DORIE GREENSPAN

Dinners at the Farm

They’re being called Dinners at the Farm, but they might just as well be called a community revolution, since these summer meals could change everything about the way the people in our little stretch of Connecticut think about what they eat and whom they eat it with.

From now through early October, there will be ten dinners, each held on a farm, each benefiting a local non-profit organization and each serving only the foods sold at the Lyme Farmers Market – translation: foods from within about a 30-mile radius of dinner.

The series is the brainchild of Chip Dahlke, owner of Ashlawn Farm and host of the Farmers Market; the gifted Jonathan Rapp, chef/owner of River Tavern in Chester, Drew and Claudine McLachlan, who own Feast Gourmet Market in Deep River, and, of course, the farmers.

Friday night, under a sky that was alternately threatening, wet and gorgeous – we had a ray or two of sun, a couple of downpours, a rainbow, black clouds, then stars and a peek-a-boo moon – there was a kick-off dinner for the farmers and winemakers whose products we would be savoring all summer, organizers from the groups that will receive donations from the dinners, and local press. 

We all ate at one very long table and it was magical to look in either direction and see people eating and drinking fresh, beautifully prepared food, laughing, talking and marveling at the setting.

The menu was put together late in the afternoon, only after Jonathan knew what ingredients he’d have in hand, and everything was prepared on River Tavern’s “chuckwagon,” a red 1953 Ford flatbed outfitted with a commercial range, a smoker and some racks and counters. 

The food was both simple and amazing for its goodness, quality and perfect preparation: warm squid (see below), a mixed seafood salad with scallops, lobster, Stonington red shrimp and bass on a bed of pristine greens, a porchetta with roasted tomatoes and a strawberry crostata with whipped cream.  Every bite of food came from a farmer or producer who was seated at the table and we drank wine from local Chamard Vineyards with the winemakers right there.

Everything was served family style and it was lovely to be passing the food among us and serving one another.

There was a lot of table-hopping (if you can call jumping up to talk to people who are all at the same table table-hopping) and even truck-hopping – yes, that’s Jacques Pepin up there with Jonathan, who’s on the right.

In fact, Jacques will be cooking at one of the summer dinners and Jonathan asked me if I’d do desserts for a couple of them.  Yes, yes, of course, I said “yes!”

It was an inspired evening and I left wondering if such evenings would be possible at Farmers Markets around the country.  The effort is huge and it’s not every chef who wants to cook for a crowd when he doesn’t have a clue about what will turn up in the larder, but the rewards for a community are tremendous.

For me, it was extraordinary to be able to share the food of our region with the people who grow and produce it.  It was another lesson in the power of food and one I wish everyone could have. 

Can we start a movement?  Is there already a movement? 

For a list of the organizations that will benefit from Dinners at the Farm as well as dates and locations, click here. 

Greenskeeping

I know, it looks a little weird, kind of like a terrarium for lettuce, but it's really a little bit of low-tech genius.  It's a terrific trick I learned from Michael Newburg, who grows the best, best greens at his Falls Brook Organic Farm.  Put your fresh greens in a big plastic bag, gather up the neck, blow a little air, aka carbon dioxide, into the bag, then seal it up quick.  If your greens are perfectly dry and really fresh (when Michael brings his to the Lyme Farmers Market, they’re only two-hours old), they’ll stay bright, firm and flavorful for at least a week like this.  The only problem is the amount of space the puffed-up bag takes in the fridge – but scrambling for a few extra cubic-inches of room on the shelf seems a small price to pay for greens that stay great from market day to market day.

Sardines: Not so much on this side of the pond

My friend Kerrin just sent me this photo.  It was taken in a hypermarche, a super-big supermarket, outside of Paris and my guess is that, had Kerrin had a wide-angle lens, she could have shown us an equally long wall of canned tuna too.  Even in the not-so-big Monoprix grocery near my apartment in Paris, the selection of canned fish is generous enough to keep you in that aisle for a while, reading labels and deciding among sardines with hot peppers, mustard, lemon or basil, smoked or not, whole or filleted.  I always keep a stack of sardine cans in the pantry, they’re my rainy-day emergency munch, perfect for when I’m on deadline and glued to my computer.  A squeeze of lemon, a couple of slices of tomato, a little salad and some bread and butter and all is right with the world.

