Can words make you hungry? Pick up a menu and the average diner begins to salivate. You imagine that salty bacalao with a side of something crunchy. Or a risotto served with pungent mushrooms. The words create a picture and an almost immediate sensation.
But what happens when you pick up a menu and all the words are new—utterly exotic—to you? That’s the experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and it’s wonderful.
Think of venturing into a new world without a map. Terrifying for some, perhaps, but a thrill for others, especially when your guide is chef Dan Barber.
Here is a sample—of ingredients, and of the ways that Barber has chosen to group them.
greenhouse: focea lettuce, ching chang bok choy, ruby chard, wild arugula, red deer tongue, green swiss chard, watercress, mokum carrots, bay leaves, rosemary, oscarde, golden frills, blackhawk, kohrabi, red Russian kale, dwarf pak choy, sulu, Annapolis lettuce, firecracker, Italian parsley, Bordeaux spinach, Tuscan black kale, Tokyo bekana, mizuna, tango, truckee, troutback, purple garnet, bok choi, claytonia, mache, galisse, starbor kale, ruby streaks, purple komatsuma, sage, bright lights chard, minutina, garnet giant, magenta lettuce
pasture: finn Dorset lamb, African goose, honey, Berkshire pork, eggs from our hens
field: green garlic, golden beets, stinging nettles, merlin beets, mokum carrots, rutabaga, purple kale, day lily shoots, eight row flint corn, Bloomsdale spinach, parsnips, Forono beets, Tuscan kale, Orion kale, Tropea onion, Samantha cabbage, celery root, rose geranium
ocean: Maine oysters, Long Island porgy, Bouchot mussels, wild Alaskan king salmon, bluefish, squid ink, black drum, Woodbury clams, dulse seaweed, Quahog clams, razor clams, hake
Dude, got some weed? The kind you find in your lawn, that you cut with a sharp blade or douse with herbicides?
I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion. The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed. But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.
Weed ‘Em and Eat
In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:
“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”
Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.
And it’s a rare weed indeed that has a book named after it: Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.
“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”
Throughout the region farm stands and farmers markets are re-opening. You want to patronize them, but it can be so much easier to shop at the grocery store. Here are some reasons for making the switch.
Such Good Taste
Summer is almost on us. If you’re old enough to remember a time when summer meant something in relation to the food we eat, then this is happy time.
Summer was the season when we could get almost any fruit or vegetable we desired. Food was fresh and it was something special. Now, we can get everything all the time, regardless of season. Our kids take it for granted. But something besides taste is lost with this total 24/7/365 access food. Produce comes in from all over the world. If nothing else, it feels different that we can no longer associate certain foods with their harvest season.
We can only skip traditional seasons because varieties have been developed for their shipping characteristics rather than their eating quality. Older varieties, which may have had shorter spans of maturity, were too soft for long-distance shipping; those different shapes and sizes have been replaced by varieties specifically bred to be firm and uniform for efficient packing.
These new fruits and vegetables are usually picked before they are fully ripened (for longer shelf life), so they never develop the natural sugars that fully mature produce possesses. Local farmers, with shorter time to market, plant varieties that taste great and possess natural sweetness. They pick the produce when it is ripe and not green. Fresh, local foods do taste better.
What makes a great teacher? It’s not “mysterious nor magical. It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance. Teachers who do well in America have a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record and a passion for long-term goals.”
That quote from a recent Atlantic Magazine article on successful teachers applies equally well to chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
Barber is the chef and owner of several restaurants, including Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. How celebrated are his artistry and integrity? When the President wanted to take his wife out dinner in New York City, they went to Blue Hill.
Food and Wine, TIME, and the James Beard Foundation have all singled Barber out for praise and honors. He was invited to speak at the 2010 TED Conference about his efforts to keep fish on the menu as wild stocks dwindle. So in addition to being smart and appealing and enormously talented, he’s environmentally responsible—and absolutely committed to sustainability.
Even critics are wowed. Ed Levine of New York Magazine wrote:
“Blue Hill at Stone Barns is the most important and gutsiest restaurant in America right now (emphasis theirs). Barber has taken the ideas of locavorism, nose-to-tail cooking, and farm-to-table to groundbreaking places, and in so doing he is laying the foundation for a truly different kind of restaurant-going experience with far-reaching implications.”
The days are getting warmer but the nights are still cool. If you’re lucky enough to have sugar maples or black maples in your backyard, it’s time to get out the buckets, the wood drill, a half-inch bit, and some taps.
Concentrated Sweetness
But don’t start whipping up a stack of flapjacks immediately: just like any other type of farming, turning sap into syrup takes time and work.
First you’ll need a maple at least 10” in diameter. One tap hole can yield five to 15 gallons of sap, though under ideal conditions a tap may yield between 40 and 80 gallons. Depending on its girth, a tree may support up to three tap holes.
Forty gallons of sap boils down to just one gallon of syrup. To accomplish that boiling-down, some Native Americans heated rocks and dropped them into hollowed-out logs filled with sap. Hard work, but think of the reward.
A “Tree Whose Juice Weeps”
In fact at one time maple syrup and sugar were an important part of the North American Indian economy. When impatiently awaiting the bounty of Spring, a happy distraction is welcome; so are the nutrition and much-needed calories.
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