Apparently the QC Area has a marsh. Nahant Marsh… a low-lying, grassy wetland. I know this because Heather worked there all summer and fall of this year, but that’s the only reason. I don’t feel bad though. There are plenty of people I’ve encountered that have lived here their entire lives and didn’t know that it was there.
From what I understand the purpose of the marsh is conservation and they have some pretty neat animals and plants out there, but they also have a ton of poison ivy so watch out! Most recently they were featured in the paper as a good place to view river otters.
The Marsh seems to be trying to make itself more known as they are now on Facebook and are holding activities at the Marsh. Then again, maybe they always did that and I just didn’t know about it. Could be either one. I’m not sure.
I attended the Autumn Cornucopia on October 9th. The event was a chance to help make and enjoy a meal made from local foods. We got to take part in the making of three items: corn bread, apple cider, and pawpaw cookies. We didn’t do any of the kitchen work as far as boiling the apple cider or baking the cookies but we did the prework.
For the cornbread they had corn cobs that we learned to see, or easily remove all the kernels with our hands. Then we put them into a grinder with a hand crank and ground the kernels into cornmeal. For the apple cider we had an apple crusher or presser. I don’t know the technical name. We cut the apples into quarters and hand cranked them through the crusher into a wooden bucket. Then we pressed all the juice out of them into a second bucket.
Pawpaw is a local fruit that you don’t see in stores because they spoil so quickly. The inside is yellowish and looks and feels like mushy banana. It’s very custard-ish. We scooped out pawpaws and mixed together all the cookie ingredients and let the volunteers take them inside for baking. One batch had just pawpaw and one had chocolate chips as well.
Heather was one of the few people hard at work in the kitchen making not only the cornbread, cider, and cookies but also roasting bison, elk, and beef and making pumpkin soup and Jerusalem artichokes au gratin. She worked hard that day!
While we were waiting for all the food to be ready we got to walk around the marsh and look at the different animals they had in the main building. Once all the food was ready we dug right in though! All of it was very good. Jerusalem artichokes are similar to potatoes and I like those quite a bit, though I could have done without the pumpkin soup personally. I prefer pawpaw cookies with chocolate chips (shocking, I know). I ate far too many of them. And the cider we made was pretty fantastic!
All in all it was a fun day and depending on the topic of the activities, I could definitely be interested in attending other functions at the Marsh. I actually saw that this past weekend they had a informational session on different types of green energy for your home (solar panels, wind energy, etc) and the costs, pros, and cons of each. I thought that sounded really interesting, but I already had plans. Maybe they’ll do it again next year.
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