10:00am is coffee break at the Wilklow farm. On the day of my early spring visit I followed the crew of farmhands to the kitchen near the main farmhouse, where Sharon Wilklow and her sister Dorothy were baking treats to sell at the weekend market. They’d laid out an urn of excellent coffee and a small feast of fresh-baked quick breads, muffins, and cider donuts. During break I listened in on the news of the day: Sharon & Fred’s son Albert was getting married in a couple of months, and he had on hand the floorplans for the house he’s building nearby, on land adjoining the farm. The kitchen looked out over the slopes of the apple and pear orchards, and Sharon described how in few weeks the view from the window will be filled by blossoms. The white blooms will fill the kitchen with their fragrance as they traverse across the hillside, the trees of each variety flowering in its turn.

After break Fred took me to a small shed nearby. Inside, a half dozen piglets scampered in hay in the warmth of heat lamps. They’d only recently been purchased from the farm nearby where they’d been born and weaned. Their little bodies were small as footballs, but they’ll gain three pounds a day and in mid-July weigh 200 pounds or more. On this chilly first day of spring, they were still living full-time inside their warm shed, protected from the weather. But as they grow, and as the weather warms up, they’ll roam in about in a wooded pasture. There they’ll have shade and nice cool mud, and will root for food in the soil beneath the trees.

We also paid a visit to Fred’s steers, a herd of six or so Angus in a pasture down the road from the main farmhouse. At 2-1/2 years of age, they were just about ready for market.  In fact two more steers were already at the meatpackers, ready to be picked up. That’s as much beef as Fred will sell in six or eight weeks.

It had rained the day before and the pasture was muddy, but the grass would soon grow in and the steers will have as much of it as they care to eat. Their diet is varied though, to produce the kind of beef that Fred likes best and that he feels his customers like best, since not everyone likes beef that’s strictly grass-fed. So in addition to grass in summer and hay year-round, each morning and evening the steers get a non-medicated grain mixture. They usually get only as much as they’ll finish off, and no more, so that Fred’s not buying grain for the wild turkeys to swoop in from the surrounding woods and finish the leftovers. For an additional snack, the steers also get the leftover apple pumice from the cider press, and I watched them devour a load of the sweet stuff as Albert dumped it into their feeder. The steers do the farm a favor by eating up the pumice, as it doesn’t break down well and so can’t be dumped or buried. Before he raised steers, Fred was at bit of a loss for good ways to dispose of it. Now, the cidermaking leftovers can be incorporated into the farm’s ecosystem and at the same time contribute to a diet that produces flavorful, quality Beef. Fred’s not concerned if it’s not a diet that will bulk up the steers as large or as fast as possible. As he tells it, “I’m not looking for maximum growth, I’m looking for good growth.”

On this first day of spring, at the very early beginning of the growing season, the farm was still operating with its small year-round crew, with only enough hands to run the cider press and the farmers markets. But already the summer crew was beginning to re-appear, returning to the Hudson Valley from their homes in Mexico and Jamaica. Fred sponsors them, and houses and pays them, according to the rules of the H2A visa program, and at the peak of the season he’ll have a crew of have 20 farmhands. Most of the crew return to the farm year after year, some for as long as 20 years or more. They are knowledgeable and invaluable members of the farm’s operation, employees who know when each apple variety opens and which trees ripen first.

With the help of this crew, Wilklow Orchards maintains a presence in four New York City greenmarkets: Borough Hall, Grand Army Plaza, Fort Greene, and beginning this year, a new market in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Manhattan. Market days are long, and they require a lot of hands to be off of the farm during peak season when the farm’s work is never done. The Staten Island Ferry Terminal market is especially demanding: they need to be set up and open for business by 7:00 to catch the morning rush, so they pull the truck in at 5:30. And by the time they’ve worked the evening rush and packed up, it’s 8pm. It all adds up to a workday that begins at 3am, when the truck leaves the farm, and goes until 10pm when they finally arrive home. During the hotter weeks of the summer the day is even longer, since they can’t pack the truck the night before and must get up an hour earlier to get the goods out of cold storage.

But days spent at home on the farm are long days too, typically stretching from sunrise to sunset. These days they’re starting at 7am or so, but by July they’ll be in the fields picking berries at 5:30. In describing this routine, Fred quotes a professor from his college days: “Anybody can put in a 40-hour week doing something they don’t like because there’s time to do what you want after work. But if you’re putting in a 100-hour week & you don’t love it, you’re in trouble.”

