fuoricitta (out of the city)

by popular demand: trota alla Piemontese

2012-01-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

If you've been following us on our FaceBook page, you'll know we've started something of a winter ritual: Champagne Sunday Lunch. Though I'm not sure it needs to be confined to only the winter. What about spring? Summer? Autumn? Not only does it have a lovely ring to it, it does definitely help get us through the remainder of the winter doldrums, that post holiday lassitude that is tied to the still short days that quickly grow so dark in the afternoon. I imagine it will help get us through our fifth season: Mud, and once we hit April and and the farm is back in full swing, we'll need something to buoy our weary bones. Funny how Champagne does that.

It is one of the many reasons we love Champagne, and I should specify here "grower Champagne" or "farmer fizz", the stuff grown and cared for by the producer him or herself, the grower ushering three hundred and sixty-five days of a landscape into a bottle. No Big House sparkle all about consistency from vintage to vintage here. We're looking for the differences in vintage, the idiosyncracies, the story.

We also love Sunday Lunch. It is our Friday (since our "weekend" occurs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), the end of our restaurant work week and we generally don't need to be in to the restaurant quite so early in the afternoon, so it allows us to linger at home for a little bit longer. Sunday Lunch conjurs long mid-day meals with family and friends, homely, tasty food, balast for body and soul for the ensuing fretwork of days to come.

For our first Champagne Sunday Lunch of 2012, we prepared a dish from the Piemonte, pan-roasted trout with raisins, rosemary, sage, and Balsamic. We were experimenting with dishes to serve at our upcoming wine tasting dinner with Gian Carlo Nada in February. The Ada Nada vineyard specializes in Barabaresco and we were trying this trout with their 2006 single vineyard Valeirano. The dish itself proved to be a worthy companion to the '06, layers of flavor, direct yet searching to meet each other and the palate. Soul food.

We've adapted a recipe we found in our library from Italian Regional Cooking by Lotte Mendelsohn with origanal recipes from Bea Lazarro.

For two. Soak a quarter cup of raisins in warm water. Chop one stalk of celery, an onion, and a couple of cloves of garlic. Pour a few glugs of good olive oil to well coat a cast iron skillet and add the vegetables. Season well with salt and pepper. (When Italians cook they use a lot of olive oil, so don't be shy. It is often the secret to the silkiness of their dishes.) Braise.

Season well a whole fresh trout, then add the fish to the skillet setting it on top of the soft vegetables. (We filleted the fish first and rested it on top of the braise as if it were still whole).

Sprinkle about a tablespoon of good Balsamic vinegar over the fish, add the drained, plumped raisins, about 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind, and a couple sprigs each of bruised sage and rosemary. Cook for about 5 minutes on side, then turn the fish and cook for about another 4, or until just done.

Remove the fish to a platter and cover to keep warm. Add a little butter and/or olive oil to the braised vegetables (enough to make the vegetables "saucy" along with the pan juices) and cook down until a nice consistency (this will be a light sauce). Pour over the warm fish and sit down with a glass of L. Aubrey et Fils Premier Cru Brut NV, or AdaNada Barbaresco Valeirano '06.

That's what we did.

-Deirdre

holiday dish redux

2012-01-05T19:57:00.000-08:00

We thought to post photos of our favorite meals of 2011, but realized there were enough pix to make a book! So instead, we'll post some of our favorite dishes of the holiday season. Everything from classic French souffles to zucchini and lemon pasta to good ole soup and sandwiches....

Buon anno e buon appetito!
--Deirdre & Caleb

tablescape

2011-12-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

As we approach the new year, and we think about setting the table to herald 2012, we look back at a few of our favorite tablescapes from this past year. La garagista-style. In this case, a picture seems to be worth more than a thousand of our words....

Here's to sitting down at the table. Happy New Year!

--Deirdre and Caleb

secret gardens

2011-11-21T18:14:00.000-08:00

1.: jardin lapin ouvrier, 14th arrondisement

I've always thought of Paris as a green city, meaning there are so many groomed parks with wide lawns and varied borders and little landscaped niches everywhere. There are allées with arching lime trees and graveled walks. In some parks there is an extravagance of roses, a profusion of asters, or an horitcultural biodiversity. Not only is this a city of architecturual beauty and grandeur, but one of landscape architecture elegance and grace.

I was in a shop in Montreal. On the shelf was a little book called Secret Paris. Knowing I would be in that city in just a few weeks, I flipped through the pages. The booked opened to a section about Paris gardens. Not just the beautiful gardens we already knew about in the Luxembourg, or Bois de Bologne, or the King's herb garden at the Jardins des Plantes, or at Rodin's museum. But social, communal, working neighborhood gardens. Part of our quest in the city this visit has been to wander through the arrondisements and find these little gems. Our map has been laid out by www.jardinons-ensemble.org.

-Deirdre

looking for the real BoJo

2011-11-18T06:19:00.000-08:00

La Cave des Papilles is on the rue Daguerre, a lively pedestrian street full of cheesemongers, butchers, fishmongers, bakeries, traiteurs, and vegetable shops. It holds down a corner of Daguerre and a street called Lalande, and is probably one of the most thrilling wine shops I've ever been in. Bottles upon bottles of wines made by small producers, young and old, men and women, who make their wines in small quantities and hold themselves to both traditional and honest standards. There are pots of pâté and foie gras, handmade jams from a farm in the south. There is a tasting on offer tonight, and for that there are beautiful baguettes and a rather impressive loaf of country pâté as well as a bowl full of rillettes. Six bottles for the tasting are lined up.

It's the third Thursday in November, which means that the newest of the new wine from this year's vintage in Beaujolais will be released. Here in Paris, there is a typical excitement, though excitement might be too strong a word, maybe more of a typical expectation. It is the day the Beaujolais Nouveau will arrive and it's the same day it's been arriving for the last thirty years, and it's a good day to find cause for celebration. Café bars and little bistros all over the city have planned tastings. Most begin at five o'clock in the evening and go till nine or ten, some will go on late into the evening. Many will be pouring Beaujolais Nouveau from George DuBoeuf, but others will be pouring something a little different.

Beaujolais Nouveau (referred to as BoJo here in the city) has a slightly less than savory reputation. People seem to like the idea of it, but not really like "it". The wine is so young and so many of the industrialized brands use chaptalization (adding sugar for fermentation purposes when the natural sugar content is low and to back sweeten), designer yeasts (there is a little bit of an "in" French joke going around right now in the wine community about a yeast used to create a slightly banana flavor fro BoJo. "Want to see my banana?" and all that...), and a heady dose of sulfite to stop fermentation and stabilize. As a result, what is supposed to be a particularly authentic wine, a real experience of wine ready to drink so close to the end of harvest has become commercially and chemically changed, or like the French word, derangé, deranged.

I've never had real BoJo and have been particularly interested in searching it out as I see so many similarities between the Marquette growing in so many vineyards in Vermont and the Gamay grape. For the past two years, after our own harvest, our young red wine has been fresh, lively, fruity, and well, rather lovely. Couldn't we have our own Nouveau tradition? The quest, as there must always be a quest, has been to find true Beaujolais Nouveau in a sea of imposters.

It doesn't take long to find the venue for which I'm looking: La Cave des Papilles (that would be The Cellar of the Tastebuds) which specializes in natural wines. They are having this tasting of several producers of BoJo as well as a Nouveau from the Loire and

Côtes de Rhône for comparitive puproses. They started opening bottles at eleven in the morning. We think to arrive at around six in the evening. Music starts at seven.

The tasting itself is everything from educational to intriquing. The wines, which come from various parts of Beaujolais, have similarities but also strong differences. The wines are light by nature with fruit and excellent acidity. They have a yeasty almost nutty element to them. They vary in texture, some being more ethereal and others almost weighty. They are curated perfectly, moving from the lightest style to the richest--though rich is never really a word to use with BoJo. Hints of cherry, tar, iron, and something a little sauvage. The producers shown: Karim Vionnet, Jean-Claude Lapalu, Raphael Champier, Michel Guigner, Christian Ducroux, the Paire family of Domaine de Pothiers (the Loire offering), and Marcel and Marie Marchaud (Côtes de Rhône), all farm organically or biodynamically and believe the less intervention in the cellar the better. All the wines were fermented on wild yeast, no chaptalization, and little or no sulfite at bottling.

At six in the evening, there are a handful of gentlemen in the shop discussing how to place these Beaujolais Nouveau in relation to the ubiquitous M. DuBoeuf's selection. By seven, it is tight standing room only, and a lot of people move out on the street corner with glasses and bottles in hand. The music, a kind of Klezmer jazz mix-up reminiscent of Dixie bands in New Orleans holds court out on the street. We meet a Canadian chemistry professor well-familiar with La Cave and in the city teaching for the month. His brother-in-law lives in Vermont. We spent the evening talking about Paris, economics, wine, and the woes of the world, the woes greatly tempered by how the wines charm us, and the rousing tunes.

On the street, a series of images pass like a film using the lens of this new wine. This is why there are people crowded here on the corner--because of the Beaujolais Nouveau. To celebrate something not quite tangible, to feel--while in this city--the rhythms of harvest and the countryside, to salute your neighbors. Women walk by in skirts carrying bouquets of flowers, a dog barks in admiration for the music, a scooter buzzes by, a woman on a bike rings a bell. An older lady hangs out her apartment window from up above. A man in a wheelchair rolls close to the tuba player moving his head to the sound. A man kisses a woman on both cheeks in greeting.

--Deirdre

How to cook potatoes in a Paris apartment...

2011-11-16T20:08:00.000-08:00

Or, ‘This could be the start of something good’

I love the lowly potato, and have no wish to argue semantics about ‘lowly,’ so I’ll stop there and get to the point. You know what I mean anyway, so whom are we kidding? Potatoes just can’t be beat, right? Just thinking about them makes me want to make them so that I can eat them, especially this way, pan-roasted until just ever-golden-so, with a mix of creaminess and crispiness, to put on top of a salad, alongside a leg of duck confit, or a few discreet slices of steak, or even some pickled herring or grilled sardines. You see what I mean? Potatoes! Let’s go people!

The procedure: Like most things done with potatoes, this is a simple procedure, but it requires a little attention, so just read through all the way, then go do it, no peeking back. Then do it again, and again, and again, until you are making the best damn potatoes you could hope to find right in your own kitchen. With practice, you'll know just how many potatoes to use to fit your pan. And invite friends over.

Begin with a few medium-sized potatoes, scrubbed and glowing, and slice them in half, then slice those halves crosswise into slices just thinner than a pencil. Remember pencils? Wooden sticks--with a dark substance stuck down the middle and a number ‘2’ printed on the side-- that we used to use to write clever and frobidden (new word!) notes which we would pass to our friends – or perhaps enemies—in class at school? No? Then put down that knife and go out and find a pencil to refresh your memory, then we can continue… All set now? Ok, keep that pencil close by where you can see it: potato slices no thicker than that pencil. But not too thin, for crying out loud. Keep the slices together, as if the half potato were still in one piece, and pause here to oil your skillet, which you will begin to warm at this point.

I use cast iron, unless I am making these taters in our friend Meg’s apartment in Paris, where she has this unusual skillet with a textured high-tech surface that distributes the heat just so and doesn’t scorch. And as for fat in the pan, I use extra-virgin olive oil, nothing fancy. Unless I have duck fat on hand. (After all, ducks were invented so that potatoes could be cooked in their fat. Confit is just a happy by-product.) If vegetable oil is what you have, or butter, or bacon fat or lard (I don’t want to hear any trashtalk about honest to goodness, non-hydrogenated, lard), then that is what you should use.