The last time I was in Paris, I brought a few cans of sardines back with me

because, while I can get pretty much anything in New York, including these really good Portuguese sardines

the selection at my local Stop&Shop in Connecticut is not great.  And, last night I discovered that it’s about to become even less not-great.  See these cans of Bumble Bee sardines? 

I picked them up last night for 50 cents a can because the store is discontinuing them. 

I guess we’re not a sardine-savoring society in these parts, but it made me sad.  Here’s a food, a real food, that’s inexpensive (even when it’s not on sale), high in protein, iron, calcium and precious omega-3 fatty acids (the stuff we’re all supposed to have a couple of times a week), and it’s going off the shelves. 

I didn’t notice any discontinued signs in the chips department. 

Opening Day at the Farmers Market: Dinner and a Couple of Recipes

While I’ve been hearing from my West Coast friends about the treasures they’ve been savoring for months now from their local farmers markets, I’ve been counting down the time until opening day for ours, The Lyme Farmers Market, and, hooray and hallelujah, yesterday was the day!

The setting for the market, Ashlawn Farm, is gorgeous, and there’s never a time when we’re driving up to it on the winding road that’s edged by stone walls from revolutionary times that I don’t get excited.  And when we round the last curve in the road and see the farm stretched out in front of us with the vendors’ white awnings sparkling in the field, it’s all Michael, my husband, can do to keep me from jumping out of the car before he pulls it up the drive. 

Then there’s the ritual first stop at Farm Coffee, where Carol Dahlke, who, with her husband, Chip, owns Ashlawn Farm, roasts mostly organic and mostly fair-trade coffee beans in small batches and mans the espresso machine at the coffeehouse.  Armed with a cappucino, we face the day’s biggest decision:  whether to go to Bobby’s TALK Seafood to buy fish or to Michael Newburg’s Fall’s Brook Organic Farm Stand to buy his greens, which are exceptional.  It’s a really big decision because both stands sell out fast.  Michael and I could split up and cover both bases, but, for me, that defeats one of the points of the market: the chat.  I love talking to everyone who brings his best stuff here and, on the first day of the market, you don’t want to miss a word – there’s so much catching up to do.

So yesterday, I stopped at Bobby’s first and got big, fat scallops and steamers, had a good chat and then got to Michael’s, only to find that he was already sold out of his mesclun.  Drats!  But he had his spicy mix, which includes baby mustard greens and a bunch of Asian lettuces, so life was still worth living.  Strawberries, rhubarb and basil from Roses Berry Farm, and tomatoes (hothouse, but surprisingly good) and beets from Scotts Orchards, then all that remained was for my husband to have his usual hotdog, which Irene, from Four Mile River Farm, where they grow and butcher their own beef, grilled for him just the way he likes it: super charred.

If only it hadn’t gotten chilly last night, we could have eaten outdoors and it would have truly felt as though summer had started.  Opening the windows didn’t help make everything seem summery, but tasting the farm-fresh food sure did.

Here are the recipes for two of the dishes we had last night:  Scallops with Beet and Tomato Salsa and Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler.

SEA SCALLOPS WITH BEET AND TOMATO SALSA

It's pictured at the top of this post. I’m sorry that this isn’t a real recipe – I just put everything together and only thought to write it all down when it was too late – but nothing in the dish has to be so precise that you can’t just play around with it for yourself.

Makes 2 servings

For the salsa:

4 small beets – roasted, peeled and cut into small dice

1 cup grape tomatoes, cut in half

2 scallions, white and light green parts, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced

Good olive oil (you could use a mix of olive and walnut oil)

Splash of sherry vinegar

Salt (I used fleur de sel) and freshly ground pepper

Minced fresh herbs – I used lots of chives, Greek oregano and thyme

Mix the beets, tomatoes, scallions and oil together and set aside while you make the rest of the dish.  Right before serving, add the vinegar and season with salt, pepper and herbs.

