winter, and where a large part of our winter diet comes from foods we preserved from the garden.

A few heroic vegetables like winter squash, sweet potatoes, garlic, dry beans, and potatoes make it easy - no canning, freezing, fermenting, or packing in oil required.

Greek Sweet Red squash

Cured sweet potatoes in storage.

Of course there are also a few unbelievably hardy vegetables like this chard harvested in mid-January, thanks to floating row cover, make a nice fresh addition to all of the roots and relishes too.

One day we'll get in the rhythm of hoophouse greens in the winter -- all of our lettuces and winter greens growing under cover in the hoophouse now are too tiny to harvest, since we planted them a bit too late.

Bruchetta with local bread (made with NC-grown wheat!) topped with a bunch of preserved spreads -- frozen mole paste and frozen pesto, and canned sweet pepper hash andgreen tomato marmalade.

There is something magical about eating those precious preserved foods in the wintertime - it seems like such a special treat.

I always feel like I'm opening a little gift from myself when I pop open a jar of tomatoes or peppers or dilly beans.

Cherry tomatoes, basil, and pearl onions preserved in salt and oil (recipe and details here) - I sauteed them in olive oil and added fresh greens, garlic, and garbanzos for a hearty winter stew.

Sweet peppers roasted and packed in oil.

Homegrown dry black beans with garlic and preserved sweet peppers, pesto from last summer's basil, and homegrown German Butterball potato "bruchettas" with various homegrown/homemade toppings, including creamy sweet potatoes.

Dilly beans, pickled green cherry tomatoes, and various other preserved things.

And then there is the occasional special winter food gift - Chinese chestnuts from Ali in this case.

Book Review, Transatlantic Gift Economy, and Cherry Tomato Art Installation

One day sometime in the past year, I issued a plaintive call to friends across the intertubes for someone to lend me a book I had built up a powerful urge to peruse: Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante. My Internet Friend Annie Levy* (who is always referred to like so by her full title) promptly responded by GIVING me a copy! A woman who I have never met, who lives far across the ocean in Wales sent me a present in the mail! A really good present.

As soon as the book arrived I promptly read it from cover to cover and then commenced to re-reading, savoring, and luxuriating in each of its 197 pages. With prefaces by no less luminaries than Eliot Coleman and Deborah Madison, this dense little treasure of a book is a new favorite kitchen reference in our house.

The recipes and descriptions of techniques are simple, practical, and clearly held dear by the gardeners and farmers who offer them. Each entry includes the contributor's name and place of residence, and sometimes also information about growing, harvesting, or wildcrafting the ingredients and/or using the finished product. Over 100 people contributed to the book, and the brief personal notes that accompany their contributions make reading the book feel like sitting around a table sharing stories and techniques with other gardeners and cooks.

Some of my favorite entries are the simplest:

Plums, Variation 2.

Plums
Small crate

A pane of glass

Place whole plums in a small, well-ventilated crate, covered with a pane of glass. Keep the crate in the sun (ideally against a wall facing south).

~Annie Dijoud, St Joseph-de-Rivi

ère

The book begins with a section on root cellaring and other methods of in-ground preservation, including pits, trenches, and packing apples in elderflowers to impart a pineapple flavor. That is the sort of tidbit that I love. It continues on with chapters on drying; lactic fermentation; and preserving in oil, vinegar, salt, sugar, and alcohol. All of these methods are ancient, pre-electric food traditions that retain flavor and nutrients far better than modern methods. The flavors, textures, and look of these preserved foods remind me of shopping in open air markets in little towns in the South of France: encountering simple, delicious, and beautiful foods handcrafted with old-world grace.

I pulled this lovely little book down today when I was considering the abundance of cherry tomatoes coming out of the garden, and envisioning how nice they would look packed in a jar. But how to preserve their beauty and sweetness without compromising their vitamin-packed nutritional punch?

I looked up "cherry tomatoes" in the index of PFWFC and discovered this recipe:

Cherry Tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes

Small onions or shallots

Cider vinegar or lemon juice ( 1-2 Tbs per 16-oz jar)

Fresh basil, tarragon, oregano, etc. (to taste)

Coarse salt

Olive oil

Canning jars and lids

"You must start with cherry tomatoes that are very firm and ripe. ...Wash and dry the tomatoes. Peel...the onions or shallots.

Prepare scalded or serilized 16-ounce jars. Fill them with tomatoes, alternating with a few onions and herbs. When the jars are filled to about one and half inches from the rim, sprinkel with a pinch of coarse salt. Add one or two tablespoons of cider vinegar or lemon juice, and cover with olive oil.