Whatever fat it is, use enough to cover the bottom of the pan, and don’t be too skimpy if you can help it. Now season the pan well with a few pinches of salt, and then lay in the assembled, sliced potato halves, and push them over like fallen dominoes, arranging them as needs be if you have to squeeze in the last few slices. (If you have to, just toss the last few slices on top and let them fend for themselves. If the pan isn’t full, either push out the slices to cover more of the pan, or slice another potato. They come out better, usually, if the pan is full.) A couple more pinches of salt over all, and a splash of water down the inside of the pan, then fire it over medium-high heat, lid on, and keep it at a fast simmer for about 12 to 15 minutes. The lid helps drive the heat into the middle of the potatoes faster, but once the middles are cooking, take that lid off or so that the vapor can escape and the slices can begin to get crispy on the bottom. Keep the heat at a steady but quiet simmer and cook perhaps another 10 to 15 minutes until tender all the way through when you test them with a knifepoint. When they are done, you should be able to lift out a whole serving in one piece, so that each person gets a sort of potato accordion on their plate.

(OK, here is where I have to say, in the interest of full disclosure, ‘unless…’) ...unless your skillet and/or stove make it really difficult to slowly pan roast something without scorching the bottom. In that case, put those slices of potato into a small pot of just enough water to boil them, crank up the heat, salt the water well, and boil until the slices are just barely done, or almost so, just don’t overcook them. Drain them and let cool enough so that you can transfer them to your oiled roasting skillet, tediously arranged as described above, well salted. The trouble is worth it, I promise. Finish them to crispy perfection, no lid.

Too many boiled potatoes for your pan? Well done! Store them in the fridge until tomorrow, when you will dress them in vinaigrette to go with your omelet or facsimile thereof. Oh, what pleasure from pennies, my friends, pennies! Potatoes! Let’s go people!

Why ‘in a Paris apartment?’ Because we ate these potatoes at one of my favorite places of all-time, la Tourelle, here in Paris (where I am writing this in the middle of a jet-lagged night), and where I found Meg’s pan and began making them myself, because I just didn’t want the goodness to stop.

--by Caleb

departure and arrivals

2011-11-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

Fall has left along with its abundant cultivation and harvest. Late autumn has arrived and the farm has been put to bed for the season. Except for the greenhouse which thrives with buckhorn, arugula, radicchio, and escarole. We are rich with parsely and thyme, and we are suddenly rich with that other Time as well. We are in Paris which could be defined as a suspension of Time.

While we have departed from our normal cares and responsibilities, we are still followed by ritual. And I don't mean only us. We are all followed, or even haunted by ritual, even when we have detached from our usual universe and landed ourselves somewhere foreign. We all crave the unknown or the new, yet we yearn for what has been and what will continue to be. The first thing Caleb and I do when we arrive in this city, for we have had the good luck to arrive here often, is buy flowers. Paris, of course, is rich with flowers, just like we are rich with parsley and thyme. For many, it might be ritual enough to just buy flowers, any kind of flowers. But our ritual also involves what kind of blossoms we procure because they are always the same blossoms: ranunculus. The only departure here might be the color of those flowers depending on the time of year and the mood.

I've been buying ranunculus in this city for the last fifteen years, which somehow feels like a millenium. Maybe that's because in those fifteen years we have crossed a millenium. And I remember well the origin of this ritual, which was before the end of one millenium and the start of another. Caleb and I had come to Paris together after I had finished graduate school. After a week, he had to return to work at the restaurant and I stayed on in the city to complete some research. I watched him wave good-bye with bags in hand and descend down the metro stairs at the Place Voltaire. The place suddenly opened into a wide plane full of everything and nothing. Behind me was a flower shop. I bought a bunch of yellow ranunculus to take back to the apartment I had taken for the month. Ever since, every sojourn in Paris begins with a handfull of the papery double blossoms akin to both roses and anenomes.

Yesterday, we bought magenta ranunculus from one of the fleuriste on rue Cler. We departed the street with bags of chipoltalas sausages, white beans, leeks, a raw milk tomme, a bottle of wine in one hand, the cone of flowers in the other. We have arrived.

-Deirdre

blossoming

2011-07-31T12:49:00.000-07:00

This is a year of anniversaries and initiations. Fifteen years at the restaurant, twenty years of marriage, a first vintage of wine. First real pruning in the vineyard. First harvest of our own fruit. First blossoming.

My work at the restaurant is to tell the stories of the wines I have curated, tales of the landscape, the vineyards, and the people who tend them. I have long worked to talk about methods of winegrowing and the work that happens in the cellar and how that translates into the glass, how the wine corresponds in an intimate conversation with the food with which it is being served. I became interested in making wine because I talked so much about the process of making wine and having once studied forms of dance, I felt that to truly understand the alchemy of that process, I had to physically go through the choreography. Once I had accomplished that, or rather failed in my first few attempts, I understood better something that I have always believed: wine is made in the vineyard and is a true expression of a complete landscape, that notion of terroir being all that encompasses a particular parcel of land from geology to botany, to the microclimate that embraces it, to the varietals that grow on it, to the human hand that husbands it and harvests it into wine. Little did I know the desire to understand the rhythms of growing wine would became much greater than the initially planned experiment of simply physically making wine in the cellar (or rather the bathtub as those first few years attested), and that in a three year period, Caleb and I would have a licensed winery with a fledgling vineyard and be producing our first negociant vintage.

There have been many firsts on this journey and many surprises. I have gone many times to other vineyards to taste wine and walk the land, to see the vines, to examine the shapes of their trellising. But these visits exist somewhat in a vacuum. For me the process is never fully understood until I experience the actual doing of it. I am envious of two friends who have taken a sabbatical to work at another friend’s vineyard in France. While they are a bit stunned by the hard manual labor and the difficulties and beauties of a living in a foreign culture, I crave to learn the repeated motions that they practice every day to the protest of their aching bodies. While I have many mentors in many places willing to discuss the mechanics of the work I must do, I have no one who stands next to me with years of experience guiding the way the hand prunes the vine here, ties the vine there, thins the shoots here, pulls leaves there. I have pruned at this friend’s vineyard in France and had his tutelage working forty to ninety year old vines, but I have never pruned two-year old vines, nor have I ever shoot-thinned vines, or pulled leaves. I have never lifted wires; I have never hedged.

I have never watched the buds turn to the smallest looking grapebunch you can imagine, or seen how they lengthen and extend with each day until they become the flowers of this majestic and earthy plant with small threads of white pistils coming out of each supposed grape waiting for pollination. I have never smelled grape blossoms before, the sweet jasmine of the Marquette, or the white pepper of the La Crescent. I have never witnessed how these scents might translate into the fruit. I have never noted when blossoming arrives and how long it lasts and if the sun graces the period or if the rain confounds. This all happens for the first time here and now in this year.

And there is some sun. There is rain. We’ve had strong breezes. The flowers seem to have pollinated themselves as the pistils fade and the berries begin to grow. But there are violent thunderstorms while I hide in our bedroom downstairs that is built into the hillside, hide with two cats fearing that the wind will blow the windows in the house out. I watch out the French doors the hail, pea-sized and so pretty, ride the wind and drop to the ground bouncing like a broken string of pearls. I find that I pray. This is the first hail that I have feared.

In the vineyard, there is cause for alarm. This is the first time I’ve understood how dispirited a local orchardist felt after losing all the leaves on his apple trees to hail the size of a snowball; without leaves there is no photosynthesis and the plants will die. This is the first time I understand why the woman in Bordeaux cried when half her fruit near the time of harvest was destroyed by hail. This is the first time I’ve seen the sly shredding of the leaves and the gaping wounds even in this smallest of fruit. This will be the first time I will know if the vines can survive this test, if any fruit will remain after all this brutality. Will the berries just expire, shrivel and blacken, losing their heart after such a defeat?

But grapevines are absurdly resilient. Only time will tell over these days that turn into weeks. Already, after a serious of chamomile, yarrow and nettle teas, the vines and fruit seem to respond putting out new growth to replace the damaged leaves, and the untouched berries grow larger covering the holes in the bunches of the berries lost. They are now about the size of those hail-pearls that caused the chaos in the first place.

This is the first time we think they will survive, and we will still have fruit for our first at home harvest. This is not the first time, however, this season we have felt hopeful. And this is not the first time we are a bit wary of that hope knowing that the next scourge or storm could render us hopeless. Now, there are black caterpillars with white and orange stripes, and a foul infestation of Japanese beetles. We pick them off the leaves every day, drowning them in old jam jars filled with water and soap. We collect them and burn them into dust, their scent, rather putrid, perfuming the air. But that is yet another story.

--Deirdre

catching (up)

2011-07-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in my newly painted studio which has been physically moved for the fourth time in the last thirteen years we have lived here. This seems to be the fourth and last time. Ralph Ward, who’s helped us move it every time, laughs and shakes his head at this. But really, this is the last time. We’ve dug a spot in to the ground at the top of the rose garden and covered it all in crushed stone, and have started a retaining wall to surround the building. There are plans to get some paving stone. Two potted roses sit at the corners of the front of the little house, tall climbing roses, the William Baffins, that bloom a deep pink and sneak around the windows. There are plans to plant the roses in the ground once the hardscaping is finished. Everything about this move is more permanent, more lasting, a little more serious. Even though after the previous move, we had planted those self-same roses also, and now they’ve just been dug up and potted again as if they might be more transient. As I have to water them almost every day, I promise that this situation is temporary.

This is the room that I write in during the summer. I wrote my book Libation in this space three summers ago though this little house has gone through some changes since then. It’s original use was as a shelter for two baby lambs bought by the original owners, a structure to protect them from the coyotes that roam down from the spines of the Chateauguay above us. This is why it’s been dubbed Lamb House. Last summer, we bought a pull-out couch, so that we could house extra guests, and when the roof failed while those guests were visiting during a series of torrential thunderstorms last August, we decided to have the roof replaced in the fall which gave Lamb House a whole new look—a single shed that is higher at one end of the building giving it the feeling of a cathedral ceiling on the inside. Just a few weeks ago, Caleb finished putting a window in that upper story, a window from the old library in our village. It still needs to be cleaned, but the effect is still lovely. The top half of the building is shingled and barnboard completes the bottom half, just like our house and just like our barn. Things look more all of a piece now.

Out my desk window, I see blooming roses: Belladonna, Therese Bugnet, common Rugosa, Foxy Pavement, blooming borage, catmint, tall spires of Valerian in the distance next to the green house which now has a French blue door to reflect the door of the Lamb House, the door of the cantina, and the front door of the main house. All of a piece, like I said. There are also the spent blooms of a million iris that need to be dead headed and pockets of bare ground in the beds that need to be weeded, pots of volunteer raspberries that need to be planted.

We have taken another long sabbatical from writing here, finding that the doing is precluding the writing. Everything is about catching up and juggling. In April, we took a break from the restaurant like we always do and took time to do some early work here on the farm. When we re-opened the restaurant in May, we thought the season would ease into itself as that’s usually the rhythm in our village. But the restaurant work started off as if in high season, and it has been that way ever since, and somehow doesn’t seem to get easier even with full reinforcements having come to share the work. On the farm, all the starts that we got going early in the greenhouse are still getting planted—there are so many!—and there has been the planting of new vines, compost preparations, taking care of the apple orchard, shoot thinning, tying up, weeding, planning for trellising, new fence, new orchard, cleaning out the barn for the tasting room, and the list continues, and while there is the satisfaction of crossing off things that do get done, the list seems to grow-every time one task is completed, three more are added.

There are many things we’d like to write about here this summer: the first blossoming of our vines, the trials and tribulations of trying to grow radicchio, the dishes we make with the ingredients that we are currently harvesting, the élevage of our first wines in the cantina, what is the meaning of a proper lunch, why do we want to grow natural wine and which winegrowers are motivating us to do so, the surprise of finding nine more bottles of our first cider and the plans for a Sunday lunch under our oldest apple tree that those bottles have inspired. And we hope to be able to meet you here every week or so with these stories, but farm life coupled with restaurant life is often unexpected. While it has been difficult to sit down at our desks to write here, we have been very good about “micro-blogging” on twitter, and you are welcome to find us there at @paneesalute.