This is the first of a planned series of posts about the farmers at the Brooklyn Greenmarkets. This post profiles Wilklow Orchards and its proprietor Fred Wilklow. Wilklow operates stands at the Borough Hall, Grand Army Plaza, and Fort Greene markets in Brooklyn, and the Staten Island Ferry Terminal market in Manhattan. Many thanks to Fred and his family for showing me around their beautiful farm, and for helping me kick off this project!

My first visit to Wilklow Orchards was on March 20th, the first day of spring. The air was cool and the sky was covered over with low wintery gray clouds, but a warm early spring sun showed through from time to time. It was the very beginnings of the growing season in the Hudson Valley, the perfect day for my first visit to a greenmarket farm.

I arrived at the farm at around 8:30, pretty early by the standards of my midtown office job. I found a crew already hard at work making cider, and I guessed they’d been at it for couple of hours already since they’d already filled the entire bucket of a front loader with apple pumice, squeezed bark dry from the cider presses. Fred Wilklow emerged and shook my hand; before he could show me around he’d need a minute to deal with an oil delivery. He suggested I start my visit by hiking up through the apple and pear orchards which sloped up behind the cider house, where I’d find a good spot to look out over the whole farm.

The orchards were surrounded by tall fencing, put up to keep deer from the nibbling buds and new shoots off of the apple trees. I squeezed through a gap in the fence, crossed a small brook, and climbed the path that led up between the rows of trees. The branches were still bare, but buds were beginning to swell at their tips. Nearly silver-tipped, as Fred described them, soon they’d be green-tipped, and soon after the branches will be covered in green leaves and fragrant white blossoms. Spring pruning had just been completed, and in the lanes between the trees the cut branches were gathered into neat rows on the brown grass. They’d soon go through the brush chopper, at the moment in the toolshed getting a new set of teeth, which will grind even thick branches fine enough to just be left on the ground, to feed down into the soil beneath the trees just they were cut from.

At the top of the ridge where the apple orchards came to an end I took in the view over the farm. Straight below me was the cider house, in a cluster of barns and sheds and greenhouses, the noise from the cider press now swallowed up in the larger overall quiet stillness. I could see the building Fred had called the dirt cellar, an ancient, earth covered shed still used for cold storage, though it’s so old he had no idea when it was built. To the right along the the stream was the main farmhouse, the bakery, and another much larger greenhouse. The Wilklows plan someday to consolidate the greenhouses into a more practical layout, the current arrangement having grown up over time as the farm and its business expanded. It’s one of a long list of projects, large and small, in a continual effort to improve the farm’s efficiency.

Behind me rose Illinois Mountain, Wilklow property on this side as far as its summit, though the only crops found there are ramps, the sought-after wild leeks that Fred began to forage for each spring after his Greenmarket customers started asking about them. On its far side are the Wilklow peach and plum orchards, in fields that get sunlight more than an hour earlier, which makes them often a full l0 degrees warmer. I wouldn’t get to visit them today, nor would I yet see the berry and vegetable fields near New Paltz, in flatter ground better suited for raising vegetables than the hilly, rocky soil of Pancake Hollow.

Along with cider making, today’s tasks included tending the seedlings in the greenhouses. Becky & Jennie, Fred’s daughters, were transplanting the tiny plants (cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, marigolds, to name only a very few) from their seed beds into flats. In a few weeks they’ll be found at the greenmarket, sold as starters for container gardens on Brooklyn patios and Manhattan fire escapes. The seedlings for the vegetable beds, the plants that will eventually produce the eggplants, peppers, and heirloom tomatoes for the greenmarket tables (and for my dinner table), were just beginning to grow in the larger greenhouse I’d seen from the orchards.

Until the seedlings get big enough to survive the trip to Brooklyn, Fred’s stand in the greenmarket will be filled with the last of fall’s apples, varieties that hold up well in cold storage and remain crisp and juicy and sweet over the winter months, along with cider and baked goods and jam from the farm’s kitchen. Already though, the first of the Spring’s harvest has begun to appear as well: there are pussywillows for sale, that Fred and his crew harvested alongside the brook, and soon they’ll be joined by lilac blossoms cut from the hundreds of bushes that grow near the pond behind the farmhouse. Then sugar snap peas will appear and start off the parade of food that will continue through the berries, peaches, greenbeans, corn, and tomatoes of summer to the apples and pumpkins of autumn.

Maybe the “freezing things” post should appear in summer, at the moment when I’m stuffing my farmer’s market booty into Ziplocks for long term storage. But it’s now, in the dark days of winter, when the dark earthy flavors of parsnips & turnips & potatoes are all that’s to be had in the greenmarket produce bins, that the work put in to putting food by pays off. That I now can have the bright & sweet flavors of summer, teleported to me as if by magic across fall and winter and into the late winter days of March, is a delight bordering on the miraculous, well worth small labor it took to pack these foods away.

