The Local Food Report: Recent Episodes
None
The Local Food Report can be heard every Thursday on WCAI, the local NPR station for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and the South Coast. From farmers' markets to backyard gardens, wild forage to home kitchen recipes, the Local Food Report explores the Cape, Islands, and South Coast to find out what's in season and what to do with it.The Local Food Report airs Thursday at 8:35 AM and 5:45 PM and Saturday at 9:35 AM and is made possible by our Local Food Report sponsors.
This week on the Local Food Report, Cape Cod jail inmates find connection and hope in a program baking for those in need.
Amateur cooks get by with a little “kelp” from their friends and the results are pretty tasty.
Garlic scapes are in season at the Truro Farmers Market, and there are so many good ways to cook them.
A centuries-old Portuguese ritual rich with history, pageantry, and, most definitely, food.
For more than a hundred years, the state has been stocking ponds all over the Cape and Islands with locally raised trout. Mike Clark of Plymouth helps breed these fish at a series of outdoor pools in Sandwich.
On a Cape Cod blueberry farm, a newly arrived colony of bumblebees takes flight, beginning the careful work that transforms spring flowers into summer fruit.
Last spring, honeybee keeper Tim Colon of Vineyard Haven emailed me a fascinating recording.
You know hostas? Those broad-leafed, perennial plants landscapers so often put in shady spots, or on the edges between gardens and lawns? Well, it turns out hosta shoots are edible. Really.
This week on the Local Food Report, a chef in New Bedford teaches students to cook with local seafood.
Sarah Reynolds North talks about how to take care of sourdough starter and what you can do with it.
For decades now, we’ve been hearing about the broken nature of our New England seafood industry fisherman Brett Tolley of Harwich explains.
Bitternut hickory trees were one of the most important perennial staple food crops in the eastern U.S. for eight thousand years or more.
Starting in about 2010, many towns on the Cape began trying to increase shellfish populations and credit them for their nitrogen-removal work.
I’m walking the back roads of Truro with my friend Nicole Cormier, who works as a dietician and is studying herbalism. We’re looking for something called Aronia which grows dark purple almost black berries.
Amy Costa of Truro got into fermentation kind of accidentally. She had just stopped working as a bartender but wanted to keep creating drinks and her friend was brewing kombucha from a kit.
This week on the Local Food Report, grieving the beech trees of Provincetown’s beech forest—and the nuts they’ve long provided.
Carrie Richter of Peach Tree Circle Farm in Falmouth is a self-proclaimed garlic fanatic."It makes every dish better. There's nothing about garlic that I don't like."
In this week's Local Food Report, Hal Minis shares why we should be tending to apple trees.
Ken Mason is an avid cook. His son Morgan is a fisherman, and he often shares extra bluefin tuna with Ken. This summer, Ken’s been experimenting with smoking the belly, or Toro, of the tuna.
Digree Rai and her son David are farmers in Truro. They emigrated here from Nepal in 2011 and they say there’s one crop that’s common there that almost no one recognizes on the Cape.
Digree Rai and her son David are farmers in Truro. They emigrated here from Nepal in 2011 and they say there’s one crop that’s common there that almost no one recognizes on the Cape.
Every gardener’s been there. You go away for a day, peer under the leaves, and are alarmed to find that the small, reasonable little squashes from yesterday have doubled in size. But I hate to see zucchini go to waste. So after talking with David, I roamed the market, asking vendors and customers for their best zucchini ideas.
The bananas were a hit and he ended up building an entire banana industry — starting plantations in Jamaica and shipping the fruit to the United States.
I grew up in farm country, in Maine. Like most of us, I associate food with farms—big cultivated fields, animals grazing in pasture, aquaculture racks in the sea. But recently I’ve been thinking a lot more about wild foods. What would the world look like if more wild places filled our bellies?
Have you ever had a black raspberry? Until about ten years ago, I thought they were made up—a way to describe a commercial flavor, like a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher. I know, it’s a little embarrassing.
My friend Drew Locke is a seventh-generation farmer in Truro. He’s always trying new things — partly because he’s curious and partly because even though he comes from a long line of farmers, a lot of intergenerational knowledge has been lost in recent decades and he’s focused on relearning the old ways.
All over eastern North America right now, chestnut breeders are pollinating tree flowers.
My friend Drew Locke is a seventh-generation farmer in Truro. He’s always trying new things — partly because he’s curious and partly because even though he comes from a long line of farmers, a lot of intergenerational knowledge has been lost in recent decades and he’s focused on relearning the old ways.
One fall, I lead a foraging walk with visiting fellows from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I pointed out Prickly Pear Cactus — a plant that I’ve heard you can eat, but that we’re not allowed to harvest in Massachusetts, because here it’s considered an endangered species.
Imagine yourself sitting down to dessert at the end of a holiday feast. What are you looking for in a pie? This is the question a panel of judges in Provincetown asks themselves each year at an event at the Provincetown Commons called Pie Fest.
Elspeth Hay's great-grandfather kept his eggnog recipe in the safety deposit box - it's that good. This week on The Local Food Report, Elspeth reveals its secrets, and how it got the sexton drunk.