Close the jars with a very clean lid, and store them in a rather cool place (10 to 15 C/50-59 F). The tomatoes will be ready to eat in two to three months and will keep for up to a year."

~Anne Duran, St. Front

Jars ready for capping and storing: Pearly Pinks packed in oil with basil and mixed cherry tomatoes packed in oil with pearl onions and basil.

One of the great things about simple, heat-free preservation methods such as this one is that you can quickly process small batches without lots of effort -- I packed two 16 ounce jars and an 8 ounce jar this evening and I'll continue packing more as the tomato season continues.

The jars of little jewel-tone tomatoes are as lovely as I had hoped. They feel like a little art installation on the top shelf of my fridge.

Thank you, Annie Levy, for your generosity. And thank you to the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante.

*I met My Internet Friend Annie Levy via the Wild Fermentation facebook group. A wonderful resource for fermentation lovers, and it turns out, a place to encounter lovely, facinating, and generous people.

Homesteading Summer Camp

Extracting honey

With our three interns and various visitors coming and going all through the summer, things have been very lively at the Red Wing for the past few months. "The 'terns," as they are affectionately known, are incredibly hard workers, smart as whips, and excited about all things garden- and homestead- related.

Because we don't want to exploit the 'terns and their youthful energy, we have tried to break up the hard work with fun and educational activities such as the Farm Tour, field trips, and kitchen projects.

Also, we've been hosting long- and short- term visitors, various friends and family who come to stay for days or weeks and sometimes help out with farm work or participate in Big Projects while they're here. Andriana is here from Manhattan, experiencing composting and chicken butchering for the first time, among other things. Fer was a "day camper" for two weeks while she was visiting from Mexico City, pulling weeds, spreading mulch, and generally jumping right into the fray.

Sometimes it feels like we are running a summer camp --the kind of summer camp I'd like to attend: one where the activities are shoveling manure, chopping vegetables, squishing bugs, extracting honey, discussing heirloom tomato varieties, saving seeds, identifying insects, and fermenting things.

Along those lines, we spent a day extracting honey and making mead with the 'terns and various visitors a few weeks ago. It was one of the stickiest and most delicious ways to spend a day you can possibly imagine. Here are a few shots of the process; you can view more photographs here: honey extraction and here: meadmaking.

Yesterday the campers (aka interns) convened in the kitchen and we made a big crock of sauerkraut and jarred up some brine-pickled (fermented) garlic scapes after a brief lesson on fermentation.

We followed up the festival of fermentation with a garlic tasting, sampling the ten heirloom varieties that we grew this year, cleansing our palates between rounds of baked garlic with a variety of homemade jams, baked brie, and sliced tomatoes from the garden.

Friends and family joined us to gorge on garlic and offer comments on the varieties to help us decide what to grow next year.

I was struck by how our collective work produced this incredibly delicious, nutritious, and beautiful food. Gathered around the table were people who had helped with all of the different pieces of the work of growing food: Shannon and Sharon helped dig and prepare beds, Ali and Nicole and Dau harvested and processed hundreds of heads of garlic this summer, Christopher and I chose varieties, saved seed garlic, and planted and mulched and cared for the plants. And we all savored the fruits of our labor together. It was lovely.

Best summer camp ever.

Winter Seed Catalog Lesson #1: Tepary Beans

My annual winter seed catalog immersion has officially begun, and as usual it is promising to be a rich educational experience.   Every winter as I read and re-read the dozens of seed catalogues that come in the mail, I learn a ton about about seed histories, vegetable diversity, and food traditions.  

If you are a beginning gardener, I recommend getting on the mailing lists of good seed companies, particularly those selling open-pollenated and heirloom varieties.  Good seed catalogues are fabulous sources of gardening information, food lore, and growing tips. 

So yesterday I was cozied up on the couch reading the Seeds of Change catalog (no better way to spend a very cold Sunday, in my opinion). When I got to the bean section, I came across a whole species I had never heard of, which rates as a discovery significant enough to blog about.  

At left: A few heirloom bean varieties from the Saving Our Seeds collection.

I love heirloom beans, and have grown several beautiful and delicious dry bean varieties over the years and fantasized about growing a whole lot more.  

I have about 35 particular bean varieties on my lifetime bean-growing wishlist.  And the list keeps growing. 

Jacob's Cattle. Hutterite Soup. Black Valentine. Indian Woman Yellow.  Amish Gnuttle. Even the names are magical to me.  I've spent hours poring over bean listings in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogue and reading about the histories of the hundreds (thousands?) of bean varieties that exist.  What I am saying is that I am a major heirloom bean dork (See previous posts on Local Protein and Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans for more evidence of this...)  

