Monday, October 29, 2007

last night


The last night at the restaurant before November vacation. There is a jittery feeling about us like on the last day of school when you are eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Energy is high, and that has nothing to do with the dark chocolate we have been testing all afternoon.

We close down twice a year, in November and April, a product of the seasonality in this part of Vermont. A product of long hours, small staff, and the need to rejuvenate, give our bodies a rest. Trips have been planned, dinner invitations on weekends accepted, lists made of things we never get to do because of our schedule. The biggest problem with November vacation is there is a tendency to overbook, over do. Like children in a candy shop, we want to do this, and that, and that, and we can't forget to include that, and before we know it we have committed to too much and good-bye to rest and relaxation. Yet, we promise to be vigilant this year in an attempt to do not much of anything. At least for a day. Or two.

In the kitchen, we are making bread to take home for vacation, thinking of how we will divvy up cheeses, taste testing sauces made from the autumn harvest to be put away, and the composta we've made from the black grapes and green tomatoes. We get ready for dinner service just like we always do; we have more reservations than we expected tonight, a Monday night close to November. We are full, a mixture of new and old patrons, those catching us for the first time before we go away, and those filling up in preparation for the month-long hiatus.

The diners arrive, they are watered, specialed, we take their orders, we bring them wine, we bring them dish after dish after dish. We open celebratory bottles, we light birthday candles. The diners leave, and we sit down to our own dinner. A bottle of nice wine, and a friend joins us. We toast to the season. We tell jokes. We try not to think about the stack of dishes and line of glasses awaiting in the kitchen.

Eventually, the kitchen calls, and the last of evening clean-up. Open bottles of wine and left-overs get packed up. We close up shop. It is already tomorrow.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

moonshine

The second fermentation begins. And this depsite all my assiduous notetaking through the first fermention which now is revealed to be quite dodgy. It seems I have been misreading the numbers on the hydrometer, that trusty judge of sugar content, or rather misattributing numbers based on the temperature reading. Everything is not what it seems. When I explain my difficulties with a laugh to a patron at the restaurant who shares an interest in winemaking, she exclaims in shock when she hears I have not kept a "control" for this experiment. I should expect this from a scientist, but I still feel slightly shabby in my efforts. I have mis-written the early numbers also for the first fermentation of the Nebbiolo, only realizing this blunder today after two weeks of "winemaking".

I placate myself with the notion, and Caleb agrees, that people have been making wine without hydrometer readings for centuries, if not millenia. My rather "shoot-from-the-hip" style will certainly not be the end of the world, and most likely not be the end of the wine. Even though the house still smells like as still, nothing smells "off", and after years of smelling wine like a perfumist at her laboratory, I know I can trust my nose.

So, we proceed with syphoning off the Barbera juice into a carboy for the second fermentation. We do this by the light of a Harvest Moon. I am rather pleased with myself on this front as I feel that while my science may be faulty, I have triumphed in biodynamics. At least in what little I know about biodynamics ( a whole world of cultivation that has been practiced for centuries, if not millenia, and finally codified by the rigorous Rudolph Steiner of Waldorf School fame in the '30's). The juice has been syphoned by gravity, and the winemaking began while the moon was on the wax. These are auspicious signs.

We are like magicians on a witchy night, the warm wind whipping about the house, and scuttling spooky clouds across that full moon. We hover and cluck our tongues over our brew, and we improvise a cork when we realize we do not have the right kind of stopper for the carboy. A rolled up, but very clean towel will have to do the trick until the next shipment of winemaking ephembera arrives by post next week. The glass demijohn goes on the pantry floor with a thermometer propped against it to keep track of the temperature. The wine is clearing as it should be and we thank the moon shining on all our alchemy.

Friday, October 26, 2007

what to do with grapes

We see grapes everywhere. Not only in the juice with which we are making the wine, but some still left wild threading through the almost bare trees, or at the farmer's market, or on our produce purveyor's list. We have been cooking with grapes at every available opportunity, while they are still fresh, still in season. We've adapted a schiacciata, or flatbread we used to do at the bakery and that you find in typical places in and around Florence, a crisp foccaccia studded with black grapes, anise seed, rosemary, and finished with a sprinkle of sugar and drizzle of olive oil. Instead, we roll out a pizza crust at the restaurant, thin as music paper, and fleck it with the grapes, rosemary, thinly sliced pancetta, the anise, good olive oil and the sugar, then bake for 8 or 9 minutes at 400 degrees.