For the salad:

2 handfuls of mixed greens

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Good olive oil

Squirt of fresh lemon juice

Have everything ready and toss it together right before serving. 

For the scallops:

4 strips of bacon

Good olive oil

10 fat sea scallops

Salt and freshly ground pepper

4 medium-thick slices tomato

Cook the bacon in a heavy skillet until it’s crispy, lift it out of the pan onto a plate lined with paper towels, cover with a double thickness of paper towels and drain.  When cool, coarsely chop the bacon.  Discard all but 1 tablespoon of the fat.

Add about 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil to the pan and heat until the oil is very hot, but not smoking.

Pat the scallops dry, season with salt and pepper and cook them, 2 to 3 minutes on a side, until they are golden on the outside and still opalescent on the inside.

While the scallops are cooking, put two slices of tomato side by side in the center of each of two dinner plates; season with salt and pepper and drizzle ever so slightly with oil.

Toss the greens and put them right behind the tomatoes.  Put the scallops on top of the sliced tomatoes.  If you’d like, you can moisten the scallops with a little of the bacon-oil mixture.  Make sure all the ingredients are in the salsa, give it a last stir and spoon it over the scallops.  Sprinkle the salsa with the chopped bacon and you’re ready to go.

STRAWBERRY-RHUBARB COBBLER

I really like the slight crunch I got by making the topping with a little cornmeal.  If you’re not as crunchophilic as I am, just replace the cornmeal with all-purpose flour.

Makes 6 servings

For the fruit:

1 pound rhubarb, peeled, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces

1 pint strawberries, hulled and halved

1/3 cup sugar (or more to taste)

2 teaspoons cornstarch

For the topping:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 cup cornmeal

3 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger (optional)

3/4 stick (6 tablespoons; 3 ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into 12 pieces

1/2 cup cold milk

Lightly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream (very optional)

Getting ready:  Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Butter an 8-x-8-inch pan – I used a Pyrex baker – and place it on a lined baking sheet.

For the fruit:  Put all the ingredients in the baking pan and stir them around.  Give them a couple of stirs while you’re working on the cobbler topping.

For the topping:  Put the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt and ginger in the workbowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to blend.  Scatter the pieces of butter over the dry ingredients and pulse the machine on and off until the mixture resembles coarse meal – it’s okay to have some largish clumps, so don’t overdo it.  Still pulsing the machine, add the milk.  Stop mixing when the dough forms big, soft curds.

Turn the dough out onto a piece of wax paper and, working with a light hand, gather it together gently.  Give the fruit one last stir, then pinch off pieces of the dough and put them on top of the fruit.  Neatness doesn’t count here nor does covering the fruit completely or evenly.

Slide the cobbler into the oven and bake 35 to 45 minutes, or until the topping is golden brown and the fruit is bubbling up around it.  Allow the cobbler to cool for at least 20 minutes before serving.  While there’s something wonderful about having anything warm, I think the cobbler tastes better at room temperature.  Of course, there’s no reason not to have some warm and some more cool.

If you don’t mind your cobbler being a little soggy (it’s never bothered me), you can cover the leftovers and keep them at room temperature or in the refrigerator overnight. 

Here's the cobbler almost ready to come out of the oven.

Julia Child, Just Outside My Kitchen

Last winter, my friend Sally Heffernan, who is responsible for my garden being as glorious as it is, called to say that she had a surprise for me.  She’d read that a rose had been named after Julia Child and that it would soon be available.  Because she wanted to make sure that I was the first on the block to have one, she ordered it immediately. 

Yes, Sally is wonderful.  And so is the rose, which was approved by Julia before she died.  As you can see, the rose is deeply golden, a shade described as butter-gold in the information about the flower.  Anyone who knew Julia, knows she adored butter.  And anyone who knows butter, knows that only very good butter is this wonderful color, so I’m assuming that the model was something yummy, like the French butter Julia loved so much.