So imagine my surprise when I discovered Tepary Beans (the aformentioned whole new species) a type of bean more ancient and storied than any of the heirlooms I've ever known.  Three varieties of Tepary Beans were listed in a sidebar in the Seeds of Change catalog, along with the botanical name of the species: Phaeseolus acutifolius.  This was enough to send me down the google rabbit hole in search of more information about the mysterious Tepary. 

Here's what I found: Tepary Beans are pre-Colombian heirlooms with flavors and growing habits distinct from other beans.  They were cultivated throughout dry areas of what is now the Southwestern US, Mexico, and Central America, selected from native beans and grown for thousands of years by ancient peoples.  

I found much more in a Seeds of Change newsletter article by Jay Bost:

"While most beans that we eat belong to the species Phaeseolus vulgaris and are native to South America, tepary beans belong to an entirely different species, Phaeseolus acutifolius, which grows wild in the Sonoran Desert, with local populations currently documented on Isla Tiburon in the Sea of Cortez and in the Santa Maria mountains of Arizona (Nabhan 1985). As long ago as 8,000 years ago, the native peoples of the Sonoran Desert began to domesticate wild tepary beans, which, until quite recently, were eaten by some in Mexico, along with Phaeseolus filiformis, another wild desert bean." 

Bost details the history of Tepary Beans, and the reasons that they are apparently experiencing something of a revival.. He says that Teparies "are considered by many to be the most drought-tolerant annual legume in the world" and "are capable of producing a harvest of beans with a single rain."  We've been in a severe drought for the last two years here in Western North Carolina, so a bean that can grow without irrigation is an exciting discovery indeed.

Bost's article also details the nutritional appeal of Teparies:

"Part of the tepary bean's appeal, in addition to its drought tolerance, is its superior nutritional content. It has a higher protein content (23–30%) than common beans such as pinto, kidney, and navy, as well as higher levels of oil, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, and potassium."

Bost's overview is great - you can read the whole article here.

  

So I've added Sonoran Gold Tepary Beans (pictured above, courtesy of Seeds of Change) to my bean wishlist.  It's a dry soup bean developed by the Papago people, and contains more than 30% crude protein.  

We'll plant some in the spring and see how they taste.    Stay tuned for further adventures in seed catalogue reading.  

Stackcake and Bear Scat: Giving Thanks

Wednesday morning we harvested collards, mustard greens, celery, parsley, and lettuces from the garden (above), packed up some of our winter squash and pumpkins, and headed for my parents' home about an hour away for Thanksgiving.


My mom and dad live on 50 acres of mostly wooded land in a rural community* near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They bought their land 30 years ago, when land in the remote areas of western North Carolina was cheap and mostly wild.

My parents built their house --the house I grew up in--in 1979 and they live there still. They have been dedicated to preserving and caring for the land for the past 30 years. Over the course of my lifetime, I've seen the hardwood forest around my parents' home slowly regenerating as time passes and the earth heals itself from the injuries of logging and clearing sustained before our time. It has been a huge part of my education to see the plants and trees, animals and birds in the woods around my parents' house thrive and reproduce, creating and strengthening living systems.

The land around my parents' house is just as much home to my sister and me as the house itself -- we spent much of our childhoods outside in the woods, creek, and pasture land, and we know the land as intimately as if were another member of our family. We grew up learning the names of the trees and plants, animals, birds, and insects that shared our home. All of those living things still feel like they are part of my extended family -- all our relations as some native peoples would say.

Calling in the Ancestors

The day before Thanksgiving was my mom's birthday, and I had resolved to try my first recipe from my favorite new cookbook/history book (see my earlier post for details).

I wanted to bake a traditional Southern Appalachian stackcake with apples, but because my mom loves cranberries and because I already had some for Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, I wanted to incorporate cranberries, too.

So here(above) is my modified, nontraditional stackcake. I started with a recipe for Apple Stack Cake from the book I mentioned above, Joseph Dabney's Smokehouse Ham, Spoonbread, and Scuppernong Wine.

Here's some background on stackcake from Dabney:

"This is probably the most 'mountain' of cakes. . . .One story goes that since fancy 'in fare' wedding cakes were beyond the reach of many...mountain families, neighbor wives would bring in cake layers to donate to the bride's family. Author Elizabeth Dunn confirmed the tradition, declaring a bride's popularity was often measured by the number of layers in her cake! As the layers arrived, the bride's family would spread the apple filling between each."

