Sunday, June 29, 2008

wild food


The first time we heard about foraging for cattails was at a dinner party. We were talking about collecting wild leeks over a deliciously roasted pork, and one of the guests who grew up in a Maine talked about all the wild food her mother cooked when she was a child. Dandelion greens, dandelion buds (which apparently taste a bit like brussel sprouts), roadside day lilies, and cattails. We had never heard of or tried cattail. She said that when she was a child, her mother sent her and her siblings out to cut down the stalks and then her mother would boil them and serve them in a little butter, salt and pepper. Our friend remembered the dish as being like corn on the cob.

The foragers Les and Nova (www.wildgourmetfood.com) bring us a bounty of cattail hearts to the restaurant. They’ve been cleaned and cut and they look like white asparagus or cultivated leeks if you squint your eyes. We make a woodland soup. Caleb steams them with some wild leeks and wood nettle in a stock we made from a roasted chicken. Once everything is tender, he added more broth to make the soup, and we serve it over a little bread and garnish with parmigiano. The flavor and aroma is so savory and woodsy it's as if you are standing in a forest.

We find the cattail hearts are a bit like celery in texture, and the interiors are the most tender. They benefit from peeling the stalk away which can be reedy and stringy, though full of celery-like flavor. The wood nettle, which is slightly different from stinging nettle, has been a curative since at least the 19th century and is said to cure all that ails you. In the soup, it is highly aromatic with an exquisite perfume.

During our own dinner after service, the talk is of the children’s book Red Wall in which the animal characters are always eating foraged wild things, especially nettle soup which is described as good for your health, yet really quite disgusting. The characters are always choking down their broth. We marvel at what a little garlic and seasoning can do.

--Deirdre

Saturday, June 28, 2008

aviary


We are surrounded by birds. Hummingbirds, finches, orioles, swallows, crows, woodpeckers, chickadees, mockingbirds, ravens, hawks, bobolinks, catbirds, phoebes. The phoebes built a mud and straw nest in the barn three years ago, and have returned every summer to raise their brood here. The first babies have flown, and now the parents will lay eggs for a second family. Last summer, one of the baby birds was sickly, and the mother pushed it out of the nest, its short life ending on the dirt floor of the barn. Evolution is without mercy.

Several years ago, my parents gave us a small birdhouse, painted white with a gray roof, for our anniversary, and we secured it on a post in the perennial garden. The blue-backed swallows have made their home there and are now feeding three young birds through the small hole that acts as front door. The swallows no longer dive down close over our heads to warn us away. They have become easy about our prescence, and of a morning, I stand close to the house watching their rituals.

The golden finches land in the apple trees looking brilliant during blossoming, and satisfied as the red-green fruit grows. Their song is sweet and somehow innocent, even though the natural world lives by gimlet law. The oriole shows off his orange back and has a fondness for the cherry trees. He plays with the other orioles, dipping and soaring from tree to tree, coming close to where we are in the garden, brazen and proud.

We have taken to calling this our English summer. The weather has been gray and misty, the gardens looking abundant and slightly wild. Caleb’s young cousin Claire is visiting—helping us with the gardens for the summer and fall. In November, we’ll take her to Italy to apprentice with a friend opening a new restaurant on Lago di Maggiore. She is eighteen and pink-cheeked, and we all feel as if we’ve stepped into a Jane Austen novel. I’ve started to sign e-mails, our modern letters--from Finch House--tongue firmly in cheek. We are only lacking a stand in for the requisite Mr. Darcy. But the summer is young yet.

The birds fly about us. On days that we leave the doors open, swallows might swoop in and out of spaces that no longer exist between inside and outside. Once, a hummingbird found himself lost against a dining room window, and he allowed Caleb to scoop him up in his hands, and take him on the balcony. He rested for a moment, his tiny claws digging into skin and muscle, the thousand jeweled colors on his necklace of feathers catching the sunlight before taking off into a breathless blue sky.

--Deirdre

Friday, June 20, 2008

rhubarb



We cut down rhubarb at our friend’s house. It is a beautiful evening with a beautiful sky that promises myriad of possibilities: rain clouds set ablaze by the lowering sun. There could be rain; there could be a sunny but cool evening. Our friend hasn’t been able to get to her rhubarb patch, or her vegetable garden which still has some sea kale growing from last year. She is caring for her ailing but spritely 96 year-old-mother, and all the good intentions of planting seeds and starters has gone by like the lilacs and apple blossom. She did get a cover crop in her garden, so the earth can recharge for next year.

We cut back armfuls of her big exotic rhubarb with its big elephant ears, the red stems making you think of strawberries, and the leaves making you think of hot tropical evenings on a tea plantation somewhere far away like Burma or Ceylon... Our own rhubarb is still a small patch, a gift given by former diners at the restaurant who moved far away. They couldn’t successfully dig up the plants that had followed them from a long line of family gardeners and transplant them so many miles away. Instead, they bequeathed them to us. We wait for our rhubarb to mature and gain stature, and in the meantime, pirate other patches and dine off our spoils.