My Julia Child rose is on the deck, right outside my kitchen door in Connecticut, and, when it’s warm outside, you can almost smell the flowers the instant you open the door.  When I cut them and put them on my desk, the fragrance is so powerful it almost gets in the way of working.

I couldn’t put my finger on the rose’s scent.  It smells profoundly rosy in a way that flowers from a florist never do.  To me, its perfume is very sweet, slightly exotic and just a smidgen spicy.  But when I looked it up, I discovered what the professionals have to say about its scent:  It has a sweet licorice perfume!  Well, that explains my affection for the flower, it’s got three things I love - Julia Child, butter and licorice - rolled into one!

A Time to Plant

It's Memorial Day Weekend and while I plan to do the most traditional Memorial Day activity - grill - tomorrow, today I did the second-most-traditional thing:  I went plant shopping! 

We used to get our herbs, tomatoes and annuals into the garden around Mother's Day (two weeks ago), but I was gone then and this is the first time I've been to Connecticut in three weeks, so at the of top of the to-do list was a spree.  The rows and rows of herbs et al in the two nurseries we went to were a little picked over, but there was still enough to make a city-girl's heart go pitter-patter and more than enough to fill two wagons:

Among the things I brought home were:

• Basil - of course, and including lots of regular, opal, spicy globe and Magic Michael, irresistible because of its name; I'm still looking for Thai basil - hope I'm not too late
• Tomatoes - big, small, round, long, red, yellow and striped; I really hope the Marzano tomatoes grow and thrive,  so I can have great sauce all winter
• Peppers - mostly chiles, mostly hot
• Rosemary - a lot of rosemary to plant along the south wall with the lavender, which wintered over beautifully; together the rosemary and lavender make me think I've got a tad of the South-of-France in New England
• Bay Leaf - one of my favorite things in a garden; there's nothing like being able to pull a leaf off the plant just when the stew is going into the oven or when you're about to make moules mariniere
• Thyme - including lemon and silver
• Marjoram - which always makes me think of oregano and makes me wonder every year why the oregano always winters over and the marjoram never does
• Mint - peppermint, spearmint and chocolate mint (which we'll keep in pots, so that they won't take over the entire garden)
• Scented Geraniums - strawberry, apple and a fabulous lemon-rose; I'm going to use them in pound cakes this summer
• Patchouli - so summer of love, so intoxicating
• Lemongrass - which will grab an entire corner of the garden, but be worth it
• Lemon Verbena- big, aromatic, wonderful in tisanes and so good with fish

There's much more, more than enough to fill the empty patches left by winter.  Actually, given how harsh our winters are here, I'm always amazed at how much of the garden survives covered by frost and weighed down by snow.  Yes, yes,  I know that that's why the survivors are called perennials, but I still think it borders on the miraculous. Here's the spring garden with nothing new planted in it:

By next week all the holes will be filled - except the ones the chipmunks burrow.  Aarrrgh.  How can creatures that are so cute be so destructive?!

A Drinking Kind of Place

I just had lunch with a friend who suggested we meet at the upstairs cafe/bar of a charming but worn hotel on Long Island Sound.  I mean really on the Sound - if the cafe weren't on the upper deck, you'd worry that your shoes might get wet when the tide came in.  The location is remarkable, the cafe less so.

Our date was for noon, but I was there a bit early, so I took the time to press my nose against the window and look out at the water.  It's a grey, blustery and wintry-cold today, making it especially nice to be seeing the icy water from the shelter of a warm room.  Then I looked around for a table with a view, scanning past the big bar and around the large open room, which resembles nothing so much as the rundown rec hall of an old summer camp.  Even though my eyes were looking for a two-top, my brain seemed to be registering something else:  the fact that there were about 15 people in the room and all but two were drinking.  A quick look turned up wine, a few martinis and more than a few Bloody Marys. 

Somehow, seeing people knocking back brandy at 6 am in the markets of France never struck me as odd, but pre-noon non-weekend martinis on Connecticut's shoreline had a different feel, something Cheeveresque.

