Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8-16, FLX Morning. Not only is it Guest-O-Rama Day with all four slots filled, it's in-studio Guest-O-Rama Day. We've got everybody in the studio today. We love when that happens. Mo Titball is here from Ontario County Cooperative Extension. Good morning. Step up a little bit closer there.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Good morning, Ted, it's great to see you.
Paul Szmal: It's good to have you here and over the years we have raved about the very cool and very smart dietetic interns that you've had and introduce our newest one. So we have here Jenna Strickland who is actually a native to Ontario County and is with the Cornell program this year and she's doing great work for us over in Ontario County CCE. Welcome, Jenna, and we'll talk to you in a little bit about what you're doing.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Thank you for having me.
Paul Szmal: So let's talk, we got some events coming up first. I was just telling you before we went on air, I didn't realize how busy Camp Bristol Hills is during the offseason and you couldn't have picked a better day for the Fall Festival.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yes, so if anybody's looking for something to do this Saturday, we're having a Fall Festival from noon to 3 at Camp Bristol Hills. The foliage will be beautiful up there in the hills and we're gonna have activities for kids and adults as well and so people can come out and carve pumpkins and do some activities with the Master Gardeners and we're gonna have a local barbecue so we'll have some chicken halves from Dudley Poultry and roast half a pig and some local coleslaw. All these activities and everything are free. It's $13 for the barbecue and what time is that? Noon to 3.
Paul Szmal: Okay, so stop by. It's the last forecast I saw. I don't think we're gonna quite get to 70 but it might be closed on Saturday. It's gonna be absolutely beautiful.
You're also doing a number of homeschool activities at Bristol Hills. I didn't know about that.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yeah, so we're really trying to, you know, have people come out and utilize the property after camp is over and things like that. So we're doing a bunch of activities for homeschoolers. This is the first time we're doing it and it's been great. We have all the slots are filled and there's a waiting list so I think we'll be doing it in the future too. And then people can use the camp for events like the Sheriff's were out recently doing some team building and ropes course things and all that.
Paul Szmal: That's pretty neat.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yes, that was their Wellness Week and actually Jenna and I did a nutrition in service for them which was fun. But yeah, people can rent the camp and people can have weddings there. You can have a wellness retreat so check it out.
Paul Szmal: So did you tell them not to eat so many donuts?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Well, just add your fruit with the donuts, right?
Paul Szmal: The oldest police joke in the book.
You also have these 4-H Step Into programs which are really neat. So here's one coming up on November 11th, pickle making.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yes, so this is, you know, since the growing season is extended we haven't had a frost yet and people still have lots of things in their gardens. It's a great opportunity to learn how to pickle them. It's not just cucumbers. You can pickle pretty much any vegetables and fruits. So that'll be a fun workshop for the kids and a nice opportunity to learn a bit more about 4-H if people are on the fence, if they'd like to join. It is the time of year where people do start joining 4-H clubs and 4-H activities. So these are sort of independent things that kids can come out and check out 4-H. And of course this time of year we're looking for foods that we can store over winter and pickled foods fit the bill.
Paul Szmal: Exactly.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yeah, you know, you could can it or you could just do refrigerator pickles as an entry to pickling.
Paul Szmal: All right, and then of course if you go to the Ontario County CCE website you'll see more events coming up. We're kind of saving some of our time today for Jenna Strickland. So tell us a little bit about Jenna and then we'll have her tell us a lot about her. So Jenna's been great. She's hit the ground running with us here at Ontario CCE. You know, we haven't, we're sort of building up our nutrition program. So she's doing some interesting research and I'll turn it over to her.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: All right, welcome again. It's good to be here. Thank you. Yeah, so I studied biology first and then I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. So I found nutrition to be a really interesting topic that touches everybody. So no one's immune to it and the research is always changing. The trends are always changing. So I just found it to be so interesting and I'm pursuing my RD to become a registered dietitian. So I'm in my dietetic internship this year and I'm lucky enough to be placed with Ontario CCE.
So I'm doing a semester-long research project to really figure out what people in Ontario County want to learn about. So we'll be having a survey up on our website. It's going to be sent out through the listserv. We'll also be having some flyers put up in community places, hotspots, so that we can see what we want to learn about. Whether that be cooking for one, cooking on a budget, gardening. We want to know what people want to learn about and we also want to learn about how people want to receive that information. Whether that be through social media, online workshops, in-person workshops. So we want to learn about you. So be looking for that survey. So that's a really cool project that I've been working on. Hoping to get that up by the end of this week.