Even though the days have mostly been warm with sun as if summer just keeps going and going, the season has given up on our green cherry tomatoes. We cut the green tomatoes up to cook down with black grapes, lemon and orange peel, fresh ginger, and sugar. This makes a Sicilian-style composta for the cheese plate at the restaurant, a good pair with creamy, young fresh cheeses, like a young goat's milk, or a blend of goat, cow, and sheep's milk with a hint of bloom.


On the menu at the restaurant is a classic Tuscan dish that we have been making for years, sweet pork sausages with black grapes and onion, the onions and grapes almost stewed and making a fruity gravy with the cooked sausages. One of the keys to all dishes with black grapes is that they have not been tampered with, no genetic variations, no seedless numbers. The seed is essential to the texture and flavor just as it provides the same in a good red wine.


Excerpted from Pane e Salute: Food and Love in Italy and Vermont


Salsicce con L'Uva/Sausages with Black Grapes


While this dish makes for excellent dinner fare, [we] personally prefer it served on a crusty roll for lunch along with a glass of Chianti Colli Aretini (red wine from the Arezzo hills). That's because we once had such sandwiches in the Piazza del Municipio in Arezzo on a brisk and bright autumn day during the monthly antiques fair. Now that [we] think of it, that sandwich wasn't much more than just grilled sausage and bread with a little rough local wine in a plastic cup, served in an atmosphere of shouting, joking cooks, and centuries-old sideboards, headboards, and dressers surrounded by buildings from the Renaissance--an atmosphere to elevate any meal. If you don't have good crusty bread on hand, make a few mashed potatoes while these sausages are roasting in the oven. Serves 4.

2 large yellow onions, halved and slivered
2 cups black grapes (Concord, Globe, or any other ripe black variety), rinsed well
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
4-8 sweet Italian sausages (1 or 2 sausages per person)


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a large roasting pan or skillet mix the slivered onion and grapes together with your hands. Drizzle some oil over them and sprinkle with several generous pinches of salt and pepper. Mix again and spread out the mixture evenly. Nestle the sausages in the onion-grape layer, but don't let them be completely covered. Put the pan in the oven and roast for 30-40 minutes, until the onions have cooked down considerably, the grapes are soft, and the sausages are plump and browned on top, even a little bit crusty. Pierce one of the largest sausages. They ar ready when the juices run clear. Spoon a bed of onions and grapes into a serving platter or individual plates, top with sausages, and serve.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

black brandy


Hot, bright late October sun. We are confused about the season as we dig out the vegetable garden and begin to cut back the perennials. How unjustified this autumnal activity when a few roses still bloom as well as the nepeta, chrysanthamum, and the African cousin of hibiscus with its gently falling red trumpets. But the calendar tells us what needs to be done, if the weather won't. Cleaning, clearing, planting, list-making, curing, fermenting.

While Caleb was very good about getting his walnut liquer into its second stage back in August, I have been dragging in regard to my own black wine. The blackberries have been steeping in the brandy with vanilla bean and lavender for weeks and weeks. I'll get to it today I say to myself, and today turns into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Creeps by at a petty pace. Shakespeare and all that.

But today is the day. The pretty mason jars of my inky brew get strained, plump and slightly color-leeched berries fill the basket. "Gelato with brandy-soaked berries," Caleb says, and we pack them up in containers for the freezer and a future dessert. I taste my concoction. The flavor of the fruit comes first followed by a thread of the vanilla and a hint of lavender. Two cups of sugar heated and dissolved in two cups of water on the stove make a simple syrup. We add the brandy to the liquid and stir, then pour back in the mason jars for further curing. Between the now everpresent yeasty smell emanating from the bathroom where the wine is fermenting, and the hot alcoholic tinge of the brandy in the kitchen, we think the cats are getting drunk.

-Deirdre

Saturday, October 20, 2007

wine by night

We are like an old couple on a t.v. sitcom. Perhaps like George's parents on Seinfeld. The wine-making begins on Wednesday night. At 10:30, after a dinner of cheese and salumi, shrimp cocktail, and white wine, reading by the fire, I decide it's a good time to start the first fermentation because after the first twelve hours, we must add yeast, and I figure if we start in the morning, we won't be home early enough from the restaurant to get the yeast in on time. On this one point, we agree this is sound thinking.