--Deirdre

Thursday, June 19, 2008

planting vines






We ordered grapes from the local nursery. With all our attention on the vegetable gardens, we were a little too late to order our root stock from a vineyard here in Vermont, but our local nursery Dandelion Acres did right by us. So we start with what we can get: Frontenac Gris.

Bronze skin gives some color to the juice, and the wine can be pale gold to amber. The palate is intensely fruity, even tropical and peachy, and lends itself well to dessert wines, but also has proven it can stand up as a dry wine. The other grapes we’ve planted around the house are also this northern varietal, and we’ve been tasting several examples produced here and been intrigued with the stories pouring forth. We would be proud to make these wines, and we are proud that someone is making them here in our northern clime. The wines lead us in various directions: the grapefruit reminds us of sauvignon blanc, and the honeyed tones pull us to Sauternes. We can imagine pairing the wine with chicken liver pate made with orange and dried cherries or an orange and radicchio salad, or an omelet filled with local goat cheese and seasoned with lemon.

We’ve tilled and prepared the ground for our vines. Caleb digs the holes and I nestle the roots in and fill in with our clayey soil. We water; we mulch. We talk to the new vines, reminding them that someday, they too can make a great wine.

--Deirdre


Thursday, June 12, 2008

waiting






The garden boxes are builit. The paths have been tilled and rolled. The boxes have been filled with compost and water buffalo manure from the local water buffalo farm. Seeds have been planted. Wild chicoria, Zatta melon, , Bubikopf escarole, Cuori Bionda, Tuscan kale, verza di Verona cabbages, misticanza di radicchio, La Victoire and Bobis nano green beans, celeriac, celery. The plums trees are heavy with promise, as are the apple trees. Rain has come and gone. Intense humidity and 100 degree weather has come and gone. Violent thunderstorms have come and gone. Seeds are sprouting. So are indecipherable weeds. We wait for the little green leaves to turn into the fruits of our labors.

--Deirdre

Friday, June 6, 2008

what to do with morels


‘Tis the season. If you find morels in your local market, or know a knowledgable forager who’s willing to share the bounty, a fresh pasta with morels is about as good as it gets. If you have the time--a lazy, rainy afternoon—to make the pasta, lovely, but your local market probably carries a reasonably good fresh pasta. Pick something long and flat, and not too wide. And in a pinch, a good dried pasta, like something by Rustichella d’Abruzzo, will suit just fine. Also a showstopper as a topping for crostini (toasts) or bruschetta (grilled bread, and yes, the bread should be slightly charred around the edges for rustic flavor).

A sauce made of morels is deliciously simple, and doesn’t need lots of other ingredients to make magic.

Sugo per morel (for two)

as many Morels as you’ve got (ideally two big handfuls)

some Butter

dash of Cream (optional)

2 Tbsp Extra virgin olive oil

2 Tbsp Minced red red or yellow onion

dry white wine

salt and pepper to taste

Make sure morels are clean—use a soft bristled kitchen/food brush. This is ideal for brushing off any dirt. Remove most of the stem, all but a quarter inch, from the cap of the morels. Cut the caps into thin slivers. Soften the onion in the fats over low heat (butter, cream, olive). Add the mushrooms. Season well with salt and pepper, and stir well to coat with the fats. Add a little splash of white wine, and bring the mushrooms to a gentle simmer. Cook until tender which might take twenty to twenty-five minutes. If necessary, add a little more white wine or water if things seem to be drying out. Taste and correct for seasoning. Toss with pasta, or put on top of crostini or bruschetta.

--Deirdre and Caleb


Sunday, June 1, 2008

woodland in wonderland



Nova and Les, the foragers, arrive in the middle of dinner service. They bring certain treasure. A box is filled with woodland ferns and wild morels. It’s the end of May, the season for these mushrooms. Ugly and pocked, we all know where their hidden beauty lays: their woodsy, pungent, gravied taste.

Our diners all crane their necks to try and get a good look at what’s in the box. Later, when things slow down a bit in the dining room, I sport these gems around to each of the tables to show them what our land can offer. Eyes aglitter, customers offer deals and golden opportunities in order to get a reservation tomorrow night when they know the morels will make an appearance. What will we do with them? Everyone asks Caleb this when he’s comes out into the dining room later in the evening. He talks of something simple: cooking them in a little wine, a little bit of garlic, olive oil, butter, salt and pepper, then tossing the mushroom ragu with a fresh pasta. We all agree that the morels don’t need much to shine.

There are over one hundred and fifty varieties of edible mushrooms in the state of Vermont, morels only one of them. The foragers will bring us whatever wild mushrooms they find every week this summer and on into fall until the ground freezes over. We hope to procure dried mushrooms from them for the winter months when it’s too cold to forage. Last week, they brought us a brace of pheasant back mushrooms that were quite large, without gills, and looked like a display of pheasant feathers on the cap. We roasted them for a wine tasting dinner where we featured them in a risotto infused with the red wine in which it was paired. Fresh, their fragrance was like pineapple and the wet branches of trees, and cooked they were meaty and with much constitution. Who knows what they will bring next?

--Deirdre