Vegetable Lover’s Shakshuka

Roisin Creedon-Carey chose to intern at Cornell Cooperative Extension to focus on sustainable agriculture practiced through community living. This is the final of three blog posts in her experience embracing seasonal eating as part of her student experience at St. Lawrence’s Adirondack Semester. Find the link to her recipe at the close of the article.

Yurt village in ADKS
Yurt village at Adirondack Semester, photo credit: St. Lawrence University

Every Friday, our assistant directors Will and Amanda, would leave the yurt village to do office work and run errands. The students would stay, attending classes and plugging away at woodworking projects, knowing that at 6:30 pm we would reconvene at the dinner table. Around 4:30, we would start to get antsy. We knew that they’d soon be back with mail, newspapers, and weather reports, but most importantly vegetables, meat, and eggs for the week ahead. A bell would ring, alerting us to their arrival. The ten of us would run to greet them and begin hauling in the boxes of goodies from the outside world.

As a group, we would divide and conquer. Some students would bring mail into the classroom, and others would trek vegetables from our Kent Family Growers share into the kitchen. We would shift the vegetables we still had on hand to the front of the pantry so they’d get used first. Read more Vegetable Lover’s Shakshuka

Finding (And Using) Your Roots

As a sophomore at St. Lawrence University, I participated in the Adirondack Semester. This program offers an immersive place-based learning campus located in the Adirondack Park. With sustainable living in mind, a group of 10 students paddled via canoe to lake Massawepie’s Yurt Village. In our village, we had no running water, no technology, and our main mode of transportation was a canoe or kayak. We got weekly installments of fresh produce from Kent Family Growers located in Lisbon. 

Yurt #2 was my home for the semester.

And as ten novices in the kitchen, our semester quickly adapted to utilizing every part of a vegetable. As students, we were accustomed to running to the supermarket for a spice you could not find in your pantry or fresh lettuce in the dead of winter. This was a luxury. These past few months our group meals were shaped around fresh, in-season vegetables. There was no “running to the market.” We ate what we had, and what we had was local. As a part of this program, once it gets too chilly to live in a yurt, the students move on to Capstone Internships.  Read more Finding (And Using) Your Roots

May Fruition Showcase

We live in a vast rural county, larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. In a place this spread out, sometimes it takes a while to know who is doing what. There’s a brand new way to learn more about agriculture in our area and the stories behind our area’s food businesses.

In addition to this blog, just launched in May 2021, the Extension Local Foods team is bringing the farmers and food businesses right to your computer screen with a new livestream called the Fruition Local Food Showcase. We are passionate about connecting consumers with the people who grow or sell food items available in St. Lawrence County.

The showcase features three new people every month, who have their chance in the spotlight for a 15 minute interview. Community members tune in on YouTube or Facebook, where it’s livestreamed and also saved as a recording to view later.  The program gives viewers a unique opportunity to learn directly from the people who run these businesses about what drives them, what’s new this season, and how to access and best use their products.

Read more May Fruition Showcase