I am not clear on sugar content. I've read several passages in several books on this now, and many of them also cover other kinds of fruit and flower wines, that I'm a little flustered and not sure if we need actually need the 8 pounds of sugar that the diagram says to add to the first fermentation, or not. There is a lot of "bright" repartee about this amount of sugar, like "But you said we had plenty of sugar," and "You never told me we needed that much sugar." The dialogue sends me into the pantry to hunt down the container of sweet. We do not have 8 pounds of sugar. We hope this is not an omen. Minor panic sets in. We decide to take a reading of the sugar content currently in the Barbera juice to at least see what we need to do, but of course, that forms a whole other conversation, like a slowly growing and billowing mushroom cloud, about temperature conversion with the hydrometer--a thermometer-like gadget that somehow measures the above-mentioned sugar content in the wine. To make an even longer story short, the ideal temperature for reading the hydrometer is 59 degrees Farenheit. If it is below or above that, subtractions or additions must be made to the reading on the hydrometer. It is 50 degrees outside, a warm evening.

We take a test sample of the juice. Our vial for reading the hydrometer has a leak in it and bleeds all over the diningroom table. We hope this is not an omen. We get a reading, and lucky for us the juice has exactly the right amount of sugar for starting the fermentation process. We are relieved that we don't have to add anything at this juncture, and we can actually get started. We smile at each other, and poke each other in the ribs like this was all fun and games from the get-go.

Grape juice pours from one container to another. There is no moon, no stars. We hope this not an omen. (They say wine should be made on the wax of the moon, they being ones who know.) Five crushed campden tablets dissolved in a little water get added for stability. We carry the primary fermentation bucket between us inside and set it in the bathtub like many a good moonshiner before us. First fermentation happens most successfully at 70-75 degrees, and we know we can keep the upstairs bathroom that temperature. It's always 70 degrees. We cover the bucket with it's clever lid with the hole in the top for oxygen, and cover the top with a clean dish towel (to keep out the fruit flies.)
Now, we wait.
--Deirdre

Thursday, October 18, 2007

days of wine and....


The wine making equipment has arrived. We ordered on-line an introductory wine-making kit which comes with all of the necessities: primary fermentation container (a 6 gallon plastic bucket with spigot), five packets of wine yeast, campbden tablets, rubber tubing, yeast nutrients, an hydrometer, corks, labels, and lots of other things for making other fruit-based wines. We also order a carboy, a glass container for the second fermentation. We were too late to order whole grapes--the days have gotten away from us--but we have been able to acquire grape juice: Barbera from California, and surprisingly, Nebbiolo from Italy. Two books were included with the kit, Wine-making Recipes, and a wine-making primer by an Englishman with a aptitude for chemistry. I'm nervous about the chemistry.

We stash the equipement in the barn, and begin to think about making changes to what we'd always planned as a woodworking shop. This space would make quite a nice wine-making room. The barn is naturally cool in the summer. There is a porch roof which would make a nice, workmanlike loggia. We can see a tasting table underneath made from the rest of the cedar of the old garage, the porch posts clad in grape vine and roses, small wooden casks inside the barn waiting to be racked. The cogs in the wheels begin to fire.

The juice arrives. A six gallon bucket of Barbera from Madera, California. We admire the brightly colored picture on the front of the bucket and it reminds us of the brightly colored agricultural posters from California in the 40's and 50's. The Nebbiolo is somewhere between here and Italy. The juice goes into the cool barn, and we hope it stays cold enough to keep it from starting to ferment because the batch is too big for our refrigerator, and we are not quite ready to start the process.

We've bought a backyard vinter's book, all about grape growing and making. We begin to study the pages of our three books, cross-referencing, and trying to understand about specific gravity and sugar content, and acidity, and when to stir and punch, when to leave it all alone. I read over and over the basic directions, trying to memorize their order. I read about the hydrometer numbers, and how they change with the temperature, and what you have to calculate to accomodate. This is just a recipe I tell myself, but it's easy to convince yourself that all will be lost if we mis-read the hydrometer, or forget when to add the yeast. But then I think about all the people who've made wine before us, hundreds, thousands of years ago, and how they didn't have hydrometers, and they didn't track time in quite the same way. They fermented the juice, and they let it age, then they drank, and all was somehow right with the world.

-Deirdre

Sunday, October 14, 2007

the beginning of the end



The garden is slowly dying. Real autumn weather has finally set in, the colors of the leaves on the trees finally vibrant, and old Jack Frost finally leaving his blackened mark. It's a funny juxtaposition as at the time of most bounty, the garden is on the wane. At the farm stand, Nick and Teresa have dug up all the carrots and red potatoes, cut the cabbages, picked all the tomotoes and cut down all the brussel sprouts. There are five zucchini remaining. Nick and Teresa too have pulled up their own stakes, and closed up their summer lodgings, and packed their van and headed down south. Their son Danny is still digging fingerlings, and Caleb has the run of what's left in the actual garden.