Berries were the easiest: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, each in their turn as they hit their peak of flavor and abundance over the summer months. Patted dry after a quick wash, they’re spread in a single layer onto a baking sheet (so they’ll remain individual berries, rather than becoming a giant berry clump), then covered in plastic wrap and set in the freezer. In the morning they’re solid as pebbles, and they get poured into a giant-sized ziplock bag with whatever berries went in the week before; I didn’t bother to batch or measure these out, or to separate the blue from the black from the rasp. In the end I was quite happy with my pillow-sized mixed bag of multicolored iced-berry nuggets. They would’ve worked great in muffins or pancakes, but I’m pretty sure that all of them went, handful by frozen handful, into my morning breakfast cereal, turning the milk purple as they thawed and extending my tart summer berry fix of all the way to December.

For some, an additional minimal bit of processing was needed. The blackberries were quartered to keep them in line with their smaller blueberry and raspberry cousins. The strawberries were hulled, and some were halved or quartered, although for some reason that I can no longer fathom, I left an entire batch of them whole, and I now have a quart bag’s worth of rock-hard, walnut-sized strawberries that I have no idea what to do with. Will they endure a spin in the blender?

Maybe I had some plan for those much-larger-than-bite-sized strawberries when I bagged them in June, but now months later that plan is lost to me. Most of the time when I freeze things I communicate much better with my future self about exactly what is in that bag, how much of it there is, and when it went into the freezer, writing these coordinates with a sharpie onto the ziplock’s white patch. Maybe this was unnecessary for the sweetcorn, which to this day has kept its unmistakable sunshine-yellow color and has never dulled into the unrecognizable frozen-substance color that food usually takes on in the freezer, but I marked each bag anyway if only to distinguish between the 1/2 cup and one-cup portions. Freezing the corn was more involved than the simpler-than-simple berries, but not by much. The corn was shucked, blanched for a minute or two in boiling water, then cut off the cob into big golden mounds. These were scooped up into half-cup and one-cup portions and placed into the marked ziplocks (nota bene: always label the bags first – if you’re as clumsy as me you’ll invariably poke through the bag with your sharpie if you try to write on it after it’s filled). The filled bags were rolled up and stacked onto baking sheets and in the morning, frozen into neat logs, they went into the freezer drawer, from which they emerge from time to time to get added to refried beans, chili (a la Alan Harding), cornbread, or to simply sit dressed with butter and salt alongside a slice of meatloaf, sweet & bright & tender like no canned niblets can ever be.

In the great August tide of greenmarket produce, there’s a swarm of only-in-summer, can’t-get-this-in-the-supermarket flavors, but to me perhaps the iconic, totemic taste of summer is found in tomatoes. I pine all year long for the juicy tart-sweet taste of tomatoes in summer, and to try and have that taste in Winter, I stowed away two quart-sized bags of frozen, whole roma tomatoes. To prepare them for the freezer I blanched them just enough for the skins to slip off — a step that my brother, an inveterate food-freezer, deems unnecessary. He says the skins will slip off easily from the frozen whole tomatoes once they’re thawed; however I took the extra of blanching & peeling for the sake of out-of-the-bag ease when the day comes for them to be turned into sauce. I plan to drop them frozen into a saucepan and cook them down into a marinara or Bolognese sauce — I’m expecting they’ll disintegrate nicely in the pot after their months in a frozen state, and I look forwarding to savoring the as much of the flavor of summer sun as they’ve managed to keep. I’ve been procrastinating this dish though, since I expect it to take up all of my frozen Romas, leaving me to wait until August before I can taste their kind again.

The effort to stash away these treats was minimal, but it made me feel I’d tapped into an ages-old tradition of preserving summer foods of summer for use in winter (yea ok the home freezer is a new twist on the tradition, but the spirit is the same, right?) I like how it lets me sidestep the supermarket, giving my an option beyond the giant food distribution chains that brings me raspberries from Chile or Florida, food bred for travel, not for flavor. My freezer lets me have food grown close to home by a farmer I’ve met, even in winter when nothing grows here.

For the past couple of years, I’ve eyed with curiosity the jars of pozole, white and blue , on the shelf alongside the dried chiles in my neighborhood spice & and tea shop Two for the Pot. “Pozole” — such a great name, and it looks like, well, corn, and so certainly must be a close cousin to the other corn-based staples of Mexican food, like tortillas and tamales, which sit very high on my list of favorite foods. When this month’s Gourmet magazine featured a recipe for Pozole Rojo, I knew the time had come to find out what one does with these strange oversized corn kernels. It was Labor day, and I had a good long afternoon to devote to this dish, and as I found out I’d need it.