Here’s to more time to do everything, and to enjoy the doing—

after the party

2011-03-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

We sit down at the table. There are six of us: our friends Mark and Gina who helped the evening stay glued together, Eliza who has been the intern at the restaurant and farm for the last nine months, and her mother Trish, up for a visit. The old-wood table that Caleb built a few years ago sits in the middle of the restaurant dining room and feels the weight of all the dishes that have been prepared for own after-the-party dinner: crispy pork, a huge platter of garlic beans, shrimp in black bean sauce, tilapia roasted with lemon grass, red-cooked tofu and coconut tofu, bowls of fresh sliced cucumber, bean sprouts, rice, mint, and basil.

Tonight, Caleb cooked Vietnamese dishes, a collection of recipes from our friend Rebecca’s handmade cookbook from a time she spent in that country, a kind of food he cooks for us in the privacy of our home or at staff dinner. Tonight, he has cooked these exotic dishes not only for our dinner, but this is what we served to a restaurant packed full of guests who were here to celebrate the launch of a new collaboration between myself and our friends Eleanor and Albert Leger of Eden Ice Cider: an aperitif cider infused with herbs that we have dubbed Orleans. In this name we wanted something French-sounding to evoke old-world bar magic and something that spoke of place. Eleanor and Albert live in Orleans County in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where they produce their silken trio of winter-made ice ciders: Eden, Northern Spy, and a Honey Crisp for Champlain Orchards.

At the table, we are only missing Eleanor and Albert. They’ve had to return home tonight, a long two hour drive, as tomorrow they have to stop fermentations, and prepare for Albert to return to teaching for the rest of the semester. They are just doing the kinds of things that winegrowers have to do all the time. We understand the demands of being cellarmaster, yet we miss them all the same.

We are a little high and a little tired, or a lot tired as I watch Caleb hit the proverbial wall after his day of cooking all this beautiful food, intricate and subtle flavors that weave in and out of the dishes and paired with the somewhat exotic notes of the Orleans in its three different guises tonight: straight-up, with prosecco and lime, and a slightly racy version of a Ramos Gin Fizz, but with the Orleans as the featured player. The tastes married with the dishes in such a way as to expand and deepen the experience of the food when you put the two together.

Mark and Gina, who’ve played this game with us before, are the kind of good friends you can call in a pinch when you are in need, and they are there in a flash. Mark has even been called out of his bed late in the evening to taxi a table of diners visiting from Holland who had walked a couple of miles into town from their inn and thought they could easily get a cab home in our small town of Woodstock. The skies had unleashed a deluge while they were dining, and there are no cabs. We were too busy at the restaurant to spare one of ourselves to drive them. Mark, donning his Brooklyn heritage and persona played the role well, willingly chauffering the visitors to the inn.

Tonight, Gina washed and washed and washed glasses and dishes and forks as they rotated from kitchen and back out to the party. She wore one of the blue and white striped smocks that Caleb found in a uniform shop in Rome next to a haberdasher for priests and nuns. It covers her sleek leopard print top and pants which no one ever gets to see as she is in front of the sinks all night. I’ve asked Mark to tend bar because the third drink is a little complicated and takes time to make, and I know how these events go—there will be other things for me to do—greet guests, dry glasses and ferry them back to the bar, check that there are enough plates and silverware on the buffet, be the expediter. Eliza is stationed at the buffet serving and talking about the dishes, and Caleb is alternately cooking and checking on guests.

Of course, I’ve created a rather complicated cocktail for Mark to wade through with many ingredients and long minutes of shaking the shaker while chatting with everyone bellied-up to the bar plus pouring the other drinks while I’m not behind the bar with him. I could have designed something simpler, but this was the right drink for the right evening, and I’ve never been one to make decisions because it makes life easier. I’m sure Mark would be able to expound on this if I let him (this is the same man who thinks it would be far more sensible to buy slews of wine glasses each week and recycle them at the end of each night rather than putting up with all the handwashing and polishing we do…), but he is the perfect choice for bartender and soldiers through my demands with style and flair.

There was a buzz, a tangible frisson, on the floor tonight as the build-up of energy slowly rose as more and more people arrived, some from around the corner, some from a couple of hours away, until the hum of conversation and laughter reached pitch. It was a party, a true celebration, excitement and expectation were as real as featured guests. But who doesn’t like to have a reason to celebrate? But even more so, I think the evening was defined by the need for celebration. We have weathered through a long and very intense winter. The larger world is in disarray, perhaps more so than usual, and the transition from winter into spring is often painful and homely in northern climes. The once beautiful snow becomes crusty and dirty losing much of its sparkle and is not much good for anything besides re-adjusting the water table—too icy for skiing, too brittle for snowshoeing, and sometimes dangerous as it melts and causes rise for flood warnings—all a constant reminder that we still have at least six weeks before things really turn around. It is hard to embrace Winter when she looks spent and rather used. But the light has changed, it is more clear, more roseate, and softens the harsh reality of mud and discomfort. Something else undefinable has shifted—Axes? Or poles? Or phases of moons or stars or tides?--which has made us buoyant.

In the dead of winter, the sun goes down at 4:30, and tonight, the light is still filtering in the windows at 7pm. All around the restaurant we’ve positioned big vases of branches, recent prunings from our plum trees and they are studded with fat green buds. With the soft light shafting through the space and candles flickering, the golden colors of the Orleans in the glasses, the bright citrus perfumes of lemon and lime, the leafy greens of mint and basil, the voices ebbing and flowing, the heat in the dining room palpable, the evening shimmers.

We hold onto that shimmer at our own dinner. It is dark outside now, and almost time to go home just like everyone else. We raise glasses and tell jokes and talk about vacations. Someone laughs with abandon. It is the Ides of March, a craziness that marks a month that comes in like a lion, and supposedly leaves like a lamb, a month of wind and temperament, but also sun and seduction. We pour Orleans into our glasses for a final good luck toast, and we pour ourselves into this melting and groaning that will eventually lead to Spring—

--Deirdre

pruning

2011-03-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

I’ve waited too long to write. My memory seems to be not quite as it used to be. In the glory days of youth, I could remember faces, place names, historical dates, addresses(but somehow, never phone numbers), what I ate, drank, when, where, and why.

I’m trying to remember that sunny day last week. Ah, yes, it was Wednesday. A brutally early morning to run errands and attend appointments, then a return home to that bright sunshine as if this was the beach in southern Italy, or coastal Florida rather than an alpine enclave that comprises our farm. Sometimes that word does not want to come trippingly off my tongue: farm. I can’t ignore it anymore, we can’t ignore it anymore, this is a farm, has become a farm, is still becoming a farm. I think if I say it enough times, quickly enough, it will become like second skin, not even a second thought.

I never expected to be a farmer. I’m not entirely sure what I expected, maybe days at the head of a classroom, and that may still come to pass, but I didn’t know that working the land would offer some of the most grueling, heartbreaking, and satisfying work I’ve ever done. I didn’t know that the work would actually feel like a second skin, almost like intuition. And that’s the strange thing, we are still so young in this work as farmers (young as in experience, not necessarily in age…)and there is still so much to learn and understand, that when this farming business feels absolutely right, it takes you a bit by surprise.

The sun is beating down, and this is one of my days to prune in the orchard. Caleb pruned all last week. I’m strapping on my snowshoes and have one pruners in my back pocket and one in my hand. The light is so bright and bouncing off the white landscape, I’m wearing sunglasses. The trees are big enough to be generous bearers of fruit and usually much taller than me. But with the two feet of snow-pack, I am that much closer to the tops. But I’ll still have to use a loppers to get at the highest points.

I’ve never pruned our trees before, other than occasionally stealing flowering branches for a bud vase or a floral arrangement in the restaurant. This is bad behavior. To prune during flowering is like tying your dog on a very short chain in a dirty yard with no shade and no water, or forgetting your child in the grocery store and driving on home without a care in the world. I realize as I look at these trees that I will have to stop that behavior. At least on our own trees. I will have to pilfer elsewhere. But that’s always been my modus operandi: Rose bushes, hydrangea, and peonies in other yards are never safe from my coveting eye, and my snappy sheers.

Somehow the real, legitimate pruning of our trees has always fallen under Caleb’s purview before this, and because his domain is already quite full, it hasn’t always been easy for him to finish the work. This year we’re serious about these apple trees, so we are sharing the work. I’m already nervous about pruning our grape vines come April, even after the patient tutelage of our friend Emanuel in Burgundy this fall, but apple trees are not the same creatures. Pruning can make or break your plant, it can be the deciding factor between a good season and a bad.

I’ve taken some time to look at our handy Little Pruning Book: an Intimate Guide to the Surer Growing of Better Fruits and Flowers by F.F. Rockwell and published in 1919. It’s been reprinted in the Small Farmer’s Journal, Fall, Vol. 33, No. 4. (There’s that word again: farm. ) Mr. Rockwell has many good things to say about the process of pruning, but he has four points he says to be sure to always keep in mind, and which I carry with me at the ready, just like the extra pruners in my back pocket:

First: always leave a clean smooth cut. Careless cutting or dull shears, leaving a ragged edge, means slow healing and increased danger—to say nothing about its being the earmark of a slovenly gardener.

Second: Cut just the right distance above the bud. If you cut close to it, it is likely to be injured. If you cut too far above it, a dead stub will be left. On small branches and twigs, cut from a quarter to less than half-an-inch above the bud. If pruning is done when plants are in active growth, however, the cut should be made close to the bud, as it will heal almost immediately.

Third: Prune above an outside bud. This will tend to keep the new growth branching outward, giving the plant an open center with plenty of space and light. While in some specific case there may be reasons for selecting an inside bud, this holds as a general rule.

Fourth: Cut close up to and parallel with the main branch, trunk or stem. In removing a branch from a tree or side shoots from shrubs or plants, the leaving of a stub, even it if is a short one, delays the healing or makes it possible for disease and germs to enter, thus providing for future trouble.

So, with a fair amount of trepidation, I start.

I take the pruning branch by branch. I step away occasionally to look at the tree as a whole with the question: is it balanced? The work goes both slowly and quickly. There is a meditative quality to the process and Time seems to be neither moving or standing still. The sun is hot and bright and feels like a balm to cold bones. The air is fresh and cold and feels like it must be full of the best oxygen. After a while, I realize I am already on the third tree and any residual fear is gone.

The snow-covered ground is littered with fallen branches to be collected in bunches. Some will come inside to be forced for blossoms in vases (old habits die hard….), others will be evaluated for suitability as cuttings, others will be left to dry as wood for cooking. (Doesn’t pork roasted over apple wood sound pretty darn good?)

The trees look airy and shaped liked lacy goblets, arms reaching out and up. When Caleb returns home, he helps me reach the tops I can’t quite get to. The sun starts to shift. It’s already three in the afternoon and we have yet to eat lunch. We decide to stop for the day and catch a bit of sun on the porch with a glass of wine, some salame, little pickles and bread. We close our eyes to the warmth on our faces and think of bees humming in blossoms in just a few months time, the the fruit ripe on the trees.

--Deirdre

gorgeous disgorgement

2011-01-29T13:58:00.000-08:00

We have only a case of bottles left of our first cider from two seasons ago. They have been patiently waiting, or rather they have been doing what they need to do, and I have been not-so-patiently waiting for the time when we can disgorge them. The number of bottles has dwindled over the last year and a quarter as they have been victims of my trials and errors. First, I had hoped to create a sparkling cider in what is known as the ancient method where the second fermentation does not get disgorged before going to market. This seemed rather easier and had a traditional beauty and insouciance to it. This can be very tricky though for the unsuspecting taster who might find an ancient method wine in a wine shop. Either the bottles will be stored right side up or on their sides and the yeast deposits from the second fermentation will be incorporated into the fluid bubbles of the wine for a more natural beer-like experience (not necessarily a bad thing if the deposits are in minimal proportion), or the bottles must be carefully stored upside down and the unsuspecting taster will perform the final disgorgement.

There is one producer I know who does this. He is from Slovenia—Ales Kristancic of Movia--and makes a remarkable sparkling wine from pinot noir--Puro--that arrives here in the United States in a special cardboard box that keeps it upside down. It is expensive and not for the faint of heart. In winemaking books, you are often instructed to wear goggles and a heavy jacket at the time of disgorgement, for protection. This can give you pause.

