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Hoof & Horn in Downtown Potsdam

In December, the Local Foods team visited the newest food business in downtown Potsdam, the Hoof & Horn Butcher and Eatery. The LaClair family, with roots in Hermon and Saranac Lake, returned to northern New York eager to contribute to the local food scene. With experience as a chef and culinary instructor, Jonathan LaClair has the passion and skills to open up a farm-to-table whole animal butchery and eatery.   Jon shares, “The big thing with us is that we are trying to utilize every part of an animal that we can.”

Charcuterie boards are available to order for any event. All of the cheeses and cured meats are sourced from New York State.

What will you find at Hoof and Horn?  “We have our display case with all our raw cuts in it. We try to have some staples like New York strips and ribeyes when possible. But you will find some different cuts like the picanhas, sirloin steaks. We do a lot of beef tips and several different kinds of house-made sausages.” Think sausage flavors like maple brown sugar and chimichurri lamb.

Come take a seat and stay for lunch.

In addition, they offer eat-in or to-go lunches, such as warming ramen bowls and delicious lamb shoulder tacos. You can find other menu items like house-made chorizo sausage dressed with kimchi and garlic soy aioli. 

Jon cooks up some of his homegrown purple potatoes.

LaClair, doesn’t stop there. It seems the longer Hoof & Horn is open, the more options become available to diners. With an indulgent brunch menu on Sundays featuring a variety of benedicts (crab, veggie and beef tenderloin).  He says for brunch menus they are “trying to stay as hyper-local as we can and really celebrate the farms of the area.” Read more Hoof & Horn in Downtown Potsdam

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Seed to Supper is back!

CCE is offering a FREE gardening course to low-income* adults in St. Lawrence Country.

This course includes six weekly classes geared toward beginning gardeners with limited resources who are eager to grow healthy food for their families. The course covers how to: plan a garden, plant seedlings, manage pests, and use the harvest.

Seed to Supper will be offered online starting March 10, 2021 and will meet every other week on Thursdays until May 19th. Each class will be around 1.5 hours and will be taught by several trained Master Gardener Volunteers and Erica LaFountain, Community Horticulture Educator. Class dates: 3/10, 3/24, 4/7, 4/14 (moved forward due to spring vacation), 5/5, 5/19. On 5/21, CCE will host a Demo Day for participants with demonstrations of cooking, tool maintenance, and basic garden skills. Read more Seed to Supper is back!

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Adapting and Improving, one year at a time

The wintertime brings a host of shifting timescales and events. It’s the overlap of the New Year, and notably the less busy time for the majority of farmers and food producers (sorry livestock folks, I realize there’s still a hum of activity in your barns!). For many of us, there’s a January lull before the thaw kicks many activities into gear.

Along with my partner, I operate a small community farm in Canton called littleGrasse Foodworks that raises vegetables, herbs and flowers for “Free Choice Shares”. My partner is on the farm and I juggle farm tasks with another job. I reckon that rings true for many northern New York producers. We are entering our 13th season and I’ve gotten much better at not losing sleep worrying about every issue of our farm, but rather tackling a couple things at a time for incremental improvements that lead to a range of small and big impacts.

Picture of field at littleGrasse
One of the fields at littleGrasse

If you are looking for ideas, here are three easy ways to enact positive changes in your farm or food business in 2022.

Track time for one enterprise OR activity 

It’s true that we cannot understand our cost of production without accounting for how we spend our time. And it can be overwhelming to consider. For years, I felt the pressure to figure out how much time we were spending tending every one of our 50+ crops to see if any were too time consuming and adjust accordingly. It seemed daunting and I hesitated to take the plunge. And in reality, as a farm with shares, diversity is essential to the quality of our overall offering. We cannot decide to stop raising carrots on a CSA farm, but we can prioritize improving efficiencies in our processes. Anyhow, in your own business, I bet there are certain activities you’d like to get a better handle on and there are very simple ways to track activities, for example an online platform called Clockify.

I decided that instead of figuring out how long tending the carrots versus the cabbage took, it would be more useful to get a grasp on categories of activities. So in 2021, once per day I logged onto Clockify to enter my time spent on certain activities such as Accounting, Communications, Maintenance, Harvest, etc.

Example of using Clockify software
Screenshot of the Clockify software.

Logging my activities each day was easy and took around 5 minutes. Some days only included a couple hours of farm work and others included a long list of tasks.  Now we are planning for 2022 and with that investment of a couple minutes per day, I have a wealth of new information that I can choose to use in various ways. These options include but are not limited to: Read more Adapting and Improving, one year at a time