Paul Szmal: So you are from where in Ontario County?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: I'm from Farmington and I went to Victor Schools.
Paul Szmal: Okay. So happy to be back serving the community.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yeah.
Paul Szmal: Alright. Go Blue Devils.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Go Blue Devils, right.
Paul Szmal: So dietetic and nutrition careers can take you in any number of different directions. So where do you think ultimately you want to go with this or do you even know yet?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: That's a great question. So I actually became interested in nutrition through my athletic experience. I would love to work with athletes and that's community work in itself, but I'm also exploring other interests because it could take you to retail, you can work in a hospital, you can work at long-term care facilities. There's so much you can do with it.
Paul Szmal: Well, especially in athletics. I mean that's still a growing discipline. The idea, you know, used to be nobody really paid that much attention. It was just like high carbs and, you know, scarf down spaghetti at the training table. So what's the... it probably depends maybe on sport, but what's the perfect diet or the optimal diet for an athlete?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: That's going to depend on the athlete, right? I worked in football and there's just a difference across the board. People trying to gain weight, lose weight, you know, maintain our alignment. So it's really dependent to the person and actually it's really special to see how... I've worked with dieticians in the past and they can really specialize to that person.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the work you've been doing with a cooperative extension and this idea of surveying and finding out needs. That's pretty cool.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yeah, so we really want to develop programming in the future that's specific to the county. So what can we offer people that's unique for them that's going to best serve them? So that's the point of the survey and, yeah, really just making it unique. What our people need.
Paul Szmal: Now one of the things you've also done is you've gotten the venison donation coalition program started back up in Ontario County. So how did you go about that and what can people do if they have some leftover deer meat?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Yeah, so it's well established in Seneca County and we're trying to get it up and running in Ontario. So we've identified some local processors that are interested and we're in the process of confirming that with our venison donation coalition and we'll have a flyer up on our website. So if you happen to have an extra deer tag or your freezers full and you just want to go experience the hunt, you can drop off your deer at your local processor and it'll be handled from there. So they'll process it safely and then get that lean protein to the people who need it because one of the problems is that protein is really hard for pantries to hold on to. So we're going to be increasing that resource for them.
Paul Szmal: So did you have to go through any regulatory stuff or state regulations and stuff to do this?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: So we just started by identifying processors and then the venison donation coalition has helped us give them information on how to become state certified because some food pantries do want to see that state stamp.
Paul Szmal: Now also on Mo's website and blog, the Wild Harvest Table, you put together a venison stroganoff recipe. So how do you go about developing a recipe like that?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: I had a lot of help from Mo. She's a professional so she told me how to brine it so that it tastes more like beef to imitate the original recipe and then I cooked it up with my dad because my dad used to hunt so I had his help. But it tasted good. It was really good. So it got the full family approval before it went out.
Paul Szmal: What else you got? I didn't have a chance to look yet on the Wild Harvest Table these days.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: So there's a great search function on there so you know people are out. Duck's open this past weekend so if people got some ducks you know just type in duck and there's a delicious duck soup recipe with sweet potatoes which was perfect for this kind of weather right now. Lots of different venison recipes and things like that. So we'll be putting more things up. I just made a venison veal marsala that was really good.
Paul Szmal: Oh boy.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: So just putting the nutrition label together and getting that up on the website.
And just a quick note on the venison donation coalition program. There's a website for that and it's across the state. So that's sort of a unique program and that organization does a great job with it. So people can donate a deer or donate money to promote the program.
Paul Szmal: That's fantastic.
Has Mo told you about Thanksgiving dinner at her house yet?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Oh jeez.
Paul Szmal: I can only imagine. It's the envy of upstate New York. I always see the menu on social media and go, wow we're having butterball at our house. Thanksgiving appetizers and things like that. Just a little note though, the pork this weekend is actually from my farm so it's going to be a really good pork barbecue.
Paul Szmal: Very nice.
Yeah again that is this Saturday, you said noon to three?
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Correct. At Camp Bristol Hills Fall Festival and Open House. It's $13 for the barbecue. Lots of fun activities that are free. The foliage is going to be beautiful. The weather is going to be just about perfect. So stop by.
Paul Szmal: Jenna, terrific to meet you and congratulations on the fantastic work you're doing.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: Thank you.
Paul Szmal: Mo, you just keep finding them. These young ladies are bright and amazing and I love meeting them each year.
Mo Tidball, Jenna Strickland: It's amazing. And Ontario County residents be looking for that survey to help us out.
Paul Szmal: Yeah and help out the county to get more healthy. It's coming up to 825 now. It's FLX Morning.