Our friend Eric who owns Vintages: Adventures in Wine in Concord, Massachusetts showed us the bottle of the Movia on a visit there a couple of years ago when we went down into his cellar to pick a case of interesting and unusual wines. When I saw the Movia box, and heard Eric’s words of caution, I had to have it. This would be a wine experience that would truly connect me to the winegrower. I would be a participant, essentially, in the finishing of the wine. It is a rather terrific notion if you believe wine connects you to the people with whom you are sharing it, to the dishes with which you drink it, to the landscape that raised it, to the person who tended both the growth of the fruit, and the fermentation and elevage of the wine itself. It’s a kind of beautiful QED.

We had the wine at Thanksgiving, disgorging the bottle outside the house into a field already covered in snow. We lost about the a third of the wine, but so relished the minerality of the perlage with just a kiss of blackberry fruit, and of course a faintly yeasty persistence that makes you think of freshly baking bread in a tiny warm bakery on a quiet street corner in early morning mid-winter. Wine can lead to such kinds of places.

I loved the idea of making our ciders in a similar fashion and engaging its drinkers in the same ritual.

We began by picking an assortment of our Liberty apples here on the farm along with our wild pippins. We added heaps of Empires from Caleb’s parents’ grand and old apple tree that offers up bushels of fruit each year. Before we had a proper cantina, the cider of that year fermented with its own wild yeasts rather zealously in a cool corner of the living room, popping its airlock off and foaming at the mouth as it were. It continued to ferment on its lees for a couple of months, and finally it settled down by the holidays and went into that quiet period of deep winter. I kept it on its fine lees. In early March, we went to go visit a friend’s family farm where they make old-style cider just for themselves, a tradition handed down from father to son to father to son. We tasted incredible three year old ciders that had been aged in whiskey or ginger barrels. Kermit, the grandfather, had told us that the longer cider stays in the barrel the better. And that it doesn’t start to show its true self until after three years, and gets really good at six years. He also told us that the cider works twice a year in the barrel, fermenting again in the spring and in the fall.

Sure enough, on the spring equinox our cider started to ferment again. Tides, shifts in season and sky, do actually have an effect on the living organism that is wine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Mid-summer, I decided to start the second fermentation in bottle. I too wanted to go old-school, so just added a simple syrup of natural sugar. We stirred, bottled, and corked with mushroom caps and the traditional cages. About a month later, our friends from Burgundy were visiting and we were tasting each other’s wine, and I brought out a bottle of the cider to try. The flavors were well coalesced, but the sparkle was somewhat disappointing. It still tasted like a base wine. In consultation with another friend who has a vineyard about fifteen minutes from us and who’s experimented a lot with sparkling wines, I decided to add another dosage to my bottles. This time with a little neutral yeast. The sparkle had increased a little more from the sugar by the day I opened all the bottles and recombined them in a large demijohn in order to add the yeast, but because this was my first time making sparkling cider, I really wanted it to sparkle, and I wanted to explore all the possibilities of production. All along, I left some of the lees from the initial fermentation in the cider. Depth of flavor and all that. I would be making this for real in another year.

We riddled the bottles three times a week, and I left them on their sides. We began to open bottles every few months, to see how the cider would develop. It developed. It definitely had sparkle now. Perhaps too much. I should have been more patient with my initial dosage of sugar. But now I had bottles with a thick carpet of lees at the bottom that would churn up with the mousse whenever we opened one. This wasn’t quite the experience I was looking for, so that’s when we decided to disgorge.

We thought a winter disgorgement would be elegant and easy. All that snow and cold weather seemed to beckon for something so festive, and a good use of the season. I had inverted all the bottles at the holidays to get the lees into the necks. The date for disgorging in January kept getting pushed back due to other necessities, until this past week. After a brutal cold snap, we had some milder weather. Out went what was left of the bottles, necks down into snow. Two to three hours, they say, for partial freezing of the necks at 21-25 degrees Farenheit. We waited. We waited some more.

So here’s the thing. Snow is an insulator. That’s why we’re so happy we have it burying our vines during all this cold weather. The snow stayed at a consistent 31 degrees. No freezing of the necks. And no disgorgement. We went to work at the restaurant, knowing that it was going to get colder out that night. We thought we’d return to disgorge at around one in the morning. Again, elegant and easy. A good story.

Arriving home, it was indeed colder. About 15 degrees. Perfect! we thought. And even more perfect when our handy little digital thermometer read 23 degrees in the snow. However, the bottoms, so gallantly sticking up in the air, were partially frozen, and the necks were not. Caleb had the brilliant idea of shoveling snow on top of all the bottles to keep them protected from the further freezing until we could look at this situation square in the eye the next morning.

The next day, the snow was still just the right temperature. There was still ice in the base of the bottles, so we uncovered them to let the sun warm them a bit. We decided to disgorge.

We dressed in heavy coats and thick glasses. Caleb valiantly managed the popping of the corks and trying to hold as much of the cider in the bottles after the yeast had shot out of the bottles. I took over with settling the bottles and setting them up inside to warm a little before topping up and corking. Again, I think my overzealousness with the yeast has resulted in a less successful integration of the co2 in the bottle. The nose of the cider was apply, yeasty, spicy, and the taste on the palate the same. We let the bottles come to a warmer temperature in the house, all lined up on the dining table, and topped the bottles up with itself rather than a sugar liqueur that many Champagne houses employ. We like the dry element of the cider. But I worry a bit about the absence of fruit. Is it there or not there? The taste an aroma of apples is fleeting.

Re-corked, and re-caged, the bottles will age for at least another two months. My hope is that the yeastiness will meld into the cider in a pleasing way, rather than a “look-at-me” kind of way. One of the wines I made from the same year also had that yeasty, nuttiness at the finish for the longest time. Until Christmas this year, and it has clearly been the best wine I have made to date. It just needed time.

So this initial foray into the world of sparkling ciders also needs time. There are only 8 bottles left, so I will have to choose carefully the tasting occasions. We will go back to the drawing board. Read and talk to other growers producing sparkling wines. What will I do with the ciders that are gently still fermenting in the cantina as we speak? I await the arrival of several ciders and poires(pear ciders) to taste from the imitable Eric Bordelet. One of my mentors had recently told me about Eric’s ciders, and that his poire Granit was one of the greatest fermented beverages on earth. I await their arrival, and practice patience.

--Deirdre

At least I grew a carrot

2010-12-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

See? I really did grow a carrot. Some of them were what I call ‘paradigm specimens’, what a carrot should be. And for a four-by-eight foot bed, there were a lot of carrots. The same was true for the scallions, and the curly endive, and for… well, that’s just about where paradigm perfection ended this year in my garden. Everything else was an exercise in rescue and salvage, once I realized that I had made some kind of mistake, or neglected to do something at a particular moment. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of great produce came out of our beds, but as the season advanced I began to see that it could have been so much better. Sometimes things go well in your garden and you don’t know why, but not for me, not in this year of no forgiving. So, in an effort to begin some catalogue of my lessons learned, for future reference, I offer a list of this year’s mistakes.

1. 1. I didn’t water enough. Sometimes it rains with some frequency over several days, or even weeks, up here in the summertime, and a garden can be quite content to hold its own with short frequent rains. But that’s not what this past summer was like, and I was finding other things to do in the garden by day and thinking that ‘if it doesn’t rain today or this evening, I’ll water when we come home tonight after work.’ After all, watering the garden beds at night is really the best for the plants. But after service at the restaurant, I would either forget or postpone watering in favor of getting horizontal; and that is the reason I offer. In return, the plants offered me no excuse. Instead, they punished me. The lettuces and chicories quickly took on a tougher texture , and—get this—everything stopped growing! And when I finally got the message and started watering every day, even just a little bit, and sometimes even in the middle of a frightfully sunny and hot day…by golly, the plants got together and decided that was all right with them, and got right back to growing and looking fabulous. Amazing, isn’t it?

2. 2. I procrastinated. On almost every job, I probably procrastinated at least a little bit. “Oh, I need to do that over there as soon as possible, but I’m doing this now, and I’ll get to that just as soon as I finish this.” Yeah. Great. Except that I procrastinated before doing the current task, and the fact is that I am already playing catch-up to my plants. As my Mom used to say, ‘Get on the stick!’ ‘Don’t put it off!’ ‘It needs to be done!’ Well said, Mom. I’ll try to do better.

3. 3. I sowed some things too densely and was too wussy about thinning them aggressively. Even lettuces need personal space.

4. 4. I didn’t give the plants that want lots of space enough. Therefore, my plan for 2011 is to move the zucchini, cucumbers, and other squashes ‘offsides’ to the vineyard side of the moat (the ditch that drains the storm runoff from the road and which separates the vineyard from the yard), in other words, into the field proper, like real farmers do it. This means I can then use their old space for the greens which need more space themselves.

5. 5. Further to nos. 3 and 4: I need to start more things in flats so that I can use my beds and my time more efficiently by spacing the transplants correctly and weeding less. This will require no procrastinating.

6. 6. I will learn how to properly prune a tomato plant so that I don’t have to hunt for fruit, and so that the plant can devote more energy to the fruit. It seems that when I ask the plant to grow longer and produce another bunch of fruits, I am really just being greedy, and then end up with less.

7. 7. I need to be more aggressive about succession-planting the wild arugula. Cutting it back and asking for more than 2 harvests per season from the same bed just seems to require more time picking individual leaves, instead of mowing a bagful with the scissors in 3 minutes. Therefore, I will stop procrastinating and sow another 2-by-8 foot space at 4-week intervals, and I will sow the designated 4-by-8 foot space in the hoop house in the first half of August, and another in the first half of September.

8. 8. I will try growing some more potatoes. The few I tried last year were excellent (once I found them under the tendrils of the Delicata squash vines).

9. 9. I think I am beginning to understand basil just a little bit. Let me correct that to: “I wonder if...” My basil plants really struggled in their raised bed in the lower garden. The last-chance salvage basil I planted in a pot took off and flourished in soil of the same quality, but wasn’t shaded by the pole bean trellis, as the bed-basil was. Therefore, I will try some more basil in pots this year (for the sake of convenience and ornament on the retaining wall), and I will hold my basil starts a little longer in the hoop house before transplanting, and I will transplant half of the bed basil to a bed where they will have full, and half to the shade of the bean trellis, just to see what happens. May be I will learn something. Oh, and I will water more. This means that I will have to ‘get off my duff,’ as my Mom would say.

1.. 10. I pray that I am beginning to understand radicchio just a little bit. This year I will start more Treviso and Chioggia in flats, and I will transplant them on their correct leaf-day (see the Old Farmer’s Almanac or Maria Thun’s Biodynamic calendar), and I will space them correctly. And! Yes, I will water more when needed.

Well, it’s December 30^th, and those are my Resolutions for the New Gardening Year. Tune in next year for a brutal review of my efforts. Let me apologize in advance to my Mom for my shortcomings in 2011. Whoops! Sorry Mom! See you in the garden!

--Caleb

the end is the beginning

2010-12-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

It’s the end of our vacation. Last day before the realities of running the restaurant during the holiday and winter season. Tomorrow and the next several days will be full of reservations, returning phone calls, waxing the dining room floor, painting the bathroom, making a soup, preparing ravioli, stocking wine.

But today is Sunday, my favorite day of the week because Sunday lunch is my favorite meal. Since we’ve been away for three weeks, we are still doing laundry and cleaning house. This morning is moving things around in the living room, storing china, and polishing furniture. With the fire warming the house all day, the air is full of the perfume of lemon and beeswax.

