Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues at 8.15, sunny skies, temperatures inched up to 39. Time to talk nutrition, joining us is Christina Ehlers from Seneca County's Cornell Cooperative Extension Branch. Christina, good morning. How are you?
Christina Ellers: Good morning, Paul. I'm doing great. How about you?
Paul Szmal: Doing well. Doing well. The fall season in October happens to be Farm to School Month.
Christina Ellers: It is, and there's so many great benefits to the farm to school programs within our county. We do implement this program throughout the four school districts throughout Seneca County. And yeah, it really helps, the benefits are the economic development, public health, education, the environment and equity and community engagement.
Paul Szmal: And how does the farm to school program work? Does this involve actually bringing food fresh from the farm to schools to use in their cafeterias or is it a little bit more expansive than that?
Christina Ellers: Well, it is that as well. What we do on the farm to school program enriches the connections communities have with fresh healthy foods and local food products. So what we do is we procure local products and we connect them with the cafeteria staff and then they purchase and implement the fresh produce and products within the cafeteria. And we do sampling as well so that kids can actually have fresh produce like we're going to be doing apple tasting in the cafeteria for the kids. But it also has the students gain access to healthy local foods as well as education opportunities for a lot of the school districts have school gardens. We do cooking lessons and we also take grade school kids to farm field trips to the farms so they can see where milk comes from or, you know, the produce.
Paul Szmal: Sounds like it's a pretty expansive program.
Christina Ellers: It is. It is. It's a great program. You know, it helps the farmers, the building of the economics within the county, and it just gives a lot of opportunities for kids to have nourished foods as well as farmers to have that support within local communities. And the hope being that by eating this fresh produce and knowing that it comes from local farms as these kids grow up and reach into adolescence and adulthood that they'll make those choices to continue buying that produce.
Paul Szmal: Correct. And that is really important. Hopefully we can install that at this early age in schools.
You mentioned apple tasting as part of the Farm to School program. Apples happen to be the October harvest of the month.
Christina Ellers: It is. So apples are so nutritious. You know, we always hear an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Apples do have a lot of healthy benefits. Apples are naturally fat, sodium, and cholesterol free, and they are an excellent source of dietary fiber and antioxidants. An apple is about, a medium apple is about, you know, 80 calories, and it's loaded with beta carotene and vitamin C. And we all want to make sure that we eat the skin. Most of the fruits, antioxidants, and vitamin C and fiber are within the skin and just underneath.
Paul Szmal: The great thing about apples is they're not just something that you can just, you know, clean up and eat as a snack or eat with a lunch or something like that. But they have a lot of cooking applications as well.
Christina Ellers: Yes. And actually, in September, we had a food preservation class all about apples. And we can slice apples. You can make apple jelly, apple sauce, apple butter, put them in salads. There's just so many uses for apples. And looking outside the box of just eating a regular apple, but they are great snacks to have around.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, my parents have a tradition. Every fall, they go out and they get apples and they go ahead and make a bunch of apple sauce and freeze it to use over the winter.
Christina Ellers: Yes. And doesn't that taste delicious in the middle of February?
Paul Szmal: Oh, yeah, it does. Absolutely. Absolutely. I always make sure I get a little supply for myself for the wintertime months as well.
We're talking with Christina Ehlers from Seneca County Cornell Cooperative Extension. We're talking about apples here, and there's one particular type of apple that happens to be the official apple of the Buffalo Bills.
Christina Ellers: Yes. So actually, Cornell University developed this apple. It's called the Snapdragon. And one of the parent apples to the Snapdragon is the Honeycrisp. So it has a monster crunch. And actually, Cornell University, their apple breeding program created this. And now the New York growers, it's a cooperative and it's called Crunch Time Apple Growers Cooperative. So you know how the Buffalo Bills are. We all have a huge heart for them. But when it comes down to the crunch time, you should grab a Snapdragon and hope for the best, I guess.
Paul Szmal: And the neat thing about the Snapdragons is they do have a little hint of a vanilla taste to them, too.
Christina Ellers: They do. Actually, you know, it's an extra crispy, juicy, you know, we call it a two-napkin apple with a hint of vanilla. And it's just an excellent apple to eat fresh, put in salads, or even some of your gourmet recipes.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. The Snapdragon apple is definitely a tasty one, whether it's straight from the lunchbox or being used for cooking purposes. You might try, too, a couple of different pairings with these Snapdragon apples for your snacking.
Christina Ellers: Yes. So there's a lot of ways that you could eat apples. But the Snapdragon is really good if you put peanut butter or eat it with cheese or even have cream cheese or mascarpone, the cream cheese mascarpone, which is a little bit more gourmet-ish kind of cream cheese. But they are delicious.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. I haven't tried the cream cheese trick yet. That sounds pretty intriguing.
Christina Ellers: It is. You should give it a whirl.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely worth a try.
This is the time of year when you're harvesting stuff out of the garden, and then you need to kind of prep your garden for the winter months so that you'll be ready when spring comes to go ahead and plant your vegetables and herbs and whatnot and start the cycle again. So what kind of prep do you need to do here at the end of the season?
Christina Ellers: So when you are harvesting your produce, find ways of preservation. You can freeze a lot of the produce. You can also can it, dehydrate it. We do have classes on food preservation. You can give us a call and we can definitely help you out with information on that. We also have our Master Gardener program, which this sort of falls underneath putting your garden to bed. So you want to make sure that your garden is cleaned up and making sure that you put mulch and enough of a thick bed of mulch so that, you know, the wind and everything like that through the wintertime doesn't erode some of your soil and the composting and gives it back the nutrients that you'll need for spring planting.
Paul Szmal: And there are a couple of upcoming events we want to touch base on here. October 19th is the Fall Fun Day at the Seneca Falls Community Garden.
Christina Ellers: Yes. So this is another, this is, we're putting our beds to, our garden beds up for the winter. So it is from 1 to 3 at the Seneca Falls Community Garden this Sunday. And you should definitely come out. There's going to be a lot of activities. I'll be there probably doing, I'll be doing an apple tasting and there'll be a lot of pumpkin decoration stuff and a lot of fun for the family.
Paul Szmal: And then October the 25th, a Mastering Fermentation Workshop is going to be held. This is going to be in conjunction with the electronic drop-off at the Seneca County Building?
Christina Ellers: Well, the 25th is the electric drop-off at the county building. And then on the 29th, we're going to be doing a Mastering Fermentation at Vince Park here in Seneca Falls. So you can go to our website and you can get all that information. And our website is SenecaCountyCCE.org.
Paul Szmal: And Christina, we appreciate it as always. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
Christina Ellers: Well thank you for the opportunity, Paul. Have a great day.
Paul Szmal: It is 826 on FLX Morning.
