new york

Blaze: Hudson Valley

A pegasus made from jack o'lanterns.

My second birthday gift was to attend The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze in Croton-On-Hudson, New York. We chose the perfect crisp fall night for viewing seven thousand lit jack o’lanterns—crisp, cool air with crunchy leaves underfoot, and the crowd was enthusiastic but chill, now that Halloween was past. The ambiance the spooky, but not so spooky it terrified the littles in the crowd.

Rows of jack o'lanterns all alight.

Overall, Blaze is an impressive display of pumpkin art with different areas dedicated to different themes running from a pumpkin-based fine art gallery (Banksy in pumpkin) to iconic NYC images, Celtic knots, dinosaurs and so, so much more. While all the jack o’lanterns are hand-carved, only some are carved from real pumpkins. Others are carved from realistic-looking faux pumpkins and, considering the size of the display, this only makes sense.

Jack o' lanterns carved and joined together to look like an old couple on a bench feeding pigeons.

If you want to visit Blaze around Halloween, I strongly suggest you purchase your tickets well in advance. There is plenty of parking and you can purchase snacks and drinks from a tent at The Blaze, but I say save your money and have a nice dinner with drinks ahead of time. We had supper at Badageoni, a Georgian restaurant in Mount Kisco, and ate so much khachapuri adjaruli (cheesy bread).

A wall of lit up jack o'lanterns carved to look like emojis.

Stone Barns, Tarrytown

Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture

I turned forty-six last weekend and one of my birthday gifts to myself was the The Innovation Labs & The Farm Tour at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in Tarrytown, New York. It was a fairy tale setting — a beautiful stone dairy (designed by Grosvenor Atterbury for the John D. Rockefeller estate in Kykuit in the 1930s, more recently reimagined by Guzy Architects) surrounded by fields of greens, fat sheep, and trees aflame with late autumn leaves. Very pastoral, but also very chic.

Sheep safely grazing.

The tour was led by a Stone Barns farmer and Blue Hill (that’s the restaurant portion) cook and featured some small, but delicious bites including a beautiful sourdough rye bread from the bakery with steaming cups of liquid red miso (one of the fermentation department’s projects). The fields were still green with spinach, dill, and mature brassicas and the air was full of bees as the farmer discussed the importance of crop rotation in regenerative agriculture.

I enjoyed the nose-to-tail, farm-to-fork ethos—soaps from herbs and tallow, beautiful wool blankets, paper-thin china cups and plates made from the kitchen’s waste bones—very much, but I’m aware that much of this progressiveness and experimentation exists because of millions of dollars in assets, the backing of the Rockefeller family, and public’s enthusiastic consumption of happy farm stories. I question its sustainability and practicality while, at the same time, I’d pay to work there for a day.

Delicious hot miso-based drink