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Newsletter for July 2006 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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This month, let me extend a warm welcome to the large number of new readers of this newsletter. Each month’s newsletter announces events, contains at least one recipe, and has several feature articles on various food, wine, and restaurant topics. All back editions of the newsletter are on our web site.
This month, I announce the plan for our monthly special dinners for the rest of the year. As for features, I write about wild French asparagus and a wonderfully fresh and quick summer dinner, not to mention a brief discussion of achiote and how we use it. I’m also extremely happy to have a piece written by Beth Nowak of Mayfair Farm, one of our key produce suppliers. Beth and her husband Gene will be guest hosts at our upcoming harvest dinner on the 20th. And finally, because of customer requests, I’ve included a recipe for the shellfish salad that we featured in our June wine dinner with Linden Vineyard.
I hope you enjoy this edition of the newsletter and if there are any topics you’d like to see in future editions, please let me know.
All my best,
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Every Wednesday is Tapas Night Each Wednesday night, we serve tapas from 5:00pm to 9:00pm. Tapas are small, fun dishes, designed so that you can try a range of foods. Last week we featured 21 dishes, of which 7 were vegetarian. My favorite tapa was Barely Seared Yellowfin Tuna Tataki with Coconut-Wasabi Sorbet. Come see what we’re cooking this week.
Thursday, July 20, Summer Harvest Dinner Hot weather is a great thing because it means a glorious bounty of summer vegetables! Join guest hosts Gene and Beth Nowak of Mayfair Farm in Bunker Hill, WV, key One Block West produce suppliers, in a four-course dinner with matching wines highlighting the fruits of their labors. Using only produce from Mayfair Farm, I have planned the most incredible menu of tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, basil, eggplants, squash, Corno di Toro peppers, Torpedo onions, peaches, blackberries, and apricots! $55 per person. Reception from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. First course promptly at 7:00pm. SOLD OUT
Saturday, August 19, 10:00am – 12:00, Demonstration at the Freight Station Farmers Market Free! I’ll be at the farmers market in the parking lot on Valley Avenue across from Handley High School demonstrating dishes made with ingredients that I find at the market. I won’t know in advance what I’m making because I don’t know what will be there. This is your chance to ask, “What do I do with THAT?”
Tuesday, August 22 through Saturday August 26, Closed for Annual Summer Holiday
Thursday, August 31, Caribbean Fusion, Riesling, and Rosé Dinner Here’s the perfect excuse for all our weekenders to take extra advantage of the long Labor Day weekend. Take Friday off and come out Thursday evening for our end of summer celebration. $65 per person. Reception from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. First course promptly at 7:00pm.
Thursday, September 21, Annual Oktoberfest Dinner with Tröegs Brewery Join special guest Chris Trogner of Tröegs Brewery as we sample his beers during our fourth annual Oktoberfest dinner. $60 per person. Reception from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. First course promptly at 7:00pm.
October, Burgundy Dinner We’re still firming up the details of this dinner featuring wine and food of the Bourgogne. I have some stunning wines in mind.
November, Daring Dinner—Are You Brave Enough? My sous chef Danny and I are designing a menu for chefs. These are dishes we would order if we had the time to go out, dishes such as Prosciutto-Wrapped Sweetbreads and Braised Veal Cheeks, things are perfectly delicious, but which most people don’t have the guts to try. Do you?
Thursday, December 21, Annual Greatest Hits Dinner For our annual Greatest Hits dinner, we will be combing through the thousands of dishes that we have done in 2006 and designing a five-course menu of our customers' favorite dishes, paired with wines.
In June, a very few lucky customers got to try the wild French asparagus that I brought in from the vast produce market at Rungis near Paris. This wild cousin of domestic asparagus barely resembles what you know as asparagus. These asparagus have long pale green stalks of very narrow diameter, topped with a very pale green cone. In flavor, they are mild with a slight asparagus flavor, with none of the bitterness of either green or white commercial asparagus. They are totally edible and after blanching them for 60 seconds, they still have just a touch of crunch. Delicious. This is something that you should try next June, if we can bring some more in.
