Fall festivals: five delicious ways to celebrate

by Laurel Miller on

There’s something really depressing about seeing the last of the tomatoes, corn, and stonefruit at the farmers market, the withering vines in my neighbor’s gardens. But fall is also an exciting time for produce geeks, what with all the peppers and squash, pomegranates and persimmons.

If you love yourself some good food and drink, here are five reasons to welcome fall. No matter where you live in the North America, at least one of these is guaranteed to be coming soon to a town near you.

1. Hit a harvest festival
From the hokey (corn mazes, hay rides) to the downright debaucherous (late-night live music and beer gardens, camping in orchards), harvest festivals are a blast, no matter what your age. A great harvest festival will include delicious food; local craft beer, cider, or wine; farm tours and seminars; a children’s area and special activities; live music, and, if you’re lucky, a beautiful, bucolic setting in which to experience it all. Some festivals run the span of a weekend, providing an opportunity to take in more of the educational offerings.

Below are some of my favorite festivals, all of which have an educational component to them. Should you find yourself in Northern California in early October, it’s worth a detour to attend the famous Hoes Down Harvest Festival (Oct.1-2) at Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley, near Davis. It’s one hell of a party (there’s also a top-notch children’s activity area, so little people will have fun, too); definitely plan on camping in the orchard and bring your swim suit; the farm is located beside Cache Creek.

Other great celebrations of fall: Vashon Harvest Farm Tour (Sept. 25), Vashon Island, WA; CUESA Harvest Festival (Oct. 22), Ferry Building Farmers Market, San Francisco, CA; Annual Harvest Festival, Sustainable Settings (mid-Sept.; date varies, but mark your calendars for next year!) Carbondale, CO.

September 22nd, from 7:30-9pm, the 16th Annual Harvest in the Square is being held in Union Square; online tickets are still available until tomorrow at noon for what is one of New York’s premier food and wine events. Some general admission tickets will be available at the event for a higher price.

[Photo credit: Flickr user zakVTA]2. Check out Crush
In North America, the wine grape harvest is held in September or October, depending upon weather patterns. In Napa Valley, “Crush” has just started, and with it, fall colors on the vines; barrel tastings; special winery tours, wine-and-cheese pairings, and up-close-and-personal views of the Crush itself. Even if you’re not an oenophile, it’s by far the most beautiful time to visit Napa and it’s neighboring wine region, Sonoma Country. For Napa wineries and event listings, click here. For California’s Central Coast wine region events, click here.

Check out wine harvest events in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Washington state’s Yakima and Walla Walla regions, and British Columbia’s Fraser and Okanogan Valleys (go to Wines of the Northwest for events calendar on all of the aforementioned); for New York’s Finger Lakes, Hudson Valley, and other regions go to Uncork New York!

3. Go apple picking
With apple-growing regions scattered all over North America–from Virginia and Pennsylvania to New York, Washington state, British Columbia, and California–there’s no shortage of opportunities to attend festivals or U-picks. This traditional fall pastime is a fun activity for kids and supports the local economy and foodshed. Put up apple butter, -sauce, or freeze a pie for Thanksgiving, but be sure to save enough for winter (all apples and pears are placed in cold storage once the growing season ends, so the fruit you buy later in the season won’t be freshly picked). Store in a cool, dry, dark place. P.S. Don’t forget to buy some cider doughnuts if they’re available.

Please note that due to unusual weather patterns (aka “global warming”) this past year, the harvest is delayed in many parts of the country, including Washington. Check with local farms before heading out.

4. Visit a cidery
If you prefer your apples fermented, there are some excellent craft cideries throughout North America. The tradition of craft cider distilling hails from Western Europe, but domestically, the hot spots are the Pacific Northwest (including British Columbia), parts of the Midwest, and the Northeast.

5. Feast at a farm dinner
For food lovers, few things beat dining outdoors in an orchard or pasture, surrounded by the people and ingredients that made your meal possible. Farm dinners are a growing national trend; they may be hosted independently by the farm (Washington’s Dog Mountain Farm, Colorado’s Zephyros Farm, and California’s Harley Farms Goat Dairy are my picks) or hosted by companies like Portland, Oregon’s Plate & Pitchfork and Boulder’s Meadow Lark Farm Dinners. Many farm dinners are fundraisers to help protect local agricultural easements or wetlands, but your participation also supports the farm and local foodshed.