Sunday is meant for slow cooking, and we have a pork roast, almost two pounds, which gets well-salted , that I prepare with a clove of garlic, two cloves, a soup spoon full of black peppercorns, a good dousing of olive oil, one onion sliced in rounds, a particularly ugly but sweet carrot from the garden also sliced in rounds, a healthy portion of parsley, and thyme still on the stem, and since I don’t have any bay, a clutch of oregano. Added to it all is about two cups of red wine. Into the oven it goes until its medium rare and rosy, just like we like it. There’s a sauce made from a roux to finish the dish made with a little less than a third of a cup of melted butter, a soup spoon of flour, and a good ladle-full of the pork juices, but I get distracted by the phone ringing, and my sauce breaks and cannot be remedied, so I scrap it.

There are potatoes I cook our favorite way too—a la La Tourelle, in the manner of one of our favorite bistrot in Paris. Sliced into rounds, about half a pencil thick, and then halved again and arranged in a layered fan like a tart in a cast iron skillet, olive oil, salt and pepper, low heat, and a lid cooked for twenty or so minutes until they are cooked through and slightly crispy in the skin edges.

We toss a radicchio salad with olive oil and lemon, and there’s till that half wheel of Bayley Hazen Blue from the cave up north. To finish, I make a pear flan because pears are what we have. Into a buttered baking dish, I place the cut and quartered pears, and pour over them a mixture of 1 egg, 1 cup milk, a half cup of sugar, a half cup of flour, and a third of a cup of melted butter, beaten with a hand mixer.

We eat late, at four o’clock, feeling like this is really more “tea” in the British sense of the word. A bottle of Madiran from the south west of France is a perfect pair for the pork. We break after the salad and cheese for a short walk around the meadow before the sun completely sets. We don’t like these early dark hours, but take hope from the fact there are only a few weeks left to go before the days start to get incrementally longer. The flan is just finished when we return and we drink a coffee while we wait for it to cool. We think about this week’s new menu, the roast pork recipe looking like a likely candidate, look at cookbooks, and notes from our travels, we read novels, one of us takes a nap. We think about another glass of wine, or a pot of tea. We relish our last free Sunday for awhile.

--Deirdre

vendanges, vendemmia, harvest

2010-12-08T10:14:00.000-08:00

The tail edges of a tropical storm are decidedly un-tropical as the wind buffets the house and barn and a fine sleet falls, or is this hail? Could it even be snow? Luckily, the rainy weather this past November happened well beyond harvest. This year we picked grapes on September 18^th, and apples mid-October. Last year, the grape harvest didn’t happen until mid-October, and the apples, well, we were in the middle of November when we pressed. Given the current climactic patterns for the last month, we are glad that the season was early. Of course, the question is--will this be the way it will be? Or just an anomaly?

A friend who works for a vineyard in California writes that they were able to blog, twitter, and facebook (I still can’t believe these are verbs…) during their harvest and how thrilling it was to get people far away involved in the process. Maybe next year we will be able to write simultaneously. We settle for writing about harvest now, almost two months after the fact, and just like the tail end of this storm, we are even at the tail end of the harvest cantina work. This was our first official la garagista harvest, the first harvest with almost a thousand pounds of grapes. In the past, we’ve worked with 50 pounds of each variety, so the jump to a thousand was quite steep. And to think, we had been hoping for two thousand pounds. Since our season here in Vermont was so hot and dry, the yield was lower, and the grower we worked with outside of the small town of Vergennes out near Lake Champlain had to lower our take in order to satisfy his commitments to all his winemakers. Sometimes things actually do happen for a reason.

The actual processing of the grapes went beautifully—a lovely surprise as we really didn’t know what we were in for. We picked our grapes on a Saturday morning, working until well after lunch, and then did a full night’s work at the restaurant. We took that following Monday through Wednesday, our usual farm days, to get the harvest in. Thanks to our intrepid volunteers: Eliza, Zanna, JT, Rebecca, Erle, Michael, Todd, Mark, and Gina—Caleb and myself were able to hand de-stem, sort, and crush in three days. We began on a very cool morning with the white La Crescent which went through our tiny press on its first outing. We broke for lunch, a simple pasta made of sausage and tomatoes and finished with a beautiful apple tart that Rebecca made at the restaurant for us to bring home. The work started up again after lunch. White grapes can be reluctant with their juice, and between the new press and handling white grapes for the first time, it took a long time.

As evening fell, there were glasses of wine and hearty cookies to keep us warm in the wine garden where we were doing the sorting and pressing during the day, and when it got too dark, we moved the operation inside to the barn. We broke for dinner inside at about ten-thirty that night having de-stemmed, sorted, and pressed four hundred pounds of white grapes.

The same happened the next day, but with the red grapes. We spent all day de-stemming and sorting. In the early evening, when we moved into the barn, the must sitting at the bottom of the white wine demijohns rose to the surface with a whoosh at the same time the full moon rose, the wild fermentation beginning all on its own. Uncanny, how the natural world behaves. Later, Caleb prepared roast chicken that he served in the barn in a steaming black skillet. There were salume, cheeses, and roast potatoes. And of course, bottles of wine to keep us warm and up the the task of the work.

It was the next day that we crushed the red grapes by feet in our half wooden barrels. This was surprisingly quick, the red grapes being far more happy than the white grapes to relinquish juice. We scooped the juice and must into the big vat, and a couple of smaller ones too, and here they sat foaming and fermenting for three weeks before going into thick glass demijohns for the next part of their journey.

When I began this entry it was mid-November and all the fermentation was finally complete, and the wines were transferred off the gross lees (the spent grape skins at the bottom of the demijohns) and into new demijohns for their elevage over the winter. Now, we have returned from three weeks of traveling abroad. The ciders, which we pressed a couple of weeks after the wine, have finished their gyrations, and we taste everything to be sure all the vessels are on track. The evolution of the flavors amaze, even at this early juncture.

Now, is the time of waiting and letting the winter days work their mysterious magic.

--Deirdre

in rememberance of

2010-11-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

First we were cooks and students of wine, then we were cooks, students of wine, and gardeners, then somehow we have become cooks, students of wine, gardeners, and farmers. While the restaurant is closed for our ritual November break, (what’s called stick season here in Vermont because all the leaves are gone and what is left are the whites, grays, and black-browns of bark and branches), the work on this farm has expanded.

The list of preparations for winter is deep like the impending snows, and holds a different urgency. New blocks in the vineyard for planting next year must be tilled over; land waiting for the following year worked over and re-seeded with an advantageous cover crop; established vines need to be lightly weeded and composted; posts for trellising must be ordered and set; the roses for the vineyard need to be planted at the head of the rows. The days of November rain confound. We are thankful the ground hasn’t frozen yet.

The new wine must be racked and settled in for the winter; the cantina rigged with heat so it can stay cellar temperature through-out the ensuing cold months; the new rose garden needs to be planted with the young Therese Bugnet starts as well as the beautiful damask Belladonna brought by our friend David just over a week ago. The old rose garden, overgrown with blue veronica, bishop’s weed, and Siberian iris needs to be cut back. The phlox, the day lilies, those mats of iris bulbs should be moved. The roses need to be mulched with nettle and fir boughs, the neighbor’s chicken manure. The green house, expanded earlier this fall, needs new beds to be made, lettuces and starts moved into their new winter home. The roof on the studio needs to be re-built, the stairs on the porch mended and stained. If Time were profligate, we would wash the windows.

Strange how we find ourselves in a season that is winding itself down, yet the work seems to wind up, almost like a last gasp, a last valiant effort to survive what is thought of as a season of loss: the dying back of the flowers, the falling of the leaves, the rotting of fruit, color leaching out of meadow and woods. But this farming thing provides an alternative perspective. Observation brings surprises. Brilliant green ferns have unfurled beneath the fallen leaves, under the canopy of those naked trees near the brook. The swiss chard and the beet greens look robust and lined with red, still in their outdoor beds. I’m pretty sure this is not a good thing, but the lilac buds have started to unfurl in that terrific spring green.

I’ve never noticed the ferns before , or the lilac buds opening in November, so I do not know if this is work as usual or if the relatively warm and rather wet days have confused these plants. Yet, I do know that this is the time of year that tricks the eye. We think of this as a dead season, the landscape around us showing us the change from one month to the next, the transition between summer and winter. But the soil itself is not hibernating; it is suddenly more alive then ever with worms and nematodes and new humus.

It is true that soon our efforts of cultivation will be over, and we will be covered in a blanket of snow for these next five months. We will be left to settle for remembering the rose garden in bloom, the apples picked from the tree, the plethora of tomatoes that went into sauce we served at that restaurant, the first harvest of grapes. And like the soil doing its hard work while there is nothing like the fullness of summer to distract, we too will be doing the work of memory which serves to sustain, sift, and stir for another season.

--Deirdre

quiet autumn

2010-11-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

A handful of warm days. It is strange to walk out the door and feel hot. The cluster flies have resurrected and swarm the sunny side of the house. While we’ve also had more rain and the ground is inconsistent at best, the air is like tinder next to a sulpfherous match. Even though the days are slowly becoming shorter, Time seems to be a bit longer. There is still much to do, but there is not the same pressing need of things growing. The plants themselves are drowsy if not altogether sleeping now—yet there are still a few tenacious leaves hanging on trees and those roses still bloom, though their colors are more tea-stained, browned at the edges. Only in the green house do the small starts of lettuces and bitter greens , the carrots and herbs need to be anchored in their new beds with tilled up soil and black compost. This will be the winter harvest for the restaurant.

It is quiet in the late afternoon sun slanting through bare maple, bare birch. It is somehow relaxing to hear only the small finches talk, the rushing water in the brook, the sound of the hoe hitting the roots of the unwanted campion in the vineyard, the burble of voices on the radio in the green house reciting the day’s news full of sensational stories and tragedies which I am frankly glad that I unable to hear clearly. Much better to get mud on the hands and knees , and think of the hopeful, hibernating plants and the slow inspiration of soil.

--Deirdre

relinquish

2010-10-31T10:09:00.000-07:00

I sit on the terrace under the pergola in the dying light. It’s mid-October and we’ve already had the first snow. I am loathe to relinquish this season, which is why I am sitting here watching the sky darken from color to black and white while the three-quarter moon is only thinly veiled by these ominous and lightly raining clouds. The coyotes up the hill have been active. They tune their voices, a series of scales and arias, like musicians at the piano. It is too dark and too wet now for me to continue planting roses in the new beds. I have come in from the rain to bring in pillows from the two wicker chairs and the outdoor settee, but I can’t quite bring myself to come inside. The roof on the balcony above the pergola keeps me dry and I am momentarily shuttled back to the heat of summer and late night dinners spent at the long dining table here set with old china and candles. I am reminded of another pack of wild dogs who so obligingly howled at the full Sturgeon moon back in August when we ate roast duck finished in a rose syrup I made from the old Bourbon roses in our garden. That night began with oysters and finished with ripe, succulent peaches poached in wine. So many long dinners had here under this pergola, and lazy lunches snuck between rigorous hours in the garden and vineyard. What’s the point if we can’t break the day with a glass of wine and a simple dish?

But October has another kind of narrative. After such a dry summer, we’ve been hounded by wind and rains. We feel lucky that the grape harvest was so early. We’ve avoided frost, and even that snow two days ago only taunted never really hitting the ground. But I’ve noticed the past two mornings that the nasturtium leaves have started to curl and shrivel, and the campion that had started to march through the vineyard is all brown husk. The vine leaves too have started to color or curl or fall, the green stems turning woody just like they should. But there are roses still blooming and making buds, and the ice pansies I have planted defy the end of season looking bright and sunny in their small pots or the edge of the vegetable beds.

Tonight, as if in preparation for tall tales or rememberances of things past, the black silhouettes of the grapevines climbing up the pillars of the pergola look sufficiently derelict as if I am outside a house which has been allowed to go wild with rose bushes and vines obscuring it. I can hear Caleb in the recently expanded green house shoveling and moving things in the dark. I’m sure he can’t see either, but he’s covered from the rain so will keep working until the light is really impossible. It makes it easy to pretend that the season, like this light, will linger.