This brings me to the article entitled “Local Heroes?” by Barry Estabrook in the July 2006 edition of Gourmet magazine in which he takes restaurants to task for proclaiming to be local restaurants, yet serving ingredients from all over the world. In part I understand his point and in part, I’m offended because he has no idea what it takes to run a restaurant. I am committed to supporting our local purveyors, yet on the other hand, when I get a chance to put local asparagus from Mayfair Farm on the menu at the same time as wild French asparagus, I am going to do it so that we can all taste the two, compare and contrast, and learn something. If Mr. Estabrook has a problem with that, too bad.
Finally, the web site at www.frenchgardening.com is incredibly well done and I am having great fun trolling through the recipes on that site. Worth a visit.
I just got up from our Fourth of July dinner and realized that more people should eat this way. Here’s a meal whose ingredients I bought at the farmers’ market this morning and a meal that took 15 minutes of prep time and 20 minutes cook time. Here’s the menu:
New Potatoes with Parsley Butter Corn on the Cob with Chile-Lime Butter Tomato and Cucumber Salad Roasted Peaches
For the new potatoes, once you’ve drained them, throw in a small bit of unsalted butter, a bunch of chopped parsley, salt, and pepper and toss well. See if you can resist the temptation to eat them all! For chile-lime butter, mix two tablespoons of soft unsalted butter with the zest of a lime, a little squeeze of lime juice, salt, pepper, and powdered ancho chile (use a spice mill). Peel the tomatoes and chunk them and mix with chunked cucumber. Toss with salt, pepper, and extra virgin olive oil. Peel and pit the peaches and place in a roasting pan in halves or chunks. Sprinkle with a touch of brown sugar and cinnamon and dot with a little butter. Roast in a hot oven until hot and the syrup is bubbly. Enjoy!
We recently ran a vegetarian special of a Sofrito- and Potato-Stuffed Poblano Chile on Cool Gazpacho that was well received. Sofrito is a base of sautéed vegetables used to start many Italian and Latino dishes, just like the trinity of peppers, onions, and celery that is the basis of Cajun cooking. On our menu, when you see sofrito, there’s typically achiote involved.
The Latino form of sofrito generally involves sautéing onions, peppers, and tomatoes, generally in achiote oil. Achiote is the Latino name for what we call annatto. We make achiote oil by cooking a couple of tablespoons of achiote in a cup of neutral oil over medium heat until the oil is boiling. Then we remove it from the heat before the achiote burns and let it cool. Then we strain it to yield a beautiful deep orange oil that imparts a lovely yellow color and a pleasantly earthy flavor to the finished dish.
A typical One Block West sofrito (they’re all different) goes thus. Sauté chopped onions and poblano chiles in achiote oil. Add diced roasted potatoes or raw plátanos, tomatoes, cumin, and garlic. Cook for three or four minutes longer. Stir in chopped cilantro. Add salt and pepper to taste.
We also have been known to simmer garlic and red pepper flakes in achiote oil and use that as a baste for fish both before and after roasting.
Achiote seeds are small, deep reddish brown, and pyramidal in shape, from the center of the small, inedible, heart-shaped fruits of a tropical shrub. The major use of achiote seeds is for food coloring: read the ingredients on your butter or vanilla ice cream container and look for the word annatto.
Although most cooks use achiote in the form of oil, in certain places, the seeds are ground to be mixed with other flavorings such as garlic, cumin, and cilantro to form rubs. One particularly famous use of such a rub, enhanced with a healthy dose of habañero chile, is in the Yucatecan dish Cochinita Pibil, banana leaf-wrapped pig steamed in a pit.
