Finger Lakes Finds

We spent last week in the Finger Lakes, and I made it into a gigantic shopping trip, so we came home with a huge load of food:

Red Jacket Orchard turned out to be a farmstand on an ugly stretch of commercial highway, but I did pick up some apples, maple syrup and a New Hope Mills whole wheat pancake mix. It was our first stop and these items were my priority.

Arbor Hill Grapery was pretty touristy and commercial, but we tasted some things we liked there, including their classic traminette, a wine grape developed, I think, at Cornell specifically for the region (which is temperate because of all the lakes) from the Gewurztraminer grape. To me this seems even more drinkable than the Alsatian wine (which I like), spicy and fruity and really easy going down. We also got some Gewurtz jelly and balsamic-style vinegar.

One of my favorite stops was at Bellwether (hard cider), where the proprieter apologized for not being dressed up because they were bottling on the day I visited and then told me about Johnny Appleseed, who was basically a bootlegger, planting apple seeds for hard cider (since apples from seeds are unreliable and rarely edible). We brought home a bottle of his Liberty Spy Hard Cider and some peach-tamarind chutney.

Maybe part of the reason I enjoyed Bellwether so much was because the day before we stopped at Belhurst castle and tried some of their wines. The woman doing the tasting rushed me to choose what I wanted to try, and when she left mid-tasting the man who took over gave me the same spiel, verbatim. Just employees, and it felt like it. I bought a bottle there anyway; meant to get a cabernet franc and picked up a merlot by mistake, which I hadn't even tried.

Todd took a tour of the Ommegang brewery (while I sat in the car with the sleeping baby) and bought a giant bottle of the Abby Ale, which he had tried in a restaurant the night before and loved. Really smooth (it didn't give me that bitter beer shiver I usually get).

The New Hope Mills factory shop isn't much to look at, and after hunting it down we felt like fools until I went inside. Dollar bags of oatmeal, ground almonds, steel-cut oats and other flours. I also got cornmeal and, because we needed a snack, s'mores snack mix, maltballs and dried fruit.

We missed the grape festival in Naples by just a few days, so I had to pick up some grape cookies (Todd says they're like fig newtons, but I thought they were more like soft sugar cookies folded in half over a grape filling), peaches and gourds at Joseph's Wayside Stand.

At the Cooperstown farmers' market I rounded out my shopping with a tomato, zucchini, eggplant, buttercup squash and an English tea cakes sampler, which included a Welsh cookie, which looked like a scone but crumbled like a cookie, and three tarts: lemon, pecan and almond-cake. Also got a sunshine squash (or something like that) at the farmers' market in Ithaca.