Since Dabney notes that "while plain applesauce can be used in such cakes, dried apples offer a much stronger flavor and therefore were the choice of most mountain cooks," I decided to use some of the apples that Alan gleaned and dried earlier this summer. I made a slow-cooked apple sauce from the dried apples with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves and then followed this recipe for the cake:

Haywood County Stack Cake

• 4 cups flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. soda
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 3/4 cup shortning (I used butter)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup sorghum molasses (I used regular molasses)
• 1 cup milk
• 3 eggs
• 3 cups applesauce
  

Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Cream the shortning [butter] and add sugar, a little at a time, blending well. Add sorghum [or other molasses] and mix thoroughly. Add milk and eggs, one at a time, beating well until smooth. Pour 1/3 inch deep in greased 9-inch pans and bake until golden brown. when cool, stack the layers (around six) and use the applesauce between them.

According to Dabney, "This 1800s recipe was used for many years by Mrs. Dolphus Kerley of Waynesville, North Carolina, who died in January 1948, just shy of age ninety. The recipe actually came from her mother, Mrs. Drury Bigham, of the Allens Creek section of Haywood County, North Carolina."

I modified the recipe in a couple of ways. First, I used butter instead of shortening, which worked just fine. I substituted sugarcane molasses for the sorghum just because I didn't have any sorghum, but I fully intend to try it again with sorghum for a more traditional taste. Also, I decided to make fewer thicker layers -- a major departure from tradition -- and used a bundt pan for the top layer. I lined the bottom of the bundt pan (which became the top of the cake) with fresh apples, about 1/2 cup of my ginger cranberry sauce, and a little (less than a tablespooon of) raw sugar.

Also, the recipe doesn't give an oven temperature or time - I baked it at 350 degrees and it took about 50 minutes before a knife came out clean. If you made thinner layers as the original recipe suggests, I can't imagine you would want to bake it for more than 30 minutes.

Here's how the cake turned out (above). It was unbelievably, ridiculously delicious. It had a very old-fashioned molasses-ey spice cake flavor, and was moist and luscious with the apple and cranberry sauces seeping into the cake adding deep, tart fruity flavor to the sweetness of the cake. Holy smoke, it was good.

I really loved the taste, and of course I loved the feeling of holding a thread spinning back through the generations of food tradition: baking a cake in the same tradition nurtured and passed along by other women in these very mountains years ago. And I loved altering the tradition to suit the particular moment -- modifying ingredients, personalizing the recipe - stirring individual creativity into the rich blend of food heritage as have so many people who came before.

Cooking from an old recipe like this makes me feel connected to my ancestors - not my genetic ancestors necessarily, but all of the people who came before me.

Visiting the Wild Relations

Eventually, after a couple of days centered around the kitchen, featuring much enjoyment of the stackcake as well as baked winter squash from our garden, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, and a huge pot of slow-cooked collards from the photo at the top of this post, we needed to get out of the house and move our bodies.

We all went for a long walk in the woods the day after Thanksgiving, and came across two exciting things. First, we found a gorgeous hornets' nest. It seems to have been made by bald-faced hornets. It was incredibly light, with paper-thin walls made up of beautiful, overlapping swirls of grey and white. The nest was vacant and in pieces, which we picked up and carried home. Also we came across some fairly fresh bear scat full of persimmon seeds. Knowing that at some point in the recent past a black bear has passed through the very spot where I'm standing still sends a thrill through me. Thinking about the bear picking up persimmons off the ground, or climbing high up a persimmon tree to get to the sweet and sticky fruit feels to me like a little spell of connection with all of the wild animals in the woods. The forest was full of all kinds of activity -- but the hornets nest and the bear scat were the highlights -- little reminders of the presence of some of our wilder relations.

Large Enthusiastic Thank-yous

So I'm giving thanks for a few days spent with family and friends including a ritual of connection with the ancestors (baking stackcake) and moments of connection with all of our plant and animal relations (hornets, bears, trees, birds, woodland plants). I spent some time the day after Thanksgiving reading Ted Williams' The Thanksgiving Address, an interpretation of traditional Iroquois prayers of thanks-giving. The Thanksgiving Address is something that my dear friend Tyson shared with me from Williams' wonderful book, Big Medicine from Six Nations (pictured at left).

In the spirit of The Thanksgiving Address, I'll borrow the refrain from Ted Williams' version to offer my appreciation to the universe for the last few days:

Three times three times three large enthusiastic thank yous!

In gratitude...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*By "community" I mean a place too small to be called a town...

Winter Reading: From Scuppernongs to Switchel

When it gets cold outside, there's nothing I like more than curling up somewhere with a hot beverage, a cat, and a book. I come from a long line of bookworms, librarians, word-lovers, readers, writers, and other nerd-types. Book-loving is in my blood.

