Month: October 2011

I’ve been looking for an excuse to visit Hyde Park’s CIA since I moved to the Hudson Valley, and I finally found one. On this Halloween episode of Distillations, I learn to make candy corn with the Culinary Institute’s Peter Greweling. Plus, I find an excuse to call my friend Iris – a Dutch expat now living in Alaska – to interview her about a Dutch treat I can only describe as… inedible. But she LOVES it. We have a segment on what Drop, or salt licorice, is made of. Here’s a hint: one of the ingredients can also be found in fertilizer.

Image courtesy of flickr user Juushika Redgrave.

My upstate NY garden is offering up the last of its bounty for the season – a few green beans, the final tomatoes, some late-season lettuces. And in this week’s episode of Distillations, we celebrate the end of the fall harvest. First, a segment on the Doomsday Vault, a safe-deposit box for plant seeds – buried deep in a mountain in the middle of the Arctic. Then, producer Sabiha Khan has the story of Miguel Santistevan, who uses the farming techniques of his ancestors to grow crops in the harsh high desert of Northern New Mexico.

Image courtesy of Mary Tefre/Svalbard Globale Seed Vault.