"Yeah," it's like this," my lunchmate said as she settled in.  I thought she meant that the cafe was just a drinking kind of place, but no, the "it" she was referring to was the American Northeast.  She's convinced that mid-day drinking is a regional trait.  So being lifelong Northeasterners, along with our Cobb Salads we ordered a Sam Adams for me and a Bloody Mary for her.

Very Verrine: Dinner in a Glass

What you’re looking at is the leftovers from yesterday’s lunch.  They don't look so bad, do they?  The original was just a salad – romaine, celery, tomato, scallions, carrots, raisins, tuna and a mustard vinaigrette – but when I couldn’t find a storage container and grabbed a jelly jar instead, the remains of the day started looking better.

My salad-in-a-glass was expedient, but these days – and for the past few years – chefs in Paris have thought long, hard and super-creatively about presenting their precious products in glasses and the results have been stunning.

Today, you can go to a restaurant and get a little amuse bouche in a slender vodka glass or an elaborate dessert in a slimmed-down lowball and in between be served an app in a glass, vegetables in a glass and maybe even a glass-enclosed pot-au-feu.  It’s a certified trend. (See the recent article in the LA Times; recipes included.)

The first meal-in-a-glass that I can remember (aside from my mom’s chocolate Slim-Fasts or my own sundaes, which weren’t meant to be meals but could have been) was some time in the late-90s at Petrossian in Paris when Phillippe Conticini was the chef.  My friend Nick Malgieri and I had a multi-course meal there in which every dish was served in a glass with custom-designed flatware – all of it long-handled – and the whole event finished with each of us being served a tray of desserts.  I don’t have the best memory, but I think we both had five glasses and each glass had eight elements (or maybe we had eight glasses, each with five different layers).  It was a wow meal and it wore out our brains – so much to taste; so, so, so much to think about. 

Nowadays, these kinds of dishes, called verrines, after the glasses they’re served in, are everywhere in Paris, especially in pastry shops.  At Pierre Herme’s they’re an art form – no surprise, I know. 

I’m not thinking art this weekend, but I do have glasses galore...

Jellied gazpacho?  Crab-avocado salad?  Seared scallops, mango salsa and a scallop ceviche to finish it?  Hmm – could be beautiful in the martini glass.  Layered beef tartar? That might be great in the snifter.  Actually, just a few tablespoons of chopped beef, a teaspoon or so each of chopped onions and salty capers and an adorable quail egg as the topper, would be a perfect hors d’oeuvre in that shapely glass that I’ve never used for anything but short flowers.  I could get into this.

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes: A Pasta Picker-Upper

Just when it looked like we were heading into the lamb part of March (is the expression March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb universal? or at least known in the northern hemisphere, where March is a winter/spring month?), along comes real snow and with it pokey traffic.  By the time we got up to Connecticut the other night, it was past serving time at all our favorite places and we were left to scavenge dinner, using whatever was in the pantry and the bag of leftovers I’d scooped up in New York and tossed into the car.  It was a little like Iron Chef … but not.

With half a container of grape tomatoes and a red bell pepper in the canvas bag, Parmesan cheese in the fridge and good olive oil (always on hand) and a box of quinoa pasta, something I bought but hadn’t tried, in the pantry, dinner, albeit a plain one, seemed to organize itself.

It took just 10 minutes to finely dice the pepper, cut the tomatoes, grate the cheese and cook the pasta and then, when I was reaching into the refrigerator to see if there were any herbs hidden away somewhere, I saw the container of oven-roasted tomatoes and dinner immediately got ten times better.

The way I think about them, slow-roasted tomatoes, or tomates confites, are somewhere between fresh tomatoes and sun-dried tomatoes and the best thing you can do with any tomato that isn’t as flavorful as you’d like it to be.  By drizzling the tomatoes with oil and roasting them long and slow, you concentrate and deepen the flavor – it’s a mini magic trick.  Then, if you don’t use them right away, you can cover them with oil and get a bonus:  tomato-infused olive oil.