If the book contains recipes, food history, and stories about food, all the better as far as I am concerned. One of my all-time favorites is 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by a hero of mine, seed saver and historian William Woys Weaver.

So I can't tell you how excited I was to be introduced last night to this book: Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney. We were having dinner with our good friends Bud and MF. After a highly satisfying meal of stuffed butternut squash, cream of broccoli soup made from broccoli from their garden, and a creamy custard for dessert, we retired to the living room to talk about James Bond movies (!), Noam Chomsky, and traditional mountain "stack cakes." This last topic lead to MF whipping out the aforementioned book.

We found several very fine stack cake recipes within, but that was just the beginning. This book is a treasure trove of Southern Appalachian food lore, food histories, food traditions, and recipes. It's one part oral history, one part cookbook, and one part hymn to the people and traditions of the Southern Appalachians. It is meticulously researched and written with the reverence and relish of a person who has cultivated a long-lasting and deep love of food and food traditions.

I quickly became completely absorbed -- a whole chapter on sweet potatoes, another on persimmons, and a veritable profusion of information about old-time food-preserving techniques. Very old Cherokee recipes, wild foods traditions, and chapters on moonshine, wine, and beer. Recipes calling for everything from "several squirrels" to "Tennessee truffles," otherwise known as ramps. A section on "The Art of Growing" in the southern mountains. And lots of amazing old photographs of places all around where I grew up and where I live now. This is so far up my alley it's out the other side.

In the 12 or so hours since MF kindly lent me her copy (seeing the pain it would cause me if she didn't), I have spent most of my waking hours falling in love with this book. I stayed up late reading Christopher snippets about the history of wild grapes in North Carolina, and opened it up first thing this morning to read about possum hunting.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I try out recipes, I will post some of them, and I'll write more about Dabney's exhaustive survey of mountain food culture as I read and re-read it, I am sure.

On a related note (food traditions, books I love, recommended reading for cold days and nights), I was re-united last night with my copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I had apparently lent it out to MF long ago and forgotten. Christopher has had to hear me lament its absence many times in recent months, only to discover that it was safe and sound in West Asheville all along. I was very excited when MF whipped out my copy last night.

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is only 187 pages from cover to cover, but it is highly concentrated. Like a thick mole or miso paste, it provides more flavor, substance, and hours of enjoyment than you might imagine. Wild Fermentation is chock full of recipes, food histories, stories from the modern food underground, philosophy, politics, and food lore from many traditions.

Wild Fermentation is the book that I used as a guide when I first began making krauts and brine pickles, ginger brews, kombucha, and other fermented foods. It is the single indispensable resource for people embarking on fermentation adventures, in my opinion, and an invaluable cache of fabulous food facts and folk traditions.

So there are two recommendations for winter reading. Though I am a big fan of libraries, these are books that I think it is worth owning. My copy of Wild Fermentation is well-worn already -- it has the creases and stains to prove that it's a book I pull off the shelf and use in the kitchen all the time. I am going to purchase Smokehouse post haste, and have a feeling it will assume a similarly revered and beloved status in my kitchen.

Happy winter, happy eating, and happy reading!

~~~~

A note on the title of this post: Scuppernongs and Muscadines are wild grapes that grew rampantly in North Carolina before and at the time of European settlement. According to Joseph Dabney, they were still to be found in abundance growing wild in these parts as recently as the 1940s, and were used for wine-making, desserts, and an amazing-sounding ferment made from wild grapes and molasses, apparently based on a Cherokee tradition. Switchel is a delicious home-made soft drink with molasses and ginger, a fine recipe for which can be found in Wild Fermentation.

Limbertwig

Yesterday at the farmers market, I bought a Limbertwig apple from Barry for fifty cents. It was quite possibly the best apple I have ever eaten. Really. I feel confident in saying that those two quarters were the best fifty cents I've ever spent.

Barry, who first started planting apple trees 30 years ago, explained that this heirloom apple, one of several Limbertwig varieties, has been grown around here for a long time. It truly beat the heck out of Red Delicious.

I've spent lots of winter nights curled up with The Fruit, Berry, and Nut Inventory reading mouth-watering descriptions of heirloom fruit tree varieties, because I am really that much of a nerd. So I am always excited to try a new heirloom apple. This one took the cake.

If you live in Western NC, you can buy Limbertwigs and a bunch of other varieties at farmers markets around town. Now is the time! It's apple season in the mountains, and fifty cents will buy you a really outstanding taste experience.

Above: the remains of the Limbertwig