When I saw the pile of pork ribs that made up the four pounds the recipe called for I knew this was going to be a formidable project. The recipe’s first step was to cook up a broth from these ribs, along with bunches of cilantro and mint , onion, peppercorns, and twenty – yes twenty – cloves of garlic. After simmering the ribs for the two hours they got beautifully tender, and the broth got beautifully porky, especially after I let the ribs cool for a while in the broth. Once cool enough to handle, part of the broth went into the blender, along with the onion, garlic, and peppercorns that had cooked in it (the cilantro and mint were squeezed out and tossed). This mixture then went back into the pot, which now contained a truly flavorsome brew– rich from the pork, spiced from the herbs & pepper & onion, and just a little foamy from the whirl in the blender. This dish was off to a good start.

But this delicious liquid was not the completed broth — in order to become the rojo of the recipe’s name it needed an infusion of chiles. These were slit open & de-seeded, and toasted on a hot cast iron skillet — they were pretty thin-skinned, and so didn’t need much time on this makeshift comal before they became darkened and fragrant. They then soaked for half an hour in boiling water, which became a dark maroon brew, and which after cooling slightly went into the blender along with the chiles themselves and a bit more onion & garlic. This liquid was cooked down & condensed, and finally added to the pork broth. At this point the shredded meat from the ribs went in as well, and now the stew was rojo indeed – and delicious: spiced from the chiles and rich from the pork.
So far so good – but what about the pozole? I’d set an appetizing red stage with the porky broth, so what about the star of the show? I needed some investigation here, since I was determined to use the dried posole from my neighborhood shop, instead of the canned hominy called for in the recipe, or the frozen I sometimes see as a recommended substitute. The shop’s proprietor gave me only the advice to soak them in several changes of water. I knew they’d cook in boiling water like a pot of beans, and guessed they’d take about as long. With help from Google I dug around and found that they wouldn’t require the 50 minutes I’d give a pot of garbanzos – they needed to cook for 3 or 4 hours. Oops – it was already 4:00 when I learned this bit. Dinner was going to be a little later than planned.

Curious about this strange ingredient, while the kernels cooked I read on to learn more about what these weird, enlarged corn kernels really are. I had a vague and vaguely alarming notion that hominy is corn soaked in lye, something that always seemed surely to be toxic in a way that I couldn’t conceive of an ancient, traditional food to be. What is lye? What is this process exactly? It is, I learned, called (and this is my Awesome New Food Word of the Year) Nixtamalization, and it is a process that dates to more than a thousand years BC, and which transforms the nutritive value of corn so significantly that it becomes a fully sustaining staple grain. Without nixtamalization , a population that depends on corn as its staple grain would be malnourished; without nixtamalization, according to Wikipedia, the great Maya and Aztec civilizations of Mesoamerica could not have existed. Yes, the process involves cooking corn (dried field corn, I suppose?) in an alkaline solution, of which lye is one example. The earliest preparations were apparently derived somehow from wood ashes, tough other preparations use mined alkali substances like sodium carbonate. And yes, this same process allows my beloved tortillas and tamales (as in nixtamalization) to come in to being. In my mind I have an image I must have read somewhere, of offerings to the gods made from ritually prepared tamale masa — no doubt thanking them for nixtamalization, the sacred cooking technique, that magically transformed corn and allowed these great cultures to thrive.

But back to the recipe at hand, where I left my pozole cooking in a pot of water on the stove. I’d gotten the last of the stock at Two for the Pot, so I was using a combination of white & blue kernels, since the two types had to be pooled to make up the amount I needed. I was surprised to find that the white & blue kernels seemed to cook at quite different rates – the white ones having opened up in a flower-like bloom before the blue ones were completely softened. Unfortunately, this led me to stop cooking the kernels too soon, and some of the blue kernels were left unbloomed and a little more toothsome than I liked. I’m glad f I used the dry stuff though, as I found it to have a hearty cereal flavor and texture that I doubt I’d find in a can of hominy.

As they were, they went into the broth, which was then simmered for a final five minutes to combine the flavors and finalize the stew. The final result was certainly delicious – yet I felt that there was a bit of room for improvement for next time. First, because as mentioned some of the pozole kernels were a little undercooked and so too chewy – if they’d all bloomed as the white kernels did I would have been very happy. Secondly, I didn’t take to heart the recommended accompaniments – the cheese, crema, crisped tortillas, radishes, lettuce, etc would really have finished this dish. I’ll have a second chance to make that final touch pretty soon, as this recipe made a LOT of stew, and much of it is now packed up in my freezer.