--Deirdre

hiatus, before autumn

2010-10-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

The last time I wrote here it was mid-summer. It is now mid-autumn. Good intentions once again gone astray. Wishing for the magician’s trick for expanding time. Our silence here may seem like we’ve been on a hiatus or sabbatical. Would that it were so. Hands dirty, backs sore, hungry, tired, and delighted. The most hard-working summer and fall we’ve ever had—and happily we’ve fallen into bed every night.

We have been reduced to single words or short phrases--an apple falls, red clover in the vineyard, sweet buckwheat, a thousand pounds of grapes, hornets, a plate of tomatoes, a clutch of roses, dirty glasses, the scent of woodsmoke. The thought of writing a sentence is daunting. That’s another reason one or both of us have not been writing. The belief that we need to construct a complete thought has hovered and kept us away. I’ve heard it said that the great winegrowers are poets. I imagine this notion fits for everything. An efficiency and rigor of style. And while I have no pretentions to being a great winegrower, only a hardworking one who lets the grapes tell their story into wine, I am intrigued by the poet bit.

So words and phrases it is even if just to keep a record of this extraordinary season. A white butterfly lost, a dog barks incessantly, the crickets hum, blue dusk in the sky, pink-lighted clouds to the west, a house light winks across the valley, the moon rises, the moon sets, the coyotes offer frenzied song, the cats pace the house, a single light in my office, vases full of pink cosmos flaunt, a storm brews, grape-stained hands, grape-stained feet, the smell of yeast and violets, grapefruit rind, the milky tea has turned cold, one grandmother’s tea cup, another grandmother’s white linens, a wall of French green beans, a sea of sweet little carrots, sausages roasted with grapes from the pergola, the raccoon is gone, the flock of turkeys circles the vineyard, the walnut trees have lost their leaves, a hot bath, roast duck, a bowl of soup.

--Deirdre

mid-summer

2010-07-16T13:36:00.001-07:00

What happened to spring? What happened to early summer? What happened to best intentions and organized schedules and having time for everything? What happened to remembering a tryst in Paris? What happened to recording the inspirations found in a walled garden in Burgundy? What happened to writing about the nest of large turkey eggs, finally abandoned? What happened to the story of our first garden party the day after a storm? What happened to documenting the flora I find in the vineyard—the English plantain, the Bishop’s Weed, the wild primrose? What happened to a photograph of the first chicken-of-the-woods? Or the the photograph of the day we planted so many new vines? What happened to the daily record of the Riesling, or the Blaufrankisch—The French Blue--growing so fast it’s as if they move toward the sun in front of your own eyes? What happened to the firecrackers on the 4^th of July? What happened to the length of the day? What happened to Time?

Nature happened. Work happened. Setting out china and glassware on a table happened. Cooking two, three, four dishes for six hundred and forty guests happened. Exhaustion happened. To be followed again by Nature, Work, and China and Glassware, Cooking.

Today, on July 14, Bastille Day in France, is the first day here in Vermont that I am sitting in my office at the end of the garden path , an office constructed out of an old potting shed, that once housed lambs to keep them from the coyotes, the building and livestock the last remnants of a substenance farm that had long ago retired. The day has been thick with humidity, steamy even, and the afternoon brought torrential rains forcing Eliza, our apprentice at the restaurant and here on the farm, to run in from her work in the vineyard and Caleb and me from cleaning out the office and preparing it to act as a second guestroom for a string of house guests coming at the end of July and through-out August. The rain has finally stopped, and so I have I, to sit for a minute and collect my thoughts from over the last sixty days.

We are well into the season. The small cherry tomatoes have already started to come in as have the raspberries. We have been rich with red radishes and the white are growing steadily all the time. The lettuces, radicchio, escarole, chicory have produced non-stop, and our native chamomile has just flowered. The poppies who have been their bright, oriental selves, are now a bit faded in the heat more towards paper-thin orange, yet they still are blooming. Almost every day, there is a new tisane to concoct with which to spray the vines to keep them safe from mites, mildews, fungus, insects. Chamomile. Yarrow. Stinging nettle. Horse Tail. The leaves look beautiful and glossy, though as surely as they did last year, and the year before, and the year before that, the Japanese beetles arrived again on the 4^th of July, slowly replicating their number. They have always brought out my mean-spiritedness, and I drown them warm soapy water only to plan a collection of them to burn with wood, then sprinkle the perimeters of the rose garden and vineyard in hope that the old witches’ tale will prove true, and no creature will cross the boundaries of it’s own effigy….

Does this slightly cooler, and mercurial evening, sun in—sun out—clouds now wisping across the sky—herald a more temperate pace to the clock? Will the second act of this summer elongate itself allowing a moment of respite, a drink of tea, a gaze outward? For there will be more birthday parties, and wine tasting celebrations, summer house guests, and dinner invitations. There will be more wild mushrooms to cook, and the zucchini will start their inexorable march to the dinner table. There will be a new rose garden to plant, a fence to build, autumn seeds to sew. The three young swallows in the barn have just begun to fly, and the two black cats stalk around the edges of the garden. Chipping sparrows bathe in the remains of rain, a dog barks in the distance. The cicadas, or locusts—I am never sure which-- have started to buzz and smoke from the enighbor’s fire floats on the foggy tendrils of air. I step out of the old lamb house, weeding claw and bucket in hand to make my way to the vineyard for a few more hours of work before then end of the day. The flock of morning doves residing among the vines light into the air, cooing and flapping.

--Deirdre
--photos by Maya Tracey

home

2010-05-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

After a flurry of Parisian posts from the easy comfort of our friend's apartment in the 7th arrondissement, we have been away from the desk as it were. We have arrived home. Coming home at the beginning of May to a growing season that is about three weeks ahead of itself, plus re-opening the restaurant and recovering from jet lag has kept us running to catch up with everything around us. Usually when we return, the buds are just starting to show a green haze on the trees and the daffodils are still blooming and the forsythia has just started. This year, because of the warm weather in March and the beginning of April, we arrive to lilacs and fruit trees blooming, bud-break on the vines. And everything is green. Green, green, green.

So, the last three weeks have been very full. And while I hope to return to some stories of days in France, we are now confronted with the stories that have begun at home. It is sometimes difficult to shuttle so much back and forth like a transatlantic itinerary.

In the last three weeks, there has been spring cleaning at the restaurant, and opening to a busy first weekend. And despite the mid-May cold snap (what the old farmer's in New England call Blackberry Winter, or their European counterparts call The Frost Saints), Caleb has planted lettuces, tomotoes, carrots, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, radishes, onions, peas, beans, beets, root chicory, daisies, and nasturtiams. We sweated out 30 degree nights hoping the tender leaves on the vines would survive, and worrying about the flowers and buds on the apple trees. Vines are incredibly resiliant. Some of them took a good hit from the cold. But with vines you get two shots at fruit, and three for foliage. Each bud has its own primary, secondary, and tertiary buds to give it every fighting chance if you loose the first round. So now everyone in the vineyard has happy looking leaves that are unfurling proudly. It's still early days, but we'll see if there will be any fruit this year. Just last night, I saw one tiny bunch.

The orchard has not faired quite so well. The fruit set is thin. Some trees don't even show fruit, just the remnants of brown blossoms. Other trees show a modest inclination.

We have had a hot, dry spell immediately following the cold snap. 90 degree days just like mid-July. Everything is growing rampantly, and then the past few days things have slowed down because we've had no rain. The roses, which started out with a profusion of leaves and imminent buds, have now acquired a yellow, thirstiness about them. Caleb has been watering his seeds and new plantings at night when we get home from the restaurant (always water at night when the plants get the most benefit. If you water during the day in hot sunlight, the leaves can scald, and the water evaporates too quickly in the sun), but we've let everything else fend for itself. We live on an acquafir, so water has never been a problem. But roses need both water and sun. That's why they love those English summers so.

Just last night, a balmy evening, I watered the roses looking the most sweltered from a row of buckets we use to collect rain water off our roofs just as lightening started to flash in the darkening sky. Thunderstorms had been predicted for the afternoon and night. As we puttered around doing final chores before going into a late dinner, we saw the moon rise golden over the tree line. It seemed like a good idea to sit for a moment outside with a glass of wine and watch the show. While the moon climbed higher, dark, menacing clouds rolled in occassionally obscuring the moon. The lightening continued to flask and strike, the thunder rumbled. Lightening bugs sparkled in the trees and meadow. (We never see lightening bugs until the 4th of July). Finally, we felt the first drops of rain, thankfully. We laid market umbrellas down, and protected garden furniture and ran inside just before the deluge.

--Deirdre

degustation!

2010-05-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

Having friends in Normandy is kind of like finding a hundred, unexpected dollars in your wallet. We have friends in Normandy--Denise and Hughes and their two rapscallions Josephine and Georges. We went with our good friend Meg for a visit a week ago (was it only a week ago?) on the Friday train just in time for apero in the back garden. Kir Royale, olives, and chips. Some of us couldn't stop eating the chips. Denise is from Australia and Hughes is French and grew up in the village in which they live. Denise coordinates a film festival (she's worked in film for a long time) and Hughes is an artist. He can paint anything. Trompe l'oeil, portrait, landscape, abstract, surreal. You name it. He can paint it. They own a really beautiful, really old house with a walled garden. A really high wall. Ancient espaliered pear trees, flowering, thick-trunked wisteria, a hedge. Some roses and lilacs. If we didn't love them so much....

The weather was perfect. Just warm enough to have drinks outside while the light was fading, then cold enough to come inside to sit by a roaring fire while Denise prepared a delicious paella. The red wine went down easy. Did anyone keep count of the bottles? We finished dinner with tarte au citron and pears poached in wine. Then we had Hughes' father's calvados, followed by two bottles of after-dinner stuff that we had made and brought: Caleb's nocino and a wild blueberry liqueur I made inspired by a French perfume. There were a lot of glasses on the table.

While Caleb has a fascination with choucroute garnie, I have a fascination with things apple, things like sparkling hard cider and calvados. I'm trying to learn how to make Normand-style cidre and calvados, the old way. Having friends in Normandy whose father makes calva is like finding a second hundred, unexpected dollars in your wallet. So, with so much good fortune, we woke in the morning to ride our bikes (because one should ride bikes in Normandy--the roads are perfect, well, almost perfect, as in perfectly flat) to Hughes' parents house for a formal degustation.

Colette and Roger are gems. They sparkle with such good cheer and hospitality. We sit down to the table with bottles of local Normand cidre and poire, and of course the calva. Colette has made delectable hors d'ouevres for us to have with our tastes: toasts with rillettes, tiny, shaped goat cheeses, and petite lasagne. I am delighted there are more chips just like the kind my grandmother used to serve for similar occasions. We have also brought some of my liqueur as a gift. Roger is keen to try it with the poire like a kir. We have never had poire, or perry in English, which is a pear cider. It is elegant, lighter than the apple cider, and dryer in taste. Sublime. Caleb is hooked, so we begin thinking of who we know back at home who has pear trees (ours are too small to bear fruit yet). We decide the jointly made kir--the poire and my wild blueberry liqueur--is rather fine and would make a very nice aperatif at the restaurant. Roger's calvados, which we have sampled over the years, is at least thirty years old, and once again on this tasting is full of smooth and happy fire. Suddenly, there are many glasses on the table. Delicate, etched glasses for different styles of drink. Coupes for kirs and bubbles, and very small cordial glasses traditional to drinking calva during a meal. Colette tells us that it was always taken after the first main plate and before the second (think pork and fish) to help settle the meal.

Other decanters of calvados come out, some with gigantic pears in them. Roger tells us how the calva is made and how the cider is made. I am furiously taking notes. He brings out these incredible old-fashioned glass hydrometers that you used to buy at the apothecary to make sure your cidre and calva had enough alcohol in them, that you weren't being cheated by your local, favorite farmer. We could have sat there all day, but because we had lunch to eat, and a train to catch, we adjourned to the cellar to see the barrels, and then had a quick lesson about the old stone apple presses. In our imaginations, or perhaps through the gauzy view of calva, we can just see the old work-horse turning the wheel, and pitchers of sweet cider ready for fermentation.