We've loaded up bags of potatoes, carrots, and tomatoes, the root vegetables for a makeshift root cellar and the tomotoes for sauce to be made this week. Our own garden gave up the first and last crop of the sweetest narrow green beans we've ever tasted, and we transplanted what's remaining of the tomatoes into pots and brought them inside to finish ripening. This is always a hopeful gesture as tomatoes don't like to be indoors, feeling too cramped and dry by the four walls and the fire in the woodstove.

The basil is gone, the bush bean plants too. But the German white radishes and beets thrive. As do the swiss chard and arugula and sweet lettuces. We listen to the weather radio in the morning and as we drive home at night, trying to gauge if we need to cover what's left of our garden. Each day, we wonder what will remain, hang in one more day, and while we are happiest sitting at the table eating of the fruits of our labor, there is a somber air about the hours as we know our own harvest's days are numbered.

-Deirdre

Saturday, October 13, 2007

apple tart/part two (or Julia dined here once)

Our apple tart recipe is an adaptation of collected recipes. The pasta frolla, or crust, comes from sage, old Italian cookbooks, and the filling, a custard cream steeped with the apple slices is an extrapolation from Julia Child. Julia Child has for a long time been one of our heroes, and when she came to dine at the restaurant, we felt elated and lucky. She did not come because she sought us out; she and her nephew and his wife simply drove by, their interest piqued by our outdoor terrace, the umbrellas, the cafe tables, the catmint growing along with the roses in our garden. They turned the car around, parked, and stepped over the threshold. They settled in for a late lunch. It had a been a long-time fantasy of ours to be able to serve Julia Child her favorite meal: roast chicken, a mixed green salad with a classic vinaigrette, roasted potatoes, and a beer. When we first opened the restaurant and we served lunch, we made sure that this meal would always be on the lunch menu, in hommage to Julia Child, but also, just in case....

When Julia Child sat at our table in the window on a late summer day, she ate roast chicken, roast potatoes, a mixed green salad, and drank a beer. The only alteration to this meal was the cup of soup to start, to whet her appetite. I like to think she finished her lunch with an apple tart though I can't remember. We have saved her signature on the credit card slip and pinned it to our bulletin board for continued inspiration, and to remind ourselves of why we do what we do.

Apple Tart Filling, and the Rest of the Recipe (for one tart)

heavy cream 1 cups
fresh eggs 1
sugar .25 cup
flour .25 cup
vanilla extract .5 tsp.
3, or 4 apples

Beat the sugar and the eggs together very well. Mix in the vanilla, cream, then the flour. Let sit for fifteen minutes. Pre-heat the oven at 350-75 (we like the oven on the hotter side because we think it gives better all around results - from browning to texture). While the cream is resting, core the apples, then slice them. Arrange in a circular pattern in the tart shell. Pre-bake the tart with only the fruit for 20 minutes, or until the edges of the crust start to turn golden brown. Pour the cream over the fruit, just enough so that the fruit is still showing through. You don't want the fruit to be covered completely, or the cream to overflow. (If you have a cookie sheet to put under the tart at this point this will catch any spills in the oven). Carefully put the tart back in the oven for 20-30 minutes until the whole top of the tart is golden brown and you can stick a knife in the thickest part of the cream and it comes out clean. Let cool before serving.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

apple tart in two parts/part one

We are in a strange but lovely season. October already and still the days are hot and the temperatures high with no rain, except an occasional burst. The gardens keep growing, the flowers still blooming, trees still laden withe apples, but there are leaves changing and everything looks stretched a little too thinly as if exhausted by August and early September's full-blown show, and the trees, grasses, black-eyed susan's, and flox are digging down deep to keep on going.

This is more or less how we feel at the restaurant. Foliage season is fiercely upon us and the town of Woodstock has never looked so pedestrian. Bumper to bumber traffic, foot to foot visitors pounding the pavement, in our little three blocks of town. All the restaurants and inns are booked with more and more inquiries every day. One feels somehow deficient and gets tired of saying, "No." The tables have been full with a healthy mix of those brave locals willing to come to town and happy vacationers. Mostly happy. There are always the seasonal snafus, and the surly diners. We try to weather them with grace.

The apples from our own trees are almost exhausted as well, so we have started to forage from a few wild trees in secret spots. Like mushroom hunters who'd never tell where to find their prized perigord or porcini, we sneak off to hidden sources, and pick the green apples with the red blush. To bite into them fresh is enough to get us through the day, the flesh tart and crisp and full of delicate flavor. A mixture of both our own and these wild apples make their way into our fresh tarts made with a baked pastry cream. They are balm to the weary traveler and the weary worker alike.