I served this with the Arroz con Pollo recipe also in this month’s Gourmet, which was a more successful dish in my mind. It benefited greatly from some smoky chorizo and it required me to make a beautiful red oil from Annato seeds, which, ever–reliable, Two for the Pot also had on stock.

It’s been too hot and muggy in my kitchen to cook, and too nice at the beach to stay at home and try. I have issues, of course, with missing out on the August bounty of corn and tomatoes (and green beans, and berries, and peaches…), and my planned blog post on freezing goes still unwritten. In the meantime though, while my stovetop is idle, I’m indulging my love for food by reading about it.

The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution
This book came to me in an unexpected way: I knew about it from a favorable review it received in the New York Times, but I hadn’t yet picked up a copy of the newly-released paperback edition. One day while perusing Midtown Lunch, one of my favorite food blogs, I saw it offered as contest prize; the challenge: write up a notable food memory from childhood (or beyond childhood, luckily for me, since as a child I didn’t actually eat food). My dazzling prize-winning entry can be found here — scroll down to find the “comment from dave.” But about the book itself: once you get past the goofy title, it’s quite good: rigorously researched, interesting, and written in a sort of quickly paced, breezily intelligent style. It’s an account of how the dominant food culture of the United States transformed, in a very short time, from a narrow, provincial, xeno- and spice-phobic gastronomy to one that embraces an enormous range of cuisines and flavors. Its focus is on three careers that the author considers to be the vanguard of the American Food Revolution: those of Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne.

I’m fascinated by the history of American food culture, which is one reason why I’m enjoying this book so much. To understand the impact of this story you only have to note, as this book’s intro does, that as recently as the eighties, salsa – salsa!! – was to most Americans unknown & exotic. The introductory chapter also recounts a 1939 New York Herald Tribune column that explains to its readers what a pizza (“pronounced ‘peet-za’”) is. For foods that are now so intimately engrained in our daily diets to have been completely unknown so recently really does speak of a huge and rapid transformation: a revolution that surely extends beyond the palate and belly to something you would have to call a national soul.

Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Eating and Living by Carlo Petrini and Gigi Padovani

Speaking of revolution: Slow Food is international, not just American, in scope, but it is a movement that has fiercely caught on in the US, as you can see by the number and range of local chapters on the slow food website. Speaking in terms of “movement” and “revolution,” anachronistic as it may sound, is completely appropriate here: the book shows Slow Food emerging in very much a political spirit, with its roots equally in activism and in a regard for food, wine and conviviality that has to be described as distinctly Italian. It tells of the food at local, traditional Italian festivals, the tribulations and transformations of the Italian wine industry, and the congenial and coalescing force of Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini’s charismatic personality. It’s assembled from interviews with Petrini, and can ramble a bit at times, but it gives great insight into the passions behind what has become an influential presence across the international food world.

That, though, is only the book’s first half; the second half, perhaps the more interesting section, contains “Twenty Stories of Presidia and Food Communities” and “Index of the Presidia” — brief accounts of a huge range of local foods, food customs, food producers, ingredients; the indigenous foods and traditions that Slow Food is sworn to protect, from syrup made from heirloom roses in Liguria to breeders of the Old Gloucester Cow, whose milk was made into cheese since the 13th century.

Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean
I bought this book with money I made from my foray into catering earlier this summer. I’ve yet to actually cook anything from it, especially during these too-hot-to-cook dog days of August, but I’ve been learning a lot from the breadth of its recipes. This is not the how-to-cook-middle-eastern starter cookbook I’d hoped it would be: its recipes lean toward pretty complex preparations. And the book’s novel organization, by different spice groupings (“a map that you can use as you embark on your own spice journey”), seems a little precious to me. And I’m a little dubious of the authenticity of its ‘middle-eastern cuisine as seen through the lens of me and my popular Cambridge restaurant’ approach. But then again I’m also dubious of ‘authenticity’ as a judge of cuisine, since it should, to some extent, take a back seat to whether the food’s good. And there’s no denying that a recipe like “Chickpea & Potato Terrine Stuffed with Pine Nuts, Spinach, Onion and Tahini” sounds pretty damn delicious.

September 2007 issue of Gourmet Magazine
The entire issue, cover to cover, is devoted to Mexican and Latin cuisine: unlikely places where you’ll find it in the US; recipes for making it at home; interviews with its leading purveyors; and of course beautiful photos of it, as it’s enjoyed by beautiful people.