This week on the Local Food Report, a re-telling of the Thanksgiving story with an unexpected narrator.
Until the other day, I’d never thought about how an animal’s diet affects the ways farmers control them. When we talk about the differences between farm animals raised on grass versus grain, we usually focus on health. But there’s also a set of relationships that’s lost when these animals follow the sound of grain in a bucket instead of grazing.
When Brewster farmer Ron Backer first read about honeynut squash, he knew he wanted to grow it.
This summer, farmer Dave Dewitt of Truro told me he’s growing something I’ve always thought of as a southern crop — okra.
For years now, farmer Stephanie Rein of the non-profit Sustainable Cape in Truro has been teaching kids about growing food. She does this in multiple elementary schools on the Outer Cape, and when she first started, she had the kids make something she called a seed wish list.
A few years ago, a Philadelphia arborist named Max Paschall read an article about a man named John Hershey. Hershey ran a tree nursery and experimental farm in Pennsylvania in the 1930s.
Reishi has a number of different impacts on our bodies, but one of the major ways it works as a medicine is by influencing our gut microbiota.
Helen loved kvass. The flavor, the fizz, everything about this drink made from fermenting stale bread with water and sugar. But when she got home, she forgot about it for almost forty years.
I have a friend in Barnstable who’s always telling me about unusual edible plants, particularly perennials. Recently, he told me he’s planting something new called a Cornelian Cherry.
To plant a fig tree in our climate is an act of faith. Most figs are native to the tropics—and in the heat and sweat of this world they do amazing things. They’ve co-evolved with a wasp that crawls into the fruit and pollinates it from the inside out.
As a fisheries and aquaculture specialist at the Barnstable County Cooperative Extension, Abigail Archer spends a lot of time trying to help the public connect the dots between shellfish, nitrogen, and healthy estuaries. This relationship starts when nitrogen travels through freshwater streams and runoff into our marine environment.
In 2015, Jess Tsoukalas was living in Wellfleet at a rental property that the tenant before her had planted with an abundance of fruit trees.
Carrie Richter of Peach Tree Circle Farm in Falmouth is a self-proclaimed garlic fanatic."It makes every dish better. There's nothing about garlic that I don't like."
This time of year at the farmers markets, lettuce is the variety queen. It comes in heads and leaves, reds and greens, crisp hearts and soft butter leaves. Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken to farmers about growing lettuce, and what varieties they like.
I’ve been hearing about the Herring River Restoration Project since I moved to Wellfleet in 2004. Restoring tidal flow to the 1100-acre saltwater estuary, which was diked in 1908, is an effort that’s been decades in the making — and hands-on work finally began in early 2023.
Have you ever been in a grocery store and seen items marked “WIC approved”? It stands for “women infants and children.” It’s a federally funded state run supplemental nutrition assistance program.
Over the past few years, I’ve started noticing how much I can control certain plants’ productivity by managing their flowers and seeds.
It’s that time of year where many of us are getting summer seedlings in the ground. And I don’t know about you, but my excitement is usually bigger than my garden — I can’t fit everything I want to plant.
Most cooks have heard of broccoli rabe. But what about other rabe varieties? This week on The Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay talks with growers at the Orleans Farmers' Market about this spring delicacy from the Brassica family.
There aren’t many things that will get me out of bed at 5:30 in the morning. But bagels—or really just the prospect of learning how to make them—is one. Recently, I stood in Wellfleet’s Bagel Hound with owner Ellery Althaus, while the windows were still dark, staring a pile of dough.
Beau Valtz is standing in his Wellfleet kitchen in front of a giant pile of fresh garlic.He's wrapping heads of garlic tightly in tin foil.
Recently I made a visit to the Sandwich fish hatchery. That’s where the state raises trout for stocking in local ponds and rivers and I spoke with Mike Clark who helps breed four different trout varieties.
This week, a young man in Truro on pruning wild blueberries and our relationship with the natural world.
For a long time, skate has been considered trash fish. But with local groundfish like haddock and cod increasingly off the menu, home cooks and local chefs are turning more and more to this tasty shark relative.
It’s that time of year again—we’re deep into storage vegetable season and I’m looking for recipe inspiration.
About ten years ago when farmer Stephanie Rein’s kids were in elementary school in Truro, she noticed something about local garden-based education.
This week on the Local Food Report, adapting Cape Cod menus to changes in local fisheries.
This week on the Local Food Report, soil building inspiration all the way from the Amazon.
This week a chef in Provincetown uses walnuts and almonds to create two Italian-inspired after-dinner drinks.
This time of year, I miss my grandmother. When I was a kid Biee always came to visit for Christmas and she spent most of her time in the kitchen.
This week on the Local Food Report, Elspeth’s daughter, Nora Hay, age 9, teaches us to make her favorite fall dish.
Another Sonic ID Podcast made up of 30 to 60 second stories. In this episode: a catwalker, a lying little girl, a man's strong feelings about Sunday, and more!
Glenway Fripp reveals a "sonic secret" from a corner of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.
David Stanwood, piano technician from West Tisbury, recounts a moment of true connection with a piano.