Farm dinners are also held at wineries, distilleries, craft breweries, mariculture farms, and creameries; a tour should be included. The best part, however, is when the guests include everyone from the local cheesemaker, rancher, fisherman, or winemaker, to the potter who made the plates. It’s both humbling and gratifying to meet the people who work so hard to ensure local communities have a safe, sustainable food supply.

[Photo credits: grapes, Flickr user minnucci]

Video of the Day – Hong Kong Honey

by Stephen Greenwood on

Having spent six months in Hong Kong in 2009, I thought I knew the city fairly well at the end of my stay. I could navigate the night markets, had committed the sleek metro system to memory and even attended a few local weddings. But there was one facet of the city that I was completely oblivious to; Hong Kong’s beekeepers.

Hidden among the thousands of rooftops that comprise Hong Kong’s iconic cityscape, there are nearly a dozen beehives that are being cared for by a community of beekeepers, artists & designers. Their aim is to harvest the honey for use in local cafés and design products that relate to the growing trend of urban beekeeping.

This vivid portrait, produced by Sean Mattison, features a short interview with Designer / Beekeeper Michael Leung & sheds a little light on a practice that, at first, seems out of place.

Have you encountered a surprising community or practice on your travels? Share it with us! Leave your video suggestions in the comments below or submit photos to our Flickr Group. There’s a good chance we’ll choose your picks for our next Photo / Video of the Day!

October is American Cheese Month!

by Laurel Miller on

It’s amazing it took this long, what with national hot dog month, ice cream month, and clogged artery month (okay, I made that one up), but now we have a new reason to check in with our cardiologists.

The American Cheese Society ACS) has announced the launch of American Cheese Month, an annual celebration of America’s artisan, farmstead, and specialty cheeses, and the farmers, cheesemakers, distributors, retailers, cheesemongers, chefs, and educators who make up this growing community. And I joke about cardiologists; cheese consumed in moderation is an excellent source of protein, calcium, phosphorous, and vitamins B12 and D, and an important part of maintaining bone and dental health.

American Cheese Month will be held annually each October, with special events, farm tours, and promotions in cities across the country. The goal of the month-long celebration is to raise awareness about the quality and diversity of American cheeses (from the milk of cows, goats, sheep; even water buffalo), as well as to increase support for family farms, traditional cheese production methods, and sustainable production and farming methods. Proceeds from select American Cheese Month events will support the American Cheese Education Foundation.

In the last decade, North American artisan cheesemakers have become serious contenders with those in Europe, and the excellence of American artisan cheeses is now recognized worldwide. The American public’s passion for cheese is also booming, as evidenced by the increase in cheese shops, books (Shameless self-promo moment: I’m currently co-authoring Cheese for Dummies in collaboration with Culture: the word on cheese magazine and its co-founder Lassa Skinner. It will be out in March, 2012) classes, workshops, and festivals.

ACS will kick off American Cheese Month in its home base of Denver, at the Brewers Association’s 30th Annual Great American Beer Festival (sold out, alas). Beer and cheese pairing is the hottest thing going in both industries, so look for more cross-promo events in the coming year. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has shown his support by issuing a proclamation declaring October as American Cheese Month in the state (which has its own growing–and impressive–artisan cheese scene).

For listings of national and local events, go to the American Cheese Society site. Cheese lovers can also network on the American Cheese Month Facebook page and on Twitter (#AmCheeseMonth, @CheeseSociety).

[Photo credit: Flickr user ex_magician]

Holy Water and Wafers in the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary

by David Farley on
I had walked for an hour in the northern Bohemian spa town Karlovy Vary looking for a place to eat. I have a general rule when I’m in these tourist-crammed towns: no hotel restaurants and no obvious tourist trap eateries, of which this town formerly known as Carlsbad has plenty. I walked along the babbling Tepla River reciting the words to the Joni Mitchell’s heartbreaking “River,” a song I haven’t been able to get out of my head lately. I strolled until the prettied-up 19th-century buildings faded into grim 20th-century Communist-era apartment blocks and the over-priced restaurants morphed into pubs where the night’s main entertainment was two dogs wildly humping each other in the corner as bar patrons gleefully rooted them on (well, at least at one of the places I popped my head into).