I can’t wait to try the Arroz con Pollo (p78) and the Pozole Rojo (p96), and if I had a tortilla press I’d sure try the crazy stuffed-tortilla quesadallas (p101). I’m reading this issue cover-to-cover, and don’t ask me to pass my copy along to you when I’m done, ‘cause I’m keeping it. (Disclaimer: yes, I work for the company that makes this magazine; I’m still not giving you my copy though.)
<>

A guest post from my brother Joe — a veterinarian and fellow food lover who lives in Vermont. Thanks Joe!
One of the joys of living in a rural area is the ability to purchase food directly off the farm. As a farm animal veterinarian, I also love knowing that some of the food I eat comes from animals I know and from owners whom I trust about their animal’s care. It’s also nice to have room for a large kitchen garden. Summer is the time I can put all these things together on my plate.

My garlic goes into the ground in late October – it’s the last duty before the garden goes to sleep for the winter. The bulbs will be ready to pull in late July or August, but before that, in June, they produce an edible seed head or scape. The scapes are cut off so that more energy goes to the developing bulb, but what to do with all these garlicky greens? I hate to waste anything from my garden, but one can put only so many of these tangy buds on a salad.

Recently while visiting the Middlebury Farmer’s Market, I visited a vendor who had made a pesto from his scapes. He was generous with his recipe so I decided to give it a try. I placed my scapes (around a pound or so I would guess) into a food processor with olive oil, a little lemon juice and salt. The resulting paste was a little too garlicky so I added a handful of fresh basil from my garden and some walnuts. The finished product was excellent on a pizza with fresh tomatoes and roasted red peppers cooked on our backyard grill or just dipped out on a pita chip.

Tonight I decided to take the leftovers a step further. I butterflied some boneless chicken breasts from our local poultry farm and cooked them to near doneness on the grill. Next I filled the cut breast with a layer of the pesto and a slice of Orb Weaver cheese produced by two very good friends of ours. I then finished the chicken on the grill. I served the chicken with a salad made from fresh tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil and olive oil along with a red wine from a Quebec vineyard we visited in May and a whole wheat batard from a local bakery.

Just returned from a fantastic vacation to the Virgin Islands, where I lived for two weeks aboard my friend’s boat, and where I’d hoped to gather tales of local cuisine but ended up not doing much in the way of food investigation. This is largely because Patrick Shea, one of my shipmates on the adventure, proved to be far more energetic than I when it came to cooking in the hot and narrow ship’s galley, and he mostly took charge of picking which foods to provision with. But it also may be because the range of local cuisine in St. Thomas is actually fairly small. Certainly, we had some amazingly fresh seafood, and the mangoes and pineapples were out of this world, and conch fritters and coconut shrimp of course. But the Virgin Islands, and St. Thomas in particular, have limited agriculture due to their mountainous terrain and rocky soil. So, much of the produce is shipped in (sometimes from New York I’m told) and I was hard pressed to find much in the way of local food.

All of which made me happy when I returned home to Brooklyn, and strolled back into the local Borough Hall farmer’s market, now bursting with greenbeans, corn, tomatoes, peaches and other summer faves. When I got to the table full of berries, I couldn’t restrain myself from buying a couple of things I had no idea what to do with: gooseberries, just because I loved their name, and red currents, for their incredible red color. When I got home I consulted the Joy of Cooking, and found that “in northern Europe, tangy red currents are turned into… elegant sauces for meat.” But the Joy didn’t offer any further help than that – no recipes for these elegant sauces – so I turned to the internet. Querying Google with “red current sauce” turned up plenty of recipes, but nearly all of them called for jam or preserves, instead of the beautiful red berries I had in front of me. A couple of hits did show me recipes for sauces made from fresh berries though, so I’d at least found a starting point.

The recipes I found (here and here) both followed more or less the same pattern: put the currents in a saucepan & cook them down, with a little liquid and a lot of sugar. I wanted to keep mine as tangy and savory as possible, so I used dry sherry for the liquid (one recipe called for port) and kept the sugar to a minimum. I also added about a 1/4 or 1/2 tsp of orange zest, and started it all off with a minced shallot in cooked in olive oil.

I’d expected a thin, liquidy sauce, but after about 15 minutes of cooking it thickened up pretty nicely (helped perhaps by the addition of olive oil?). The flavor was quite strong and definitely tangy; I worried that it was too pungent, and wondered whether I should’ve used water in place of the sherry, or whether I needed to cut the finished sauce with some water or stock to back off the flavor. My worries were groundless though: a couple of restrained teaspoonfuls of this sauce atop a grilled pork chop was just right, and the bright pungency of the sauce made a great accent to the smokey chop. As far as I’m concerned you can toss the A-1 Sauce right in the can – this sauce was simple and quick, and beats the bottled sauce by a mile for freshness.

The full plate: a farm-raised pork-chop topped with a garden-fresh red-current sauce; new potatoes that were parboiled, then grilled & smashed; fresh green beans & the summer’s first corn on the cob, and a thick slice of grilled fresh tomato — a perfect summer dinner.