Pasta Frolla for Four 8 inch Crusts

Our tart recipe will come in two parts as you must make the tart crust first. We make a batch of four crusts at a time, and recommend the same. You can freeze the other three crusts because who doesn't want to always have a tart crust on hand?

1 1/5 c. sugar
1/2 tsp salt, scant
1 lb. butter, soft
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp lemon juice
5 1/2 c. flour

Cream the sugar, salt, butter; add eggs, vanilla, lemon juice and mix very well. (Frolla comes from frollare in the Italian and means to beat well.). Add flour and salt and beat until just uniform. Roll out to the thickness of a pencil and mold into tart pans.

Friday, October 5, 2007

roasted potatoes


At the farm stand, Nick and Teresa are starting to put the gardens to bed. It is both a beautiful and melancholy sight to see the harvest of root vegetables laid out in the dirt: carrots, beets, fingerling potatoes. The corn has all been cut down, and Teresa has dried the red-kernal variety for hanging on front doors to encourage bounty in the house. We've collected baskets of fingerlings, especially our particular favorite, the rose Finn apple, named for it's slightly pink hue to the skin and buttery yellow flesh. But there are also the Russian Bananas that came somewhere from the Baltic, and they do just fine. In the next day or two, we will haul in more potatoes, beets, and carrots to cellar for the restaurant.


Roasted Fingerling Potatoes For Four

3 cups large diced fingerling pototoes
salt and pepper mix (50/50 ratio)
regular olive oil, or a blend of olive oil and vegetable oil, or extra virgin
extra virgin olive oil

Toss the diced potatoes in an ovenproof skillet or roasting pan. You can use plain olive oil, or a blend, or extra virgin, but use enough to coat the potatoes. Then season liberally with several big pinches of the salt and pepper mix. Roast in the oven at 375 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the potatoes are nicely golden brown with crispy edges. Plate and finish with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.






Thursday, October 4, 2007

new life for old things


There is something very pleasurable about giving another life to something old and forgotten. The found object becomes a favorite piece--the lamp left by previous owners, the chair picked up in the trash on a city curb, the old chintz curtains packed away in the attic--becoming a thing we see and touch everyday, a thing that informs our hours, informs the way we look at our world. This thing not only defines our space, but something about who we are. These objects, yet they are more than objects because we are somehow drawn to them immediately as if they have a personality or a spirit, call for transformation like the phoenix rising from the ashes. They are narrative. They have a story to tell that weaves itself into the story we continue. We bring them home, dress them up in that new lamp shade with the pert black trim, or call the upholsterer for the new batting and springs, and order the new fabric for the chair, or after a good washing make the trip to the seamstress, unless we can sew ourselves, and turn the drapery into pillows or a duvet.

Our house is filled with such objects. And there are others we have still waiting to be re-claimed. The pieces we've stored away to fix-up on a rainy day. There's the lamp that the previous owners of our house did leave behind (along with an upholstered chair, a gate-leg table, two more lamps, an old garden basket, two wooden farm chairs, and an old suitcase with real 1950 travel stickers from places like Canada, Mont St. Michel, Japan, and India) that I have grand plans for involving silver spray paint, some old bobeches with glass teardrops, and some black organdy ribbon. I've had my eye on an old piano stool for some time that I salvaged out of Caleb's parents attic most fondly known as The Glory Hole. We've had the stool for sixteen years now, and have moved three places with it. We've stripped it down to its natural wood, its top gaping as it once had a caned seat. We thought we'd take it to a local gentleman south of town named Lyman Shrove to re-cane it (we really just loved his name), but never got around to putting it in the car. It's come in and out of storage becoming useful with an atlas resting on it's legs, or a couple of white painted planks to hold drinks out on the balcony. Or we've tucked it back up into our own barn loft to simply get it out of the way. Until recently. In a fit of industry, I painted it white and Caleb made a top out of MDF to fit into the place where the caning used to be, neat little cleats to hold it in place. Then I wrapped the new top in batting and cut a piece of zebra-print fabric to size and stapled. It's back in service now, as an ottoman of sorts paired to a mis-matched bedroom chair. We can see it in the morning when we wake up, or first thing when we come downstairs. We can rest our weary legs on it and read late into the night, or we can still rest the atlas on it if we want to look at all the places we want to travel, or become nostalgic about the places we've already been.