As darkness began to envelope the town, I turned back toward the center and walked until I found a pub with a sign for Platan, an excellent south Bohemian beer, a rare sight here among the signs for Pilsner Urquell and Budweiser (the Czech variety). I stopped in to the five-table pub. There were no amorous hounds inside; just quiet-talking couples taking up all the tables but one. I sat down, ordered a beer and a klobasa and dove into a book, figuring I’d settle in for another melancholy evening of sipping better-than-average beer and reading about Burma. Within a few minutes, though, three middle-aged women joined me at the table. They didn’t speak English, so they began asking me questions in Czech. Where was I from? How did I speak Czech? Do I have children?


They laughed at my bad jokes and feigned interest in what I had to say about my life. Finally, I was able to ask something: “What brings you to Karlovy Vary?” All three of the ladies put their hands to their chest and said, in unison, “We’re sick.”

My heart sunk, but I should have known better. It’s the reason why most people come to Karlovy Vary. After all, for centuries everyone from the rich and royal to the ordinary have been gravitating here to “take the waters,” which flow liberally from fountains throughout the colonnaded center of town. The mineral waters are said to have curative properties and today people the world over limp around Karlovy Vary, drinking from the natural springs in between spa treatment appointments.

I was glad the women didn’t ask me why I was here. They probably just assumed I was there for the same reasons they were. But my survival didn’t depend on being in Karlovy Vary. Not that I had the ability to explain in Czech my own struggles, the dark quicksand with which my mind has been sinking; I can barely explain it in English except to paint a picture of being at the bottom of a dark pit with no way out except to ponder the worst scenarios. I had no idea what I was expecting to find in this famous spa town. I knew I’d encounter sick people and pickled-looking Russians and sick pickled-looking Russians (Russians, in fact, own 65 percent of the town and nearly all of the city center), but I came here not just for work but I wondered if this town, which for hundreds of years has been a metaphor of last hopes and survival, would somehow help me too.

Travel, I had rationalized on the two-hour bus ride north from Prague a couple days earlier, comes from the word “travail,” suggesting, inherently, struggle and pain and challenge. And with that, we hope, comes renewal. And wisdom. Either that or death, metaphorically or physically.


As I strolled through the town the morning after my encounter with the three women in the pub, on my way to catch the bus back to Prague, I pulled out the porcelain cup I’d bought on the promenade my first afternoon in town and, like the rest of the visitors, began sampling one last time the various springs. And then, when I saw someone in the distance selling fresh spa wafers, I got an idea. In addition to being where people go to hopefully not die, Karlovy Vary is the wafer capital of Central Europe.

Maybe because they’re light and not too unhealthy, wafers became an in-between-therapy-session snack for the rich and sickly. I’d always heard that you could buy these thin cracker-like circular treats (with chocolate or vanilla smeared in between) on the streets of Karlovy Vary.

There were boxes of wafers piled up to the heavens (at the low, low price of $1.40 each) with flavors that went way behind the traditional chocolate or vanilla: sour cherry, Algerian coffee, gingerbread, tiramisu, white chocolate and orange peel, and even chili pepper.

A young woman was smearing chocolate between freshly baked wafer crackers. I bought one and continued down the promenade, breaking off pieces and stopping at each spring to refill my cup. At the last spring, inside an arched high-ceilinged room with a sculpture of a water nymph placed above the spouting water (the most cathedral like of all the springs), an old frail woman watched as I filled up my cup one last time before I would flee this town perhaps forever. I sipped from the piping hot, fresh-from-the-earth water. The old woman looked down at her empty plastic cup. Signs warned against using plastic cups and bottles. The heat of the water will melt the plastic and could be dangerous for one’s health. I walked over to the old woman and handed her my sipping cup.

“Here,” I said. “Would you like my cup? I’m leaving town.”

Her trembling hand extended toward me. She wrapped her miniscule fingers around the cup, overlapping on to my hand. She didn’t pull away and for about five long seconds we stood there in the empty vaulted room, the sound of splashing water echoing through the space, joined together by this cup–this, as some might say, life-restoring vessel–staring at each other.

