Elspeth Hay

Gleaning is an ancient practice, as old as the Torah. It means to gather leftover grain or other produce from farm fields after a harvest, and traditionally was a form of charity. In most places, the tradition has died out. But today on Martha's Vineyard thanks to a program called Island Grown Gleaning, it's alive and well.

One day Elspeth Hay brought home a Meyer lemon tree to keep outside in the summer and in front of a sunny window all winter. After a few years it's bearing fruit. This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth talks with Kim Shkapich of Lola's Local Food Lab in Wellfleet about her recipe for lemon curd and the science behind it.

On the Local Food Report we’ve been thinking a lot about the why: why we make this show every week. Since we started in 2008 we’ve learned a lot about our local harvest, activism, and traditions. But we wanted to remind listeners why we’re interested in covering local food in the first place. So we asked co-hosts Elspeth Hay and Ali Berlow to give us their motivations.

My father’s goal for the past decade or so has been to cook his way through the book “660 Curries.”

“I don’t think I’m past about 60 recipes,” he says. “So I have 600 to go. But I’m getting there.”

Have you ever had whiting? It’s a small fish, usually about 12-to-14 inches long, with a soft white flesh and a mild flavor. It lives in our waters, and historically, the whiting fishery was big on Cape Cod every fall. These days, though, most local fisherman aren’t catching whiting, and it’s hard to find in local markets.

A tote of mackerel slides noisily down a metal chute into a warehouse at the fish pier in Chatham. It’s dark and chilly and I’m standing with Willie Ligenza, who caught the fish.

I asked him if today was a good haul. “I saw you got what, about five, six hundred pounds?”

“Yeah, it was a pretty good haul,” Ligenza said. “I got between 400 and 500 pounds today, it was a pretty good haul.”

How do you fish for mackerel, I asked. What kind of gear do you use?

One January, I gave a talk to the Village Garden Club of Dennis. In the midst of a snowstorm, we talked about landscaping with edible plants. I asked if anyone knew of any unusual food plants growing on the Cape, and at the end of the talk a woman named Susan sought me out. “There is a persimmon tree near my house,” she said.

Now that it's fall, local beekeepers need to prepare their hives for colder weather. This week on The Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay looks into a Wellfleet beehive and learns about the massacre of drones (a good thing), mouse incursions (bad thing), and how to tell if the queen is healthy. 

Chestnuts are common snack food in Europe—you find them roasting on every street corner in the fall. But in the U.S., they're rare. This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth talks with Falmouth farmer Carrie Richter about her own locally grown chestnuts.

Find out more about chestnuts and many ways to prepare them, along with information about the American Chestnut Society, at Elspeth's blog, Diary of a Locavore.

Today, I'd like to let my grandmother do the storytelling. A while back, when she moved into an assisted living apartment, she stopped cooking. 

Local gardens are overflowing with green beans this time of year. Most are short and snappy. But Victoria Pecoraro is growing two unusual varieties—Orient Wonder and Red Noodle—both of which measure over a foot long! This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay talks with her about how she started growing these Asian yard-long beans and how she likes to eat them.

Did you know that you can make white wine out of red grapes? I had no idea until I was at the farmers' market in Falmouth, talking with Will Becker of Westport Rivers Winery. 

Here's a list of some of the grapes grown by local vineyards—there are seven within the 30 miles from Newport to New Bedford, not to mention one in Truro and one in northeastern Connecticut!—also, a little bit about where they come from, and more about the history of the French grape varietals Will Becker mentioned.

Shishitos are suddenly showing up at markets and restaurants and dinner parties all over Cape Cod and the country. According to DMA solutions—a marketing firm for produce companies that actually studies these things—from 2010 to 2014, the popularity of shishito peppers on restaurant menus grew over 400 percent, putting the peppers just behind kale as the nation’s trendiest produce.