--Deirdre

choucroute garnie

2010-05-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

My husband is infatuated with choucroute garnie. For as long as we've been coming to Paris, Caleb has been on the hunt for the perfect choucroute. We've tried it at various small-time brasserie, and every visit, we always say, "Oh, let's try Lipp this time." But somehow, we never get there. Other restaurants beckon, or markets seduce. We came quite close to eating there just the other night, but instead went to another very, very small Parisian institution La Pied de Fouet. But that's another story. Or stories.

There is no set recipe for choucroute garnie or "cabbage cooked and garnished". The cabbage is actually fermented, just like sauerkraut, and that stands in for the cooking. Classically, the dish can be any preparation of hot sauerkraut served with meat and potatoes, but there are a few key rules to follow. Traditional recipes call for three types of sausage: Frankfurters, Strasbourg, and Montbeliard. Fatty salted cuts of pork like ham hocks, pork knuckles, shoulders, or fat back are a must. Very occasionally, you'll see fish or goose meat, but this would be rare.

The sauerkraut is usually heated up with a glass of Riesling and goose or pork fat. It some recipes, especially in mountainous areas, you may find it cooked with onions and sliced apples. Every authentic sauerkraut recipe includes black peppercorns, cloves, garlic, juniper berries, onions, bay leaf, and wine. In autumn, in Germany, they prepare the sauerkraut in special crocks to sit and cure over the winter.

Choucroute garnie, while a typically French dish found in every brasserie worth it's salt pork (brasserie means beer brewing in or brewery in French, hence choucroute is always served with beer), hails from more Germanic or eastern European tribes. It became part of the French lexicon when France absorbed Alsace et Lorraine on the German-French border so many years ago.

This time in Paris we forgo Brasserie Lipp one more time, and our choucroute is procured at the Motte-Piquet Market. There is a notorious, as in flirtatious, butcher there specializing in pork. He has one of the largest booths on the street. He quips, tosses, smiles, winks. There, we see all the makings of classic choucroute. We stand on line and wait for the butcher--or is it the butcher's wife?--to wait on us. We ask for choucroute garnie for two. She sets us up right: the white, almost transluscent sauerkraut flecked with juniper berries and whole peppercorns, Frankfurters, Alsation sausages, and fatty salted pork shoulder. We'll make our own roasted potatoes. At the apartment, we already have Kronenbourg chilling.

The butcher's wife, if that's who she really is, does not like that I've taken my camera out to photograph the scene. I don't like posed pictures, so I'll be the first to admit, I'm a little sneaky, though my camera is too large to be inconspicuous. I watch another American woman in the line ahead of us ask to take photos and the butcher's wife smiles and strikes a pose with her knife. That's not what I'm looking for. I only know that she is not pleased with me and my Sony Cybershot, the last of its kind with a Zeiss lens, when we say "Bonne Journee" and make to leave. She pierces me with a rather deadly stare. Guilt quickly sets in on my part as I think of good manners and politesse....

At the apartment that night, we set the table, light the candles, and heat up our prize. Maybe we'll get to Brasserie Lipp the next time we visit, but I rather think that we may never get to Lipp as if we are holding it out as the quintessential choucroute experience that we never want to spoil by actually eating there. Perhaps we've created too much of a temple out of the notion. Or maybe it will be saved for the last meal we ever have in this great city. A send off of nostaligic proportions.

Caleb thinks his fascination began when he read somehwhere about the traditional Parisian brasseries that were opened by the influx of Alsations that came to Paris for work in the 19th century. But it's been a fascination for so long, he can't quite remember why. Other than the dish just tastes so damn good.

Here's to the butcher's wife,,,,

--Deirdre

les fleuristes

2010-05-02T03:38:00.000-07:00

In Paris, there are always flowers. On a hot morning, there are extravagant, fresh, and fragrant bouquets of lilacs, peonies, muguet--or lily of the valley--given for the May 1st holiday. We have several favorite flower shops dotting the city, and every visit we plan our walks to delight in the explosion of blossoms behind plate glass windows. Ever since we came here many years ago, the first time together and shortly after we were married, and bought a clutch of white and pink ranunculus for only a couple of sous for our narrow 4th story hotel room where the patroness would deliver hot coffee and hot milk with two croissants to your room every morning (that alone could make one fall in love...), one of the first things we do upon arriving in this city is to go buy flowers.

Here, they are so inexpensive in comparison to home, you can can go a little crazy, a coup de foudre almost, and arrive back at your vacation apartment or hotel room with arms full of flowers. This visit, I buy a plump bouquet of fragrant lilacs from a gypsey standing out on the rue Cler with here offerings. We buy a little muguet for our friends who we go to visit in Normandy at my favorite flower shop of all--Eric Chauvin . Tucked in between a Greek restaurant and one of the great bakeries of Paris--Poujerain--is a small, brick-walled room stuffed full of what's currently blossoming. Arrays of snow-white tulips, coral-colored peonies that defy explanation, chartreuse viburnum, white, lavender and dark purple lilac, more lily of the valley, and as always in this shop, in the center, is a towering bouquet of flowering tree in a vase as broad as a redwood. I have seen quince, forsythia, or apple blossom in this arrangement, but this visit, we are embraced by flowering almond. In the back, is an outdoor courtyard with boxwood and ivy.

Sometimes, I dream of moving to Paris and taking over this shop where I would still sell such beautiful flowers, along with natural wines made by hard-working vignernons a d vigneronnes we find out in the countryside. I believe flowers and wine are inextricably bound together. We'd bring back our spoils, these cases of wine from small, unknown vineyards, and share them in the city. In my dream, on Friday and Saturday nights in good weather, we open the back courtyard which has been strung with lights, and cook simple dishes to be served at one long table. We open new or old vintages of new or old favorite vineyards, and we sit down with guests for a proper degustation....

--Deirdre

pure perfection

2010-04-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

The nights feel like summer. Forget April in Paris. We walk to the four corners of St. Germain de Pres. It's late, just starting to darken. There's Cafe Flore and Les Deux Magot. Just down a side street from Leon Bruxelles is a little sliver of restaurant called Huiterie Regis. It is perfect. I'm proud to say we found it a few years ago exactly two weeks before the review appeared in The New York Times. Twelve seats inside. Six out. Freshly white-washed walls. Pearl gray lacquered rush-seated chairs. And oysters. Only oysters. (They do offer a plate of cured meats, just in case...). Fin de Claires. Marennes. Les Pouces. Les Belons. In the Marennes d'Oleron, an expanse of salt flats, they harvest these beautiful shell fish known for their green tint, somehow colored naturally this way because the algae they grow in is blue. Something I imagine akin to the Green Flash at sunset. This special algae, particular to this area in the north of France, gives them their particular flavor. If the flats were on land, I'd use the word terroir. Can I say marine?

We dine on a dozen each. Six Fins de Claires and six Les Speciales. It is now a cliche, but they do, in fact, taste like the sea. We have two glasses of slate-like and bright Sancerre, bread and butter. We share a third glass. Two of the owners, both men tonight, work the floor and open these fruits of the sea. We hear voices cheering next door, really a roar. A soccer game is on. We finish with an apple tart and two coffees. Sublime.

I've worn my highest heels because it's Paris and it's dinner out. I change into new tennis shoes on a dark side-street, so we can walk care-free the rest of the way home.

--Deirdre

la tourelle

2010-04-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

Even though the evening is warm we dress for dinner, then take a long stroll to a little side street off the Place St. Michel where we've eaten many times, and with good friends. It is a place for good friends. Every time it is magic. Down a quiet side-street in the 6th, you always arrive by surprise. It is both closer and farther than you think. But then there it is.

A 16th century building with a tower that looks more Medieval than Renaissaissance. A narrow door. On the bar, a vase of pale roses so open they resemble peonies. Only two tables are empty. A white jacket hangs on a hook. Laughter, discussion, the music of cutlery on plates. Last year, and the year before, and two years before that, there was a black cat, but the black cat is missing making dinner bittersweet. Robert with his white and grey hair brings water and wine, and then our dishes. One menu: chevre chaude on fresh greens, pork ribs, mousse au chocolat, Calvados. Another menu: oeufs mayonnaise, beef steak with roquefort, rhubarb compote. A third dessert for celebration: a thin layer of cake and crackled chocolate with spun praline sugar. Cecilia, Robert's wife, who came to Paris from Hong Kong, moves around the dining room like silk. Diners eat and then eventually leave, only to replaced by new diners. And this on a Tuesday night.

Every year when we travel, an over-riding idea or philosophy or context seems to present itself. Sometimes it is confined to scenes depending on how many places we land, how many acts there are to the story, and sometimes we follow a single arc from the day we leave to the day we come home. When we arrived in Paris two days ago, we didn't know what Paris would show us this time for she is always surprising. Would it be a continuation of the earlier days of this trip which has circled around notions of cultivation, terroir, and taste? Or would it be some sort of new frontier in the city? New tastes? Something about the constant heat we've had suggests a tendency toward return. Dinner at La Tourelle, the little bistrot in the building with the, well, tourelle, a restaurant we have returned to each spring for the past five years, seems to readily point us in the direction of revenir, to come back again.

--Deirdre

finally, off the road

2010-04-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

We have been traveling for the last two weeks plus a few days. In France. It's been good. We started out in Aveyron, staying in a hamlet the size of four houses called La Lavande not too far from Villefranche de Rouerge. While the volcano in Iceland was trying to settle itself,we stayed put until we needed to pack up the car, lock up the house we had rented, and drive to Burgundy for my stage at the L'Ecole du Vins et des Terroirs. The stage was in French and focused on the soil and plant life in the natural vineyard. Really, it was an intensive on how to change the way you think. Needless to say, I am still sorting through new vocabulary, new information, new thoughts, new philosophies and I sense this will all take a long time to filter.

Now, we are in Paris, one of our favorite and most frequented cities. We have a dear friend with an apartment here and somehow, we seem to end up on her doorstep at the end of every April. This will be the 5th year in a row that we've spent Caleb's birthday here which is today. Not only have we been overwhelmed by the last two weeks of tasting and thinking, we are now confronted with the one big taste that is Paris. We are a bit stupid with the same awe we feel every time we visit here.

We will try to both back-track and to move foreward now that we have a connection to the wider world. But it's sometimes hard to go back in time while you are still being distracted by so many bright shiny things in front of you....

So hang on. Here we go--

--Deirdre

Easter Sunday

2010-04-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

Sun-bright afternoon. The wind is occasionally fierce and we must anchor the sun umbrellas with big stones stolen from the stone wall in the sunken garden. Rituals: hardboiled eggs from a neighbor’s chickens, pale blues, browns, greens, and pink. A toast with a glass of our friend Fede’s sparkling Nebbiolo to those who cannot be with us. Fede means faith in Italian, probably in Latin as well. The taste of the salted egg. Just like the first time we had lunch one spring in Sicily a week before Easter, the egg served with Zibbibo, a sweet sparkling white wine. The green house is open, the lettuces all stretching to the light. A child’s Easter gifts left on the floor of the porch. The plates are full with a fresh ham, new potatoes with basil, a salad cut from the green house just before lunch, roasted squash and leeks. We cut into a gorgeous round of local Roquefort, creamy and pungent. And onion tart both salty and sweet. Two morning doves stroll through the orchard then fly up into an apple tree. Rosato from the north of Italy on the border with Austria. White wine, a Blanc de Morgex et La Salle from the Alps, and we are back to Sicily with a light red Frappato. Will we always double back to Sicily?

The pears have been poached in red wine and the sour cherry tart is very dark, but not brooding. The remnants of last autumn’s harvest. My husband says that Easter in our northern hills is always made up of the last of the winter’s bounty. We cannot look to spring quite yet. In the unusual heat, we dress in bright colors and short sleeves until the sun goes behind racing mares’ tails only to return once we’ve put our sweaters on. Thick dark coffee served in cups bought a long time ago in Paris and tea served from a white porcelain set flecked with gold. A story about rabbits is read to a child. We blow bubbles to remember that we too were once children who hunted for eggs in the hydrangea and lilac and refused our naps. After everyone is gone, the glasses stand empty on the white tablecloth. The interior of the coffee cups is painted with doe-colored dregs.

