Sunday, January 31, 2010

wolfen moon


Full moons are strange and uncanny. The other night at the restaurant, a Friday night, was the Full Wolf Moon, the biggest full moon of our new year. It was the biggest moon because the moon was at its perigree, or rather , it was mightly close to the earth. In fact, it was its very closest at 4:04 am Saturday morning, bright red Mercury playing sidekick. Not that we were up to see it at 4:04 am. But we did see it at two o’clock in the morning when we rolled home from this Friday night. Friday nights are usually busy nights in any restaurant. And by last Monday, all our reservations were taken, every table and chair accounted for. By Friday afternoon, almost half our reservations had cancelled with no one to replace them. The frigid, painfully cold weather, a car accident, delayed house guests all played a role in our quiet evening.

Despite a half-full dining room (this strange in that it did not mirror that overly full moon), all our guests were lovely and engaging. When there are those mid-winter sub-zero temperatures outside, we always wish for a fireplace, but all the lighted candles and the warmth coming out of the kitchen stand in well. On this quiet winter evening, we get to do what we love best: greeting, toasting, discussing, offering. When we sit down to our own dinner, we toast these Friday night intrepid: The couple here for a birthday, a gift from their daughter. The ski coach and her beau from Quebec letting us choose their dinners along with the wines paired. The university group who tasted everything. The late revelers driving up from Boston. We served them all a smorgasbord of tastes: garlic braised escarole, rolled pork belly stuffed with bay, juniper, and sage and braised in white wine, the calamari roasted in white wine and olive oil and served with a squeeze of fresh lemon, the narrow grilled green onions—sweet and smoky from the cast iron, a sour jam cherry tart made from sour cherries collected over the summer and put up for the winter.

And it is indeed winter. The temperatures dropping by the minute with too little snow to protect us from the fierce wind coming down from the Arctic. The Algonquins named this full moon for the wolves baying and scratching at their tee-pees. On a night like Friday night, we can well imagine being hungry, and needing to come in from the cold.

--Deirdre

Friday, January 29, 2010

secrets revealed






We reveal secrets. Or at least we talk about our latest secret. Back in October, we pressed our first hard cider from our small orchard that abutts the vineyard. The caramel-colored juice quietly continues to bubble away in a cool corner of the dining room. We begin to steep ourselves in the world of old English and Normand-style cider-making. We are inspired by other local cider-makers, like the clean precision of Farnum Hill or the idiosyncratic depth of a friend's barrel-aged brew who hails from a sixth generation Vermont farm family. We unearth an ancient style of cider from northern Italy called pomelo that ferments the apple juice on the pomace of crushed grapes. Ideas and plans form. While the land is covered with all this white, we watch the light and it's mercurial changes. We become fascinated by temperatures and humidity. Barometric pressure and planets in retrograde.

--Deirdre

Sunday, January 3, 2010

the winter garden, or gardening in winter



I will admit, I am a sucker for the romance conjured by words. Caleb, who I would categorize as a certain type of romantic, also likes the hard work of words. Hence the constant yet subtle debate that peppers our own language at home.

We have a green house. It is specifically designed to be our garden during those Persephone months when autumn turns into winter, and while the days are slowly becoming longer after the winter solstice in December, the hours trick us into thinking they are shorter and darker and that we are very far away from the advent of spring. Two years ago, we put up the green house which is technically called a hoop house or high tunnel in these Northeastern parts. They are modeled after the relatively low budget green houses found in France and Italy, and all over Europe. A series of galvanized pipes shaped like a half-cylinder that when placed, secured, and then covered with a thick, weather-resistant and very taught plastic looks a little like the covered ribs of a whale. It is within this 20 X 24 foot body that we attempt to garden in the winter.

I had been planning on waxing on in this little essay about how I read somewhere in an English gardening book the word “winter garden” to refer to the green house in winter, and how I liked the sound of it. How “the winter garden” sounds so much more inviting than the more hard working “hoop house”. How “the winter garden” really impresses with its sleight of hand: as a series of three words the phrase conjures turn of the century conservatories with sweaty glass panels that can barely contain the fecund tropics within, where everything is green and smells of humid dirt and peat. I had planned to make note of how Caleb always uses the word “hoop house," and how I have detected a slight roll of his eyes when ever we entertain a guest to lunch, and offer a trek out to “the winter garden”, how I have noticed that Caleb will very quickly say “hoop house” within seconds of my reference to “the winter garden”. I had plans to explore the notion of how we use words to connect us, to the land we live on, how they delight, trick, and tell the truth.

My plans fell apart this morning as Caleb asked me what I was writing. When I explained to him the direction I was going, he ruined my neat supposition. It turns out he too prefers the romance of “the winter garden”. He is not rolling his eyes at my willful attempt at charm, at how I refer to our work-horse plot of land that somehow produces these beautiful and piquant greens throughout these cold, and snowy months; he is making sure that lunch guest understands that "the winter garden" is actually a "hoop house", and he is expressing his frustration with how this string of days with no sun and constantly gently falling snow, or sub-zero temperatures do not make the garden feel like it is the definition of its own word. Because our green house is passively solar, on these gray, cold days, he does not want to linger in this space that we’ve created. There is a quick satisfaction at uncovering the raised beds and seeing all those green leaves, but it is short-lived. The cold has wicked away the scent of moist earth, and while we are amazed and admire the strangely organic and plant-like patterns of ice on the glass and plastic of cold frames, we are not encouraged to sit at the little cafĂ© table in the corner next to the compost and take a late morning tea. He says, “Why don’t we just call it “the place where we go to be cold”.

I suggest a different angle. When we think of winter gardens we can think of snow-covered topiary. We can see those beautiful and inexplicable patterns that look like William Morris wallpaper in the glass. We can be reminded of an image from a Russian film we once saw together called Russian Arc, an image of Catherine the Great in her long butter yellow robes and furs running from one end of the gardens to the other at The Winter Palace. Hmmmmm, I think, that’s what we’ll call our little 20 X 24 cold-weather eden: The Winter Palace.

--Deirdre