I’ll definitely make the current sauce again — maybe next time with a touch of ginger. Now, if I can only figure out what to do with the gooseberries.

Here’s my recipe for the Red Current Sauce.

Last week my friend Steve called to say he’d landed a catering gig, to feed 200 scooter enthusiasts at a scooter rally, and would I like to help. I took on the challenge of feeding 200 people, to see what the experience is like and whether I could pull it off. Good people of the NYC scooter clubs, should you happen upon this blog, I’m sorry to spoil any illusion you might have had that you were fed by professional caterers. No, you were fed by a couple of food-loving amateurs, who wanted to give it a go to see if we could handle it.

My assessment: we handled it pretty well in that ‘not bad for the first time’ sort of way. Our menu: burgers, hotdogs and chicken wings on the grill, plus chili and mac’n’cheese in hotel pans.

Mac’n’cheese for 200 people? How in the hell do you do that? For expert advice I called my friend and neighbor Naidre Miller, proprietor of neighborhood happy spot Naidre’s. Naidre’s advice: don’t take a home kitchen recipe and size it up: get a food service recipe. She happened to have one for Mac’n’cheese and she passed it on to me. The recipe made one hotel pan worth and I decided to double it for the hungry crowd of scooter lovers.

How to cook six pounds of macaroni? In a really, really big pot. From the Jetro, along with our cases of hotdogs and burgers, our foot-high stack of American cheese slices, our deli-size jar of mustard, we brought home a pot nearly big enough to take a bath in. I poured in salted water by the stockpot-full, set it across two burners on the stove, and watched and waited & waited & waited for it to boil. When the pasta was finally cooked I scooped it out with a strainer, and with help from Steve carefully poured off the cauldron boiling water into my apartment kitchen sink. The mac then went back into the huge pot, along with six sticks of butter, two dozen eggs, eight cans of evaporated milk, two tablespoons of Tabasco, tablespoonfuls of salt and pepper and nearly an entire jar of McCormick dry mustard. Once this was stirred together, I added seven pounds – seven pounds! – of shredded cheddar cheese.

It was weird and very cool and kind of weighty working with such quantities: any mistake would be multiplied by 200. Stirring all that cheese & pasta together took some muscle, and pouring it from the huge pot into the flimsy aluminum hotel pans in my small apartment kitchen was a delicate – and definitely a two-person — operation. But into the oven the pans finally went — props to my new kitchen’s oven for accommodating both pans — and the enormous pot was handed over to Steve to make the chili. NB: Steve didn’t have a foodservice chili recipe, and despite Naidre’s advice, sized up a Food Network recipe for pork loin chili. It ended up working ok, and came out tasting great, but it was definitely scary working with 20 pounds of pork loin.

At the venue calamity struck: one of the folding tables provided by the scooter club collapsed as I was trying t o move it into serving position, dropping one of the pans of chili to the ground and pouring out about a third of its contents. It looked like a heap of wasted chili, but hotel pans are commodious, and there was plenty left inside for the queuing crowd, and another pan besides, plus two pans without pork for the vegetarians. We fired up the grill, opened up the first box of burgers, and started cooking. The burgers and dogs disappeared as fast as we could take them off the grill, and we made the mistake of trying to insert a round of chicken wings which took too long to cook & stalled out the line. But then we fell into a rhythm and for the most part kept the line moving and the crowd happy. Lots of thank yous. Overall I think we did a pretty passable job — not bad for a first time catering effort. The preformed frozen burger patties in boxes were definitely not my style, and I would’ve loved to have spiced up some quality ground beef for some really flavorful burgers, but adhering to a ‘keep it simple’ strategy for this first outing was pretty smart. Maybe next time – if there is a next time – I’ll have the time for some extra touches.

The move is nearly here. Less than a week from now Dave’s Kitchen will relocate two block down and across the street to a new apartment, blown by the changeable winds of rental life. I’m very sad to leave the kitchen in my current place – the new one is a bit smaller, but promises to be quite functional. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to tell as I learn my way around it. And of course as the move gets nearer I’ve had no time for the kitchen, except to put the kitchen into boxes. I’ve been subsisting on takeout, spending my time packing stuff, sorting stuff, selling stuff off at a stoop sale. I’ve missed out on a beautiful month of spring weather and – worse – a month of my favorite spring food.

