We found the pot of gold: It's at Roxbury Mountain Maple. (And a dozen-plus other syrupmakers around the Catskills, all celebrating Maple Weekend on March 16-17 and 23-24.) Photo from Roxbury Mountain Maple's Facebook page.
Editor's note: We have added more events to this post since it was first published.
Legend has it that an Iroquois chief accidentally tapped a maple when he’d just needed someplace to stick his tomahawk, and his significant other decided to try cooking with the liquid from the wounded tree. Thus began tree-to-table, and a lively lot of characters have been refining the art ever since.
Over the intervening years, syrup harvesters have found ways to be a bit gentler to the trees, which graciously donate their sweet essence year after year to humans who craft it into all sorts of delectable treats, a gentle act of organized foraging. Read more
It's 3.14 today, which means math nerds and pie-lovers around the world are celebrating Pi Day.
In honor of this most auspicious holiday, the Watershed Post is collecting beloved pie hotspots in the Catskills. (Like you really need an excuse for pie.) Got a favorite local source for fresh-baked pie? Let us know in a comment below, or tweet with the hashtag #CatskillsPie.
Top: John Lopez works in the kitchen of J&K North Main Bakery. He is looking for a bigger space to move into. Photo by Jason Dole.
Above: A slideshow of photos from Sullivan County bakeries.
On New Year's Eve, Livingston Manor’s Flour Power Bakery, a high-profile local business with a devoted following, closed abruptly. A brief email to friends and customers titled “There will be no more bakery” made it clear that Flour Power’s doors will not reopen.
Small, independent, artisanal bakers have been on the rise in Sullivan County. Over the past decade, many new entrepreneurs have emerged in the region to tap into a growing market for local food.
But lately, the ranks of Sullivan County bakers have been thinning.
Above: The popular Flour Power Bakery in Livingston Manor closed its doors this winter. Photo by Jason Dole.
Six-year-old Lucas Lemos gets a taste of fresh maple sap at Brook Farm in New Paltz. Photo by Dawn M. Cservak.
Three bundled-up boys huddled in the morning mist to catch drops of sap as it trickled out of a freshly drilled 1-inch deep hole in the bark of an old maple tree. Lucas, 6, licked the sap from his finger and looked up at his father, 39-year-old Luciano Lemos of Riverdale, in shock.
“It tastes a little like syrup,” he said, smiling. “Like watered down syrup.”
A handful of folks from all over New York State traveled to Brook Farm on Saturday, February 23 to take part in a maple sugaring prep-work party. The volunteers scrubbed metal buckets for sap collecting and piled up firewood to be used later for distilling the sap. They also set up maple tree taps on the 20-acre property.
The Brook Farm Project is a nonprofit sustainable farm just west of the village of New Paltz. The farm runs on a community supported agriculture (CSA) model, where members purchase shares of the season's produce and pick up fresh crops each week from June through November. Read more
Officially, TED stands for "Technology, Education, Design." But the growing video talk series is much more than an acronym. It's a movement of smart ideas, fascinating thinkers, and free access to innovation -- and this weekend, a Manhattan TED event dedicated to local food comes to the Catskills, via the wizardry of live broadcast.
Locavorism has spread like wildfire over the past decade or so, fueled in our region with the ample tinder of agricultural heritage, culinary brilliance, and hunger for overall sustainability. The possibilities for thinking global and acting local radiate in so many directions: planetary health, personal health, open space preservation, economic viability. Fresh, local and farm-to-table have become the standard by which many people judge their eating choices. Read more
Above: The Catskill Brewery on January 25, as workers were finishing up the welding and starting on the outside walls. Photo by Suzanne BeVier. Used with permission.
Above: Bitteto (left) and Gaebel representing Natural Contents at a holiday bazaar at Villa Roma. Photo from Natural Contents' Facebook page.
When Danielle Gaebel and Jennifer Bitetto first took the leap into eating healthy in the wake of a painful gall bladder scare, they made forays to Whole Foods in Paramus – a four hour expedition from their Sullivan County home – and set out to scale a steep learning curve. The couple who used to “stop at McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Taco Bell” all in one day were determined to make their changes stick, but there had to be a better (and closer-to-home) way.
With the founding of their online pantry, Natural Contents.com, they began to see what that better way was. And with the opening of the region’s first Community Supported Kitchen, they’ve positioned themselves at the cutting edge of farm to table.
The Watershed Post spoke to Gaebel about their culinary voyage of discovery and the business that’s growing around it. Read more
It's true: On any given weekend in the Catskills, you can't swing a cat without hitting a random celebrity. Looking glam as ever here despite the candid snapshot is Tyra Banks, supermodel and host of America's Next Top Model, spotted by a sharp-eyed Watershed Post reader at the Phoenicia Diner last weekend.
Delaware County's finest eels 
