What’s happening now

On the farm
In late October we hosted our last visitors for 2008. Mornings on the farm were getting cold! But our guests still found plenty to pick in the Children’s Garden—tender baby lettuces, two kinds of kale (green and purple), pumpkins, plum tomatoes, and more. On October 14, first and second graders from North Albany Academy pulled a few dozen potatoes out of the earth—red ones and white ones. That was fun! They liked harvesting the carrots even more. Some of them came up in tangled clusters that looked like Halloween monsters. Nobody knew that carrots sometimes grow like that.

For lunch there was hot potato-leek soup that the children made themselves. The meal included almost all the plant parts that we talked about that day—roots, leaves, seeds, stems, and flowers. Yes, flowers! The children tasted yellow and orange nasturtium, and they added it to their salad. The petals taste of butter and pepper.  They all ate fruit, too—sweet cherry tomatoes right off the vine, in the Katchkie greenhouse. Everyone was surprised to learn that tomato is a fruit.

After lunch we visited the chicken coop. The chickens pecked at our pants and untied our shoes. Our bravest guests stayed long enough to harvest some eggs. Katchkie eggs are very pretty; they come in creamy shades of pink, green, and brown.

Farm-programs coordinator Karyn Novakowski extends special thanks to this season’s interns, Pam Neimeth and Marlene Rolph. And congratulations to volunteer Matthew Tymchak, who is leaving us to begin his new life as an environmental consultant. We’re all going to miss all of you!

In the kitchen
Our SoHo kitchen smells good! On the menu this fall: recipes from around the world, made with fresh ingredients from Katchkie Farm. We started the season with our Asian foods workshop. Visitors from PS 11 and PS 19 learned how to stuff and seal a Chinese-style potsticker dumpling, and how to julienne fresh veggies for homemade vegetarian sushi. Everyone tried the wasabi, some students for the first time. Hardly anyone knew that wasabi comes from a skinny, homely-looking brown root.

Next up: cooking Latin, Mediterranean, and Italian-style. Most of our guests have never tried Greek babaganush or pere al forno (Italian baked pears). Everyone knows about fresh tomato salsa, but homemade corn chips are something new. We show visitors how easy it is to make them in the oven from fresh tortillas. They taste better than the deep-fried packaged kind, and they’re healthier too!

Our last lesson is “American food.” But what is that, exactly? In New York City, where people come from all over the world, practically everything tastes like home to us!  At the Sylvia Center, we think pumpkin soup is American. Intern Ellen Emerson, from the Natural Gourmet Cooking School, is including ketchup in our American lesson, too—homemade ketchup. It tastes great with oven-baked sweet potato “fries.”

Have you been to the Sylvia Center lately?  Tell us about it so we can publish your comments on this page!