So here’s what I did with the pasta:  I diced the grape tomatoes and bell pepper and put them in the bottom of the pasta bowl with some extra-virgin olive oil, sea salt, freshly ground white pepper and a pinch of hot pepper flakes.  I cooked the pasta, drained it, tossed it with the tomatoes and pepper and then added the slow-roasted tomatoes, grated Parmesan cheese and just enough of the tomato oil to bring up the flavors.  With a glass of wine, it was a pretty good made-in-10-minutes-welcome-home dinner.

Here’s a recipe for the tomatoes:

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes/Basic Tomates Confites

1 pint cherry (or grape) tomatoes

Pinch of fleur de sel or fine sea salt

Pinch of freshly ground white pepper

1 or 2 sprigs fresh rosemary or thyme, optional

1 or 2 cloves garlic, unpeeled and smashed, optional

About 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 225 degrees F.  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or use a silicone baking mat.

Cut the tomatoes in half – I cut cherry tomatoes horizontally (around their waists) and grape tomatoes from top to bottom – and place them cut-side up on the lined baking sheet.  Sprinkle over the salt and pepper and drizzle with the olive oil.  There’s no need to use a lot of oil – just enough so that the tomato tops glisten.

Slide the baking sheet into the oven and roast the tomatoes for about 3 hours.  When they’re done, the tomatoes will be shriveled and a little dry looking, but press them gently and you’ll see that they’ve still got some juice.

Use the tomatoes immediately or cool them on the baking sheet.  If you don’t need them now, pack them in a jar along with the garlic and herbs, if you’ve used them, and cover them with good olive oil.  Topped with oil, the tomatoes will keep in the refrigerator for a few weeks.

In addition to pulling the tomatoes into service to give pasta a little more punch, I put them and a little of their oil over chicken, salmon or tuna, steamed vegetables and anything else that needs a little color and an extra hit of flavor.  I’m sure once you have a stash of these tomatoes, you’ll find lots of uses for them.

Swedish Visiting Cake

The water is still crashing over the dam, the rain is still strong and steady and the leak over the stove is still leaking – the roofer said he couldn’t get here until Monday (actually, he said he was “swamped” – really) – but I am in a much better mood and all it took was a couple of minutes in the kitchen. 

I thought I was going to make muffins and then the Swedish Visiting Cake came to mind (the recipe’s in Baking) and I could think of nothing else.  The recipe for his cake was given to me by my friend Ingela, who said her mother claimed that you could start making this cake when you saw visitors coming up the drive and have it ready for them as soon as they were settled into your home.  And mothers never lie. 

Making the cake just now reminded me for the nine-millionth time why baking is so dear to me:  it is a pleasure that engages all your senses.  In the 10 minutes it took me to get the mixture into my old cast-iron skillet, I rubbed sugar and zest between my fingers, watched a batter grow from thick and dull to lithe and shiny, caught the fragrance of lemon, vanilla and almond and had the satisfaction of knowing that I was making something completely by hand and that it would be something others would soon enjoy.

The fact that the house will smell like butter, sugar and vanilla for hours is just a happy extra.

Swedish Visiting Cake (adapted from Baking, From My Home to Yours)

Makes 8 to 10 servings

1 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling

Grated zest of 1 lemon

2 large eggs

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

About 1/4 cup sliced almonds (blanched or not)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Butter a seasoned 9-inch cast-iron skillet or other heavy ovenproof skillet, a 9-inch cake pan or even a pie pan.

Pour the sugar into a medium bowl.  Add the zest and blend the zest and sugar together with your fingertips until the sugar is moist and aromatic.  Whisk in the eggs one at a time until well blended.  Whisk in the salt and the extracts.  Switch to a rubber spatula and stir in the flour.  Finally, fold in the melted butter.

Scrape the batter into the pan and smooth the top with a rubber spatula.  Scatter the sliced almonds over the top and sprinkle with a little sugar.  If you're using a cake or pie pan, place the pan on a baking sheet.

Bake the cake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until it is golden and a little crisp on the outside; the inside will remain moist.  Remove the pan from the oven and let the cake cool for 5 minutes, then run a thin knife around the sides and bottom of the cake to loosen it.  You can serve the cake warm or cooled, directly from the skillet or turned out onto a serving plate.