Covid Thoughts

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It’s going to be alright! The plants and fungi have got our backs!

  • Drink lots of tea and take tinctures and syrups if you have them.
  • Herbal Actions you want: Immune supportive herbs like echinacea, myrrh, boneset, usnea, osha, yarrow.
  • Cough Herbs: thyme, osha, propolis, wild cherry bark, licorice (*do no take with high blood-pressure)
  • Soothing or Demulcent Herbs: Using a cough syrup with honey to take the tinctures down with will be good, garlic syrup, elderberry syrup, usnea syrup, birch bark syrup. Marshmallow root powder mixed in with warm water is very soothing.
  • Bourage For Courage, as we used to say at the old Tweefontein Herb Farm (where this borage flower came from).
  • Stay strong. Build your body up to be able to stay as healthy as you can even if you get sick. Take vitamins and herbs, drink tea, eat whole foods, stay off of the sugar and alcohol, definitely don’t smoke, and get as much sleep and rest as possible.
  • You can have no symptoms and spread it. Symptoms can be mild at first and keep worsening for more than 2 weeks. Some people feel better for a few days and then symptoms come back even harder so don’t get cocky.
  • Wear a mask, even a homemade mask to protect others from you, and protect yourself from others. Save the medical masks for medical workers until there are enough for all. Stores are now requiring everyone wear a mask that enters in many places.
  • Do not assume you’re immune if you have had it as we do not yet know how long immunity will last for this virus. Some Corona viruses can be as short as 6 months.

Easter Rabbit Recipe

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Easter is all about that bunny right? In our case, we served it for dinner. It’s actually a much more sustainable meat source than factory farm honeyed ham which is a common Easter Dinner. To get a rabbit in the US it is likely to be coming from a smaller producer and may even have been humanely raised, which is a perk that we don’t often see in meats we can get in a store. It is also delicious. The preparation is rather important though for maximum tastiness and tenderness. Here is how I did it. Full time lapse of the cooking process will be available on the Patreon page soon. 

Easter Rabbit Recipe:

In preparation: Brine the meat for at least a few hours in salt water. A little black pepper and red pepper is good in the brine too. Use cheap salt because it will soon go down the sink.

A note on cooking times: 

I cook rabbit the same way I would cook a chicken — about an hour at 375-400 covered with tinfoil, followed by another 30 minutes at 450 with no tinfoil at the end to get it nice and crispy / golden on the outside. The tinfoil will be lightly stained and can be reused; Rather than cleaning it ( which will likely destroy it), I often just fold it up and put it in the fridge for later use as a heat shield.

-Source rabbit from local farm

-Add a little lard on the bottom of the bake pan

-Thinly slice sweet potatoes to create a bed so the meat doesn’t directly touch the pan.

-Stuff the rabbit with rice (already soaked and cooked), pine-nuts, and butter (I used a local rice raised from an African rice variety by a small farmer in Kingston)

-Top the skin with a sauce you mix up in a small sauce pan, using: Thai sweet chili sauce, butter.

-Bake like you would a similarly sized chicken; my general tactic is about 45 minutes – 60 minutes at 350 under tinfoil, followed by a final 30 minutes or so (watch the skin) at 450 with no tinfoil. 

-Just before the skin starts to get golden brown add a sauce to the pan of old sake and/or apple cider to really tie the room together, and allow the drippings to lift from the pan. This step serves a few functions. It deglazes the drippings, freeing their flavor from going to waste as burnt pan crust. It also adds steam and humidity to the final portion of the bake, which makes for a less dried out roast. If you want, you can even pour off the deglazed drippings into a sauce pan, and make them into a gravy — highly recommended. 

-Serve with a salad of your choice. This Easter, I did a grapefruit/daikon salad.

Woodstock Farm Festival: Eat Seasonally, Shop Locally (May 20th, 5pm)

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We want to help you eat local and seasonal, now more than ever!

For this online workshop we’ve teamed up with Chrisso Babcock of Coyote Kitchen Workshops to guide you through what’s in season this Spring season, meal planning around the market offerings, and how to prepare for a trip to the market each week. Workshop takeaways include seasonal recipes, Spring market meal planning PDF, and specific protocols for shopping amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

Register Now

Workshop tickets are available on a sliding scale from $10-$50. The higher the ticket price, the more impact your purchase will have in our local community. Proceeds for this workshop are split between WFF and CKW, with one third of total sales going to The Table at Woodstock, a local organization we love that provides no-cost, nourishing, hot meals to anyone in our community who needs it. In addition, select the “get one, give one” ticket option and we’ll extend an invitation as a free resource to low- or no-income families around the region who could benefit from having these tools in their back pocket.

Food shopping in these unprecedented times can be overwhelming and fearful. We believe that shopping at your local farmers market is always the best way to get the freshest, healthiest food in your area. As we navigate this public health crisis, it’s hard to deny that the open air market with short supply chains and direct connection to the farmers is truly the safest, most secure food shopping you can do right now. Here in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, we have an abundant regional and hyper-local food system, where delicious and nutritious food is available year round. We want to help you know what to look for and how to prepare it, so you can eat what’s in season, shop close to home, and strengthen the local food system in the process.

The Woodstock Farm Festival opens May 27th, and we stand with farmers markets across the country that are fighting to stay open, accessible and adaptable throughout this experience. We encourage you participate even if you’re not a Woodstocker! Together we can keep our local food system resilient, our local economy moving, and the health of our community strong.