Finally, we let go and she took the cup. I then handed her the rest of my host-like wafer. She thanked me profusely in Czech. I smiled and walked out of the sheltered space, my eyes welling up with tears for some reason. On the way back to Prague, I kept thinking about the people I’d encountered there: the three women at the bar, the old woman I’d given my cup to. The history-making events they’d probably been through. And now they come here to this spa town, one last gasp, one last hope, one last wish, in their own personal struggles for survival. They’d traveled here, like me, with hope.

After two days, I felt no real change. No epiphanies. No great insights. No clarity. No rope thrown down to me from the top of the pit. It was silly for me to think otherwise. Yes, the travail of travel sometimes changes people, but not always on the spot. Not always as quickly as we’d like. I might only hope I someday to have the courage of the people I met in Karlovy Vary.

I turned my iPod on and listened to the song I’d been humming the last few days and quietly sang along, “I wish I had a river, I could skate away on…”

Tasty trail food and thoughts on trail food

by Elizabeth Seward on


Enertia Trail Foods isn’t like most things that come out of my hometown. Not a lot of things come from where I come from. Marietta, Ohio is a town tucked away alongside the border of West Virginia. Downtown is centered around a convergence of the Ohio River and Muskingum River. Because of this, Marietta is a bona fide river town. Boats meander casually up and down the waters on weekends and the Ohio River Sternwheel Festival draws in thousands of visitors each year. And that makes a big economical and cultural impact on a small town like Marietta. According to the 2010 census, 14,085 people call Marietta home. I still do. But for all of the reasons I look fondly upon my hometown, booming, promising business isn’t usually at the top of the list. There are businesses in Marietta–there are some great ones. But not many. So when an old high school friend and fellow vagrant let me know that he is now working for a trail foods company based out of Marietta, he immediately had me interested.Familiar with my roughing-it-much-of-the-time travel style, he asked if I wanted to try the stuff. And of course I did want to try it. But I was, admittedly, half expecting plastic baggies filled with nuts and dried fruit, sealed shut with a bread tie. I would have loved that too, but what showed up at my front door was definitely trail food; not trail mix.

He sent me:

  • New River Granola with Milk
  • Veggie Pizza Pasta
  • Pinnacle Pasta
  • El Captain 3 Bean Chili
  • Chocolate Peanut Butter Pudding
  • Grand Canyon Cheesecake

“… and I was all like, whaaaaaa? I can take this kind of stuff into the woods with me? On the road with me? How come I didn’t know about this stuff back when I was spending the night in Wal-Mart parking lots and graciously accepting free hot water from gas stations for my OATMEAL PACKETS???…”

The answer is, it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t have afforded it back then anyway. Not that it is exorbitantly expensive (most of them cost $4-$5), but I couldn’t have afforded it back then. But these days? I’d be hard-pressed to not splurge for the sake of having something other than peanut butter and bread while out in the wilderness. And by splurge, I mean, at least have some of this stuff packed away for the extra tough days. I’ve done just fine on peanut butter for a few days at a time, mind you, but after a few days, I find that I lose focus and start dreaming about things like… macaroni and cheese.

As it turns out, Enertia Trail Foods has now teamed up with Coleman and their packets of food are becoming increasingly popular and therefore available. And I know why: they’re actually really good. I’m not just getting behind them because they’re based in my hometown. I know about them because they’re based in my hometown. But, with that said, if you visited my hometown, you’d be impressed that a company with products this tasty is coming out of a town so small. It just doesn’t usually work that way. But it’s so very nice when it does.

In addition to Enertia’s curious home base, Enertia has a another attention-grabbing quality: ingredients. Whole wheat couscous, whole wheat bulgur, organic maple granules, sunflower seeds, organic rolled oats, organic pumpkin seeds, West Virginia honey, toasted almonds, organic peanut butter, ginger, fresh ground basil leaves… there’s some good stuff in these packets.

But here are some questions I leave you with:

How much does trail food like this actually enhance the overall experience? Do you find that varying your food like this provides more mental clarity, better morale, stronger determination, or an increase in satisfaction throughout and after the trip regarding the adventure? Since trail food isn’t usually cheap, at least not compared to it’s trail-friendly competitors (peanut butter, bread, cheese, nuts, dried fruit, etc.), how worth it is trail food like this for you? Are you getting more bang for your buck? Alternatively, do you find that you focus and perform better without the distraction of varying food options?