Food

Discover the best food, farms, and dining in the Hudson Valley, Berkshires, and Litchfield Hills. Rural Intelligence shares local restaurant reviews, seasonal recipes, and stories celebrating regional flavor.

Food

AgriCulture: The Farm and I

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: Ah being a “farmer!” But, what’s in a name, as they say? My first memory of the term is from baby nursery rhymes: “The farmer in the dell The

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Food

AgriCulture: Antibiotics, You Can Run But You Can't Hide

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes: Lately I’ve been afflicted with the uncomfortable feeling that my fate is in the hands of other people. Last week it seemed almost all of those people were in

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Food

Brick House Pub: A Nirvana for Hungry Beer Geeks

For the past few years, Leland Kent (right) and John Flynn (left) worked as bartenders at the no-frills Brick House Pub in the Great Barrington village of Housatonic. "We always talked about how we would make it better if we were in charge, how we'd serve really

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Food

Eat, Plant, and Learn to Love Good Food at Katchkie Farm

By Betsy Miller Liz Neumark, CEO of Great Performances, a catering company based in New York City, had been catering for more than two decades when she took to joining CSAs, and gradually fell in love with locally-grown produce. “For the first time in my life,” she says, “I knew

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Food

AgriCulture: A Tail of Two Cultures

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: That’s right, “tail” not “tale.” Our sheeps’ tails have gotten caught in a collision of cultures. As some of you may know, we breed karakul, a desert sheep originating

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Food

Alternative to Shopping: The 21st Century Root Cellar

by Betsy Miller Before there were refrigerators, even before there were ice boxes, there were root cellars. Homemakers knew how to preserve their summer harvests for safe consumption in the dark of winter. And they didn’t pay a cent for energy. Root cellars were a common part of every

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Food

The Wine Tasting Train, Drinking in the Scenery

by Betsy Miller The clicking of the wheels on the rails. The breeze rushing through windows that actually open. The comfort of knowing this is one train ride with no office waiting at the end. It is a train ride to nowhere; better yet, a train ride through glorious Berkshires

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Food

Food News: Le Pain Not So Quotidien

by Scott Baldinger Warren Street in Hudson is an uphill climb from its start at Front Street to its commercial finale a couple of blocks past Park Place. Luckily there’s a quality pit stop every half a block or so for pedestrians in need of lattes, iced coffees and

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Food

AgriCulture: Pretty Weeds, Friend or Foe?

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes: It is still late Spring, though the recent stretches of extreme heat and the explosion of vegetation read more like mid summer. In the late afternoon sunlight, the pasture is

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Food

Culinary Insitute of America's Grilling and BBQ Boot Camp

by Betsy Miller Ladies and gentlemen, start your charcoal. Or propane. Or gas. The grilling season has arrived. Across the country, summer hails the beginning of the outdoor cooking season. Legend has it that food cooked al fresco tastes better. At the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, they are doing

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Food

AgriCulture: Perspective Shifts from Picturesque to Practical

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: Having a farm does change the way one sees animals. I can remember in my pre-farm academic days in the early 70’s living on Phyllis Curtin’s estate in

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Food

Serge Madikians Cooks from the Soul at Serevan in Amenia

Serge Madikians treats running a restaurant as if it were a cross between a grand opera and an extreme sport. As the chef/owner of six-year-old Serevan in Amenia, NY, he does everything from taking reservations and driving to New York City to buy fresh fish to crisscrossing the Hudson

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