We have scheduled a Harvest Dinner for July 20th featuring the produce of Mayfair Farm. I thought that you might like to know more about the farm and its owners Gene and Beth Nowak. Here is their story in Beth’s own words.
by Beth Nowak
My husband Eugene and I started Mayfair Farm, a 43-acre fruit and vegetable farm located in Bunker Hill, WV, in 1983. Originally from White Plains, NY, Gene has a BS in horticulture from Delaware Valley College. He developed an early interest in agriculture on his parents’ quarter-acre lot in a subdivision called Mayfair Acres, the inspiration for the name of our farm.
As a child I lived in Oregon and picked berries and worked on my family’s two-acre garden before moving to Alaska. My father grew berries and we sold them, along with milk, eggs, and cream to supplement our income. It takes a lot to feed and clothe seven children!
Gene and I met at church while I was in New York in college, earning a BA in history. We married in 1975 and we have managed to stay married, despite working together, because we are committed to each other and to what we do. We have complementary interests and abilities that are all necessary for both growing and marketing our products.
We moved to West Virginia in 1976 when Gene became an assistant manager at Jefferson Orchards in Kearneysville. He worked for the orchard for six years, until he was fired in 1982. While he was with the orchard, we had already begun selling produce from our garden and believed that we could make a living truck farming—raising fruits and vegetables and trucking them to a retail market. So in 1983, we purchased the property where we now live and began working out our plan.
When we started farming for ourselves, our oldest son Daniel was five; Erik was three; and Philip was on the way. He was born in April 1983, year of the hottest and driest summer in 30 years. Despite the weather, we managed to make a profit. I continued to work on my masters’ degree in education and substitute teach for the next five years until the demands and profits of farming made teaching unnecessary.
We planted trees, berries, and other perennials, along with more and more vegetable varieties. In 1993, we added a 30- by 96-foot greenhouse to grow early tomatoes, a very profitable venture. We have since erected an additional greenhouse for more tomatoes, as well as two smaller ones for starting seeds and transplants.
Currently, we are growing 3 acres of apples (30 varieties), 3 acres of peaches, 40 tart cherry trees and 40 sweet cherry trees, plums, apricots, nectarines, Asian and European pears, Concord grapes, red and black raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, cut flowers, and about 30 different vegetables. The mix of fruits and vegetables continues to change yearly, depending on customer demand and preferences.
Besides growing fruits and vegetables, we also press our own unpasteurized cider and fruit juices from our produce. And, we sell eggs from our free-range chickens that run around eating and recycling our unsold produce. Finally, we sell wild-caught Alaskan fish from my brother, a commercial fisherman in Seward, Alaska.
We sell at Freight Station Farmers’ Market, 1000 Valley Avenue in Winchester on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 7am-1pm. We have sold at other markets in the past, but our Winchester location is the best fit for our product and us. The Winchester area has supported us financially and emotionally for the past 25 years and we see an opportunity for continued growth here.
We practice sustainable agriculture, which is defined by the use of cover crops, composting, mulching, and reduced spraying. We are not certified organic growers because experience has shown that we cannot grow many things here without some pesticide protection. However, it is incumbent upon us to use those pesticides responsibly and at the lowest possible levels. The current trend toward organic produce has come about because consumers feel that agribusiness does not practice ecologically sound and socially responsible agriculture. We do.
We believe there will always be demand for high-quality, locally produced food from customers who care about where their food comes from, how it tastes, how it was grown, and the increased nutritional content of locally produced food. Small family farms, whose products are sold in local market places, will fill this demand. As a bonus, these farms will also maintain green space in areas that are rapidly becoming developed.
However, it is challenging to maintain family farms when faced with rising land values, suburban life styles, and the seduction of easier work for more money. We will continue to farm because we believe that producing fresh, high quality fruits and vegetables is an important contribution to our community. And truthfully, we probably couldn’t work for anyone else either!
