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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.