One weekend though I did manage to pick up these oddities. They looked like jalapenos, but came in the red, yellow and orange of fancy bell peppers, which is, in fact, what they were. Baby bell peppers. I’m sure I’d never seen them before. Two of the produce markets on Court Street – Pacific Green and Jim & Andy’s – had them on the same day, and I bought them wondering if they’d grill up next to the farm-raised steaks I’d bought at the Borough Hall farmer’s market. Oh, and indeed they did. They needed no more prep than a wash and a thin coat of olive oil, then onto the grill 10 minutes or so before the steaks went on. I turned them frequently and watched closely so they wouldn’t burn, and soon the smell of charcoal and searing beef was perfumed with the tang of roasting pepper. They charred nicely, proved tough enough to stand up to the grill, and went directly onto the plate – no need to de-vein or de-seed or peel off the skin. Delicious and a perfect compliment to the steak.

The next week I was invited to a BBQ (the last ever John Fritz rooftop party, as it happens), and thought I’d bring a bag of these delicious treats to throw onto the grill.  But at Jim & Andy’s I found only the last wrinkled dregs of the previous week’s crop. Same luck at Pacific Green, where the shopkeeper brought out the leftovers from the store-room (they were too withered and ugly for display) and offered to sell me as much as I wanted for a dollar a pound. I came away with a pillow sized bag of them, then sorted out the worst of them when I got home. They tasted just fine coming off of John’s grill, and I think all the partygoers liked them but then again I may have eaten them all myself.

But they left me with a mystery. What were these strange little peppers? The sign in the market called them “baby bell peppers,” but they couldn’t’ve been just young bell peppers, which are green. No doubt they’re a variety bred to ripen small, and with the benefit that they don’t need the extensive prep work of a full-sized roasted pepper. I’ll ask around in the markets and maybe someone will have them again, but if not I’ll look for them next year.

My first guest post, from my friend & hostess extrordinaire LJ Lindhurst. Thanks LJ!

I got this recipe from my friend Murt in L.A.—ever since she told me about it, I’ve been dying to make it. The original link for the recipe is here.

This turned out VERY good, and made a LOT of food. I was originally afraid it wasn’t going to feed the seven hungry adults I invited for dinner, but this proved to not be a problem in the least, as I’ve got a huge Tupperware full of leftovers in the fridge right now. I served it with a big basket of rolls and a nice green salad with goat cheese, beets, walnuts, and apples. For dessert we had sour cream pound cake (I used this recipe, which turned out great).

Despite the daunting number of ingredients in the pot roast recipe, it was a lot of fun to make, and I made every effort to follow the recipe to a tee. The only variation I made was the cut of beef—the recipe calls for “chuck roast or top round” and all I could find at the store was “bottom round”. (Dave suggested I look up the difference—from what I can figure out, it’s simply considered a less tender cut of beef. This did not seem to be a problem with this recipe, however—the meat turned out perfectly tender and delicious).

This recipe starts by layering simple stew vegetables: potatoes, red onion and carrots. You toss in springs of rosemary and thyme, and then cover it with a cup of beef broth, a big can of crushed tomatoes, some honey and garlic.

Preparing the beef was the fun part. You make a “spice mixture” to rub into the beef. Be warned, though—this recipe calls for making a LOT more spice mixture than you could possibly use. I made mine in a little jar in anticipation of this; now I have a really great spice mixture that I can use next time I make meat. Also be warned—this spice mixture turned out a little bit on the pepper-y side. I think the red pepper and the Cajun spices are ok, but the large amount of black pepper it calls for can probably be cut down to half. One way or the other, I felt like it needed a bit of adjusting, but this is a nitpick; no one except me complained about the spiciness, and it wasn’t so spicy that it was unpalatable.

After you rub down the roast with the spice mixture, you set it in the crock pot on top of the vegetables. You then pour 1.5 cups of wine over it. This doesn’t SOUND like a lot, but it is indeed a great deal of wine. The entire mixture turned red, but that could be because I had a VERY hearty, quite expensive bottle of red wine here (and had forgotten to stop at the liquor store to get an actual burgundy wine). I was hesitant to use such a good bottle of wine, but well, then it was open, and… well… it WAS 11:30am, which is cocktail hour SOMEWHERE in the world, right?

And yes, I was making this at 11:30am because it is worth noting that this dish cooks for a full eight hours on high in your Crock Pot. After the eight hours have passed (and you’ve polished off the rest of your bottle of wine), the meat is super tender and practically falling apart. You remove it from the Crock Pot whole (if you can) and check the vegetables/sauce for thickness. I found that mine needed a LOT of Argo to thicken it up—but then again, I could have been going overboard here because once you shred the meat, it gets pretty thick on its own.

The recipe says to serve this in a bowl—and we did, but at the last minute decided to whip up some mashed potatoes, which went with it fantastically. Next time I make this recipe, I think I’m going to omit the potatoes from the dish itself and simply serve it over a big spoonful of mashed potatoes. It was super good, and very filling!