Of all the challenges that we face, labor is by far our biggest. We have depended on our sons, but the youngest has now graduated from college and they all seem to be moving on. We are making adjustments, but still need to find dependable, committed assistance for our operation. So far, none of our sons has decided to partner with us on the farm, but we remain hopeful.
In farming it is always hope that keeps us going. We see the new leaves, the blossoms, the miniature green fruits, and we watch the weather. We hope until harvest comes. And then, all the hard work in surmounting the challenges seems worthwhile.
Recipe: Poached Shellfish Salad with Creamy Saffron Dressing
Here’s a recipe that several of you requested from our Linden wine dinner in June. I devised this to be a light, refreshing seafood accompaniment to serve with Jim’s crisp and citrusy Chardonnay. This dish is simple to make, but it takes a while, so save it for a weekend when you have some time to devote to it. The result is worth it. This recipe illustrates how we chefs build layer upon layer of flavor.
2 lb mussels, shell on 8-10 parsley stems 1 shallot diced ½ c white wine 1 lb bay scallops, shucked 1 lb shrimp 1 lemon 4-5 peppercorns ½ c heavy cream generous pinch of saffron 1/3 c white wine vinegar 1 c flavorless vegetable oil (we use grapeseed, use what you have) 2 avocados ½ c minced chives salt and pepper
Clean the mussels. If you’re new to mussels, we covered that in October 2004. In a pan large enough to hold the mussels, steam them with the shallot, parsley stems, and white wine until they open. Remove the mussels from the pan to a bowl to cool, leaving the mussel broth in the pan. While you are poaching the scallops, the next step, you can remove the mussels from their shells and refrigerate them, discarding the shells, and pouring any remaining mussel broth into the poaching scallops.
While the mussels are cooling, put the bay scallops in the pan with the mussel broth and add enough water to cover the scallops. Place on a gentle flame and poach until the scallops are just done. Remove the scallops with a slotted spoon or strainer to an ice bath to stop their cooking. Add the scallops to the mussels under refrigeration.
Next, add the shrimp to the poaching liquid along with half a lemon, in slices, and the peppercorns. Add more water as necessary to cover. Save the other half of the lemon, you’ll need it for the dressing. Whether you use shell-on or shell-off shrimp is up to you. You will have a richer broth with shells, but I can’t fault you for buying already peeled and deveined shrimp—I do: I can’t afford the labor to shell them. Poach the shrimp until they just turn opaque and remove to an ice bath. When cool, peel them and then refrigerate with the other shellfish.
Add the cream and the saffron to the poaching liquid over low heat, reduce to about two cups, and then strain to remove the seasoning ingredients. Refrigerate until cold. You will only need one cup of reduced stock, so start planning to use the other cup along with a bit more cream to make a quick seafood soup or bisque.
Place one cup of the cold reduced stock in a blender container along with the vinegar and the juice of half a lemon. Start the blender and slowly pour in the vegetable oil. Blend until well emulsified. Taste for seasoning—you are not likely to need salt as the mussels contribute a lot of salt to the broth.
Dice the avocados and add to the shellfish along with the chives and dressing. Toss well and serve over your favorite mix of salad greens, with some hot bread, and a glass of Linden Chardonnay. Although I have scaled the recipe to the quantities of shellfish that you can typically buy in a grocery store, this recipe still feeds a small army and the resulting salad doesn’t keep, so invite friends over to help you with the cooking and more importantly with the eating.
Are you watching the Hell’s Kitchen soap opera on Fox? We watch on Monday nights and laugh our behinds off. This is so far from reality that it is comical. Can you imagine me halting dinner service on a Saturday night and throwing you out? Me either. Nor can I imagine anyone leaving my line because he or she burned her hand.
The next eight weeks represent the peak season for our local produce. If you haven’t been to see us in a while, now’s a really good time.
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
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Copyright © 2006 Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC sensational seasonal cuisine and the W logo are trademarks of Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC. |
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