The light filters through a dirty window and the impulse to wash it overcomes the impulse to sit down. A vase full of shell pink double tulips open even wider. Dusk washes the wall of old pale gray wallpaper painted with the climbing dog rose. A new pot of tea perfumes the end of the day. The sun slips behind the ridge and the meadow is in shadow. We are left with quiet.

--Deirdre

the party, part two

2010-03-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

In the morning, the electricity did not come on. The snow was still coming down. At least 30 inches had already fallen. We began to think of alternate plans for the Sunday night dinner if our power did not return in time. We went to the neighbors, who have a generator, to take showers. We would be open at the restaurant for the evening. E-mails went out advising the Sunday night guests to stay tuned in case there was a change in the program. We thought, what a shame if we have to move the venue. We had made grand schemes for the evening that could not be duplicated anywhere else.

The power came back on that night. The cleaning and setting up resumed. On Friday, we moved the long wine tasting tables that Caleb had made from our old garage into the green house to thaw. We had left them on the terrace to the elements for the winter and they were heavy and saturated with snow and ice. By Saturday, we were moving the furniture to the perimeter of our main room. The couch, the chairs, all looked like wallflowers at a Regency dance waiting for their dance cards to be filled. We brought the tasting tables in, and placed three, stem to stern, down the center of the room. We hung two chandeliers over the long table. We brought in extra dining chairs from the barn. We had two almost-blooming jasmine topiary that we placed on the now-long single table in their wrought iron urns.

We began cooking on Saturday. Rolling the little meatballs made from local beef, lamb, pork, and venison stuffed with dried black currants and bread crumbs. These would get cooked in red wine. Picking and cleaning the escarole for braising with garlic and a little hot pepper. Cooking the chicken livers and making a smooth, creamy pate with dried apricots. The farro would get cooked the following morning, made with a battuto of carrots, onion, and leeks so finally chopped they would absorb themselves into the large grain through the conduit of the generous white wine, making a perfect marriage of flavors. To be topped with crispy pancetta. The flowers also arrived on Saturday, bunches of snow white tulips, for arranging the next morning.

On Sunday morning we set the table. The wine glasses sparkled in the gray light. Mis-matched plates and silver paraded up and down the rough and aged wood of our tasting tables, remnants of that old cedar garage. With the heat from the woodstove and the cooking in our tiny kitchen, one jasmine began to bloom.
In the afternoon, friends arrived to help set up outside. We had planned to begin the evening with a bonfire and a hot cocktail. I had imagined a wild tangle of the branches and wood we had collected placed on stone at the end of the lower garden. I thought the most help we needed was digging a hole in the snow to get down to that stone. But Todd, who came to build the bonfire, created a work of art. A pyre of wood, branches, and the remnants of our neighbor’s Christmas tree stood like an elegant sculpture at the foot of the garden. Edie, our neighbor, Todd, our old friend Erle, and our new friend Rebecca all tramped paths in the snow with snow shooes. Edie organized the porch and we created a cozy seating area on the terrace where we planned to serve the hot cocktail. Erle placed tikki torches to line the path and decorated the bases with winter greens still left over from the holidays. We put candles in lanterns everywhere, and the white wines out in the snow to chill.

I made the hot cocktail from Randall’s pommeau, or apple brandy. Lightly heated with lemon and star anise. Just as everyone started to arrive, we lighted the torches and lantern. No one wanted to light the bonfire. It was too beautiful, and we wanted to wait until everyone was there and gathered around as it looked like it might burn very quickly and just go up in smoke.
So on a mid-winter night, on the Full Snow moon, we gathered together and embraced the cold and snow for this is such a large part of the terroir of where we live. Randall arrived with friends and hosts Meg and Steve, and stopped to marvel at his bottles of Cigare Blanc and Moscato in their bed of snow. Todd returned with his wife Andrea and did the honors of lighting the fire which made an impressive conflagration. Everyone had tea-cups full of hot pommeau and stood by the fire or on the terrace. The conversation buzzed about winegrowing in Vermont. We were immersed in fire and fermentation.

The original plan had been to have Randall read from his new book by the firelight, but when we got to that time, the fire had burned very quickly and was almost out. So we adjourned inside the house. Inside, the fire roared, the candles and chandeliers were lighted. Coats and boots were ferried downstairs and out of the way. We poured wine and everyone sat. The first courses began to circle the table—plates of cured meats, crostini with the chicken liver pate, braised radicchio with toasted pinenuts and raisins, a local aged cow’s milk cheese garnished with fresh thyme from our green house and honey from down the road. Glasses were raised, and we toasted to our good fortune to spend an evening together at one great table with new and old friends celebrating our guest, his lush and precise wines and his collection of writings. Here’s to the conviviality, the conversation, and the myriad flavors of the table, and all who gather there--

--Deirdre

the party, part one

2010-03-06T22:51:00.000-08:00

photos by Edie Crocker

Where to begin? It begins with a storm. I find that most good parties do. The snow started on a Tuesday, soft and rather innocent. Nothing serious. The weather report called for three to six inches. Even though it was snowing hard by Wednesday morning, we didn’t think anything of it. The snow was needed. We were almost down to bare ground after a January thaw and rain. We thought of those young grapes vines and the flower garden, a bedful of sweet carrots, and how they needed that blanket of protection against the winds that whip down off the top of the Chateauguy above us. We went about our morning enjoying a fire in the woodstove and watching the snow come down. We were busy cleaning house as we were planning a dinner party here at home for Sunday night. Usually we’re open on Sunday nights at the restaurant, but we had the opportunity to fete one of our favorite American winemakers, Randall Grahm, and the release of his new book. Because of arcane distribution agreements and various other complications, the dinner could not take place at the restaurant if we wanted to be able to enjoy a handful of Randall’s wines along with the festivities. We are practiced at entertaining fairly large groups of people at home, but that is usually outside in the summer months. Our house, fondly referred to as a cottage, is really the size of a pocket watch, or what would be called a generous Manhatten apartment.

So plans were set in motion to host twenty people for dinner. Hence the house cleaning, organizing, planning, and not paying attention to the weather. By lunch it was clear the snow predictions were somewhat “off”, as about a foot had already fallen. We couldn’t resist the temptation to go out and play. On snowshoes, we looped around our hill, and down into the vineyard to check the vines. They were so well buried I couldn’t even dig down to find the small hardened-off shoots. When we came back inside, the electricity went out and the sun was going down. The rest of our cleaning endeavors would be postponed. We lighted the candles and contemplated what to do with the forty-five minutes available on our laptop computer’s battery. My laptop, the one with the more stalwart battery, had just gotten a nasty virus that morning, and would do nothing but tell us it was under attack and then proceed through a litany of XXX sites as if it berating us with foul language.

The evening was quiet. We couldn’t hear our little under the counter refrigerator in the kitchen humming away, and the radiators didn’t clank on, the pipes filling with hot water and sounding like we were a ship on the sea. The snow muffled everything by taking the source of our everyday noise. After our eyes were too tired to continue reading by candlelight, we fell asleep, sure that the lights would come back on in the morning.

--Deirdre

what we're eating now

2010-02-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

“ Poach the head of cauliflower in salted water, remove it when still slightly firm, and chop it into large chunks. Then season it in a skillet after you have sautéed a small onion, thinly sliced, in olive oil in the same pan. In another pan, fry up a piece of fresh sausage, and the moment it turns golden, cut it into small disks no more than an inch wide, removing the skin. Add the cauliflower to the pan with the sausage bits and oil, adding a few potatoes sliced into thin transparent disks, some chopped black olive, salt, and spices. Stir this assortment well. Knead some leavened bread dough into a broad, flat disk and mold this into a cake tin with a tall rim; fill this with the mixture and cover with another round sheet of dough, kneading the edges together. Spread lard over the upper parts and put the tin into a very hot oven. Remove it as soon as it turns golden brown (but this will take half an hour or so).”

This was the recipe for ‘mpanata di maiali that the inspector asked the cook to dictate to him after he and Fazio had finished licking off their fingers.

Excerpted from The Wings of the Sphinx by Andrea Camilleri

mechant loup

2010-02-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

There is something delicious about opening a bottle of really, really good Champagne in a foreign hotel room. And there is something delicious about dabbing a really, really great perfume on your wrist, behind your ear while in the self-safe foreign hotel room before opening that bottle of really, really good Champagne.

So this is what we did on a recent quick get-away to one our favorite cities: Montreal. We left early on a Tuesday morning so that we could arrive in time for a classic bistrot lunch at a favorite watering-hole: Chez Levesque on rue Laurier. We traveled with four friends, and we all tucked into lunch with the abandon of starting a long vacation even though we all knew we only had twenty-four hours. We drank Saumur Chenin Blanc from the Loire, and white Cote de Rhone with fresh oysters, and winter green salads. Sole Meuniere, sweet breads, slightly spicy steak and salmon tartars, pan-roasted Canadian colin. In the afternoon, we haunted favorite boutiques admiring daring fashions. I trekked to one of my favorite department stores in the city, Ogilvy, and bellied up to the comptoir at L’Artisan Parfumeurs. I was there to purchase my favorite scent, La Chasse aux Papillions, a white flower concoction with notes of white pepper that seems to satisfy my connection to the floral and the gourmand, and somehow sits well with my own chemistry.

As I always do at a perfume bar, I smell other things. It’s like a grand tasting at a bar à vin. There was the new harvest perfume Iris Pallida made from a rare iris found in Italy originating from the Dalmatian coast; there was the vintage and organic harvest scent Jatamansi made from the rare nard, or jatamansi root grown in the foothills of the Himalayas; there was La Haie Fleurie du Hameau extracted from jasmine, orange blossom, narcissus, and ylang-ylang; and there was Méchant Loup. I remembered having smelled Méchant Loup before but not being nearly as intrigued as at that moment on a bitter and damply cold mid-winter afternoon dressed in two sweaters and two coats and still feeling only barely warm enough even though I was inside a well-heated building. It was difficult to get out of the chill, but the Méchant Loup distracted me, beckoning with a compelling narrative on its notes of cedar, white pepper, sandalwood, hazelnut, and honey. Deep into the woods go I following these illusive yet magic scents that reveal themselves only as they choose, the sign of a good perfume--a perfume of place, just like the sign of a good wine.

I translate Méchant Loup as Naughty Wolf, but it might also mean Angry Wolf, or in the spirit of the parfumeur Bertrand Duchaufour’s thinking, The Big Bad Wolf. A scent often suggested to men, I take the sample thinking that even though this is more woodsy than most scents I wear, the thread of the white pepper and the hint of magnolia somewhere in the kernel of the perfume might suit me just right in this winter season. This is a gourmand scent made from spices that I might use to flavor roasting lamb. A spicy perfume, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

We are staying in a new hotel down in the old city, Le Petit Hotel. We’ve been admiring it since it’s opening in late July. It is modern and small with great flair. Red, white, stone, wood. In our compact room, modern lamps light our way, and the bed is made in the European fashion: white sheets and eiderdown. We’ve brought a Gaston Chiquet Champagne from Dizy in France. It is mostly Chardonnay with a little Pinot Noir, and a little Pinot Meunier. We’ve brought six very thin glass flutes from Austria. The Chiquet brothers were on the front line of Champagne farmers who decided to stop selling to the big Champagne houses, and keep the grapes for their own wines. Our non vintage Champagne is full of toasty hazelnut and minerality precision at the finish. The mousse, or the bubbles are very fine and small like tiny exquisite pearls. It is both expansive and restrained. It is in balance, and accompanies the Méchant Loup perfectly.

We toast, we talk, and the room is illuminated with flashes of the yeasty Champagne, and the dark woods that I wear on my wrist. We create a new tale between the six of us : Little Red RidingHood drinks Champagne.

--Deirdre

wolfen moon

2010-01-31T14:08:00.000-08:00

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

secrets revealed

2010-01-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

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