It seems like some people were born to host holidays and dinner parties. Everything from the perfect place settings, succulent starters and show-stopping entrées. Oh, and let’s not forget those sugar-dusted miniature monuments of dessert perfection.You can’t help but wonder who has the time to learn and prepare all that. Unfortunately, hosting dinner parties isn’t going anywhere. Fortunately, we’ve found a few ways to make the hosting a whole lot easier.
Your dinner party solution might be somewhere you’re already visiting on a weekly basis.
If you’re short on planning time or used to spending more time in your living room than your kitchen, it’s completely understandable to be on edge at the thought of hosting. Not all of us are primed to be the next Master Chef or prepared and willing to cook for more than two or three people. That being said, your dinner party solution might be somewhere you’re already visiting on a weekly basis.
If you haven’t caught on to the food bars at your local Wegman’s and Whole Foods you’re missing out. You might be too busy trying to beat the rush of weekend patrons or after-work shoppers to truly have time to peruse the offerings, but both grocery chains have a wonderful array of cuisines ready to be packaged and taken home. They offer everything from noodle dishes, soups, sautéed vegetables and sauced meats which means you really can’t go wrong. If you’re up for a quick trip to the hot bar you can have food ready for your party in under an hour (just don’t forget to stop by the bakery section to pick up some tasty desserts).
Consider going bold with a cuisine that wouldn’t normally come from your stove top.
That being said, one of the biggest steps in your planning would be deciding just how secretive you wish to be with your guests. If your friends are aware that you’re not the Anthony Bourdain of your household and you’re willing to admit that you picked your palette pleasers up from an out- side source then consider going bold with a cuisine that wouldn’t normally come from your stove top. Choose a local restaurant that caters and go for Mediterranean, Asian, or Indian dishes and make a theme of it.
You may be thinking Theme? You need a theme to host one of these things? Not necessarily.You’re more than welcome to dust off your regular kitchenware and provide enough wine that no one cares whether they’re attending a “Night in Morocco” or “Casino Night”. If you want to go the route of having a theme (and trust that it’s probably much more fun) you can do it with only a little effort if you plan accordingly.
If you’re planning to host this autumn and are in need of tabletop decorations, stop by a local craft store.
Assuming you don’t have a stockpile of china, tea cups and lace doilies (Tea Party Dinner theme) to accommodate your number of guests, don’t stress out. After you have picked a theme do a little reconnaissance work. Find out if any of your local stores are doing sales at the moment and if so make a stop at somewhere like Target or Home Goods to find a nice set of dinnerware, place mats and table runners. If you’re planning to host a party for this autumn and are in need of tabletop decorations you could always stop by a local craft store to pick up discounted fall decorations. As we all know, once October arrives fall decorations re sales occur to make room for shelving of Christmas decor.
If you would consider yourself crafty, some cheap and brag-worthy craft ideas include buying wire and stringing beads to make your own napkins rings or personalizing place cards (think tiny gourds and pumpkins tied name tags). Regardless, a quick Pinterest search yields unending suggestions for memorable party decorations, fall themed or otherwise.
While there are plenty to choose from, we wanted to highlight one and give it a test run for you.
Now you might have an idea for a theme but let’s say you’re not set on shopping at a local grocer’s hot bar? You could always hire a catering service. While there are plenty to choose from in the Lehigh Valley and beyond, we wanted to highlight one and give it a test run for you. We asked around and double checked online reviews of our top choices and decided to use Sumac Catering of Bethlehem.
As started in their 5 star reviews, Sumac is dedicated to making every catering event their best yet and, lucky for us, they do more than just dinner.You can cater breakfast, lunch, dinner and desert. The way it works is you just head to their website, we recommend not doing this on an empty stomach, and pick from one of their 30+ dinner options. Once you know what you want for the main course, check out all the sides, salads, apps and desert options to put together the perfect menu. The best part about this is, you never have to leave the living room! You can order it all over the phone and they’ll deliver it to your house the day of your party. Just worry about how you’d like to set the table and you’ve just made hosting a dinner party as easy as pie!
Nowhere else do the increasingly sophisticated flavors of the region come together as well as they do at the Easton Public Market. The trick is not filling up too fast. Follow us for the way.
By Kendra Lee Thatcher·Photography by Jennie Finken
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that everyone should have at least one person in her life who embodies these three qualities:
1. He/she is nonjudgmental, especially in the presence of slurping.
2. He/she is always down to eat, no matter the time and place.
3. He/she is always thinking ahead.
That last one proved especially valuable, because I approached the Easton Public Market with the singular (and narrow-minded) ambition to eat as much as I could, where my Ride or Die thought to bring a large cooler.
Culinary halls may be all the rage (even though the concept is old-old-school), but Easton Public Market is not a loosely wrought trend. It’s smart (the cooking demos arm you with ideas so you don’t get home and stare blankly at all that delicious food), conscientious (it’s grassroots, but it’s designed to be self-sustaining, and the vendors are all local) and on point (the diversity rivals that of any urban hall). It’s also overwhelming. With all those aromas competing for your attention, it’s very easy to walk in and fill up on the first thing that catches your eye. But a little poise will carry you far. So here’s a field guide that’ll ensure you hit the most appetizing spots with a little room to spare.
Begin at Mister Lee’s Noodles (1) for kick-ass, authentic ramen. The dishes don’t lend themselves to sharing, but you won’t want anyone else hanging their heads over your bowl anyway. The ingredients are local and the noodles are made by Sun Noodle Co., which supplies revered ramen houses in Manhattan and Brooklyn. If you’re the kind who appreciates the astonishing amount of labor and the time-honored technique that go into constructing that bowl, grab a seat at the bar.
The Kitchen proved to be a good palate cleanser. We walked in on a juicing demonstration and sipped the extracts of beet, ginger and kale while we plotted our next meal.
Welcome as that little detox was, it had to be five somewhere, so we headed to Tolino Vineyards (2) next to sample some chambourcin (which happens to be the official grape of the Lehigh Valley). It’s a not-too-bold red that paired well later on with our Chocodiem (3) truffles and the live acoustic music.
(More on those truffles: Chocodiem collaborated with other Easton Public Market vendors on several varieties. I fell in love with the More-Than-Q BBQ (4) and the Fieldstone (5) Espresso truffles, both of which were unlike any truffle I’ve had before.)
We indulged next in the arnabit at The Taza Stop (6). It’s breaded, fried, mildly spicy cauliflower served with a scratch-made garlic sauce. Think cauliflower calamari. From The Taza Stop, it’s an easy walk to Youseff’s and Olive with a Twist, between which you’ll find deep inventories of hard-to-find spices, unusual balsamics and handcrafted soaps and body butters.
At this point, I strongly advise checking your parking meter. Time has a way of getting away from you here. That’s not, however, a legitimate defense in a Northampton County court. Also: You’re going to need to grab that cooler.
Now, let’s get down to some shopping. Don’t be afraid to ask the butchers at Dundore + Heister what’s good. They’re likely to turn you on to cuts you’ve never heard of before, but’ll become your go-tos from here on out. Then, stock up on produce, Alderfer eggs and Apple Valley Creamery raw-milk cheese at Highmark Blue Shield Farmstand (7). There should still be room in the cooler, but not much, so head back to Chocodiem for macarons.
Your appetite’s probably returning by now. A beer and Neapolitan-style pizza at Scratch (8) will satisfy those pangs. Scratch is the epitome of the Easton Public Market experience: comfortable and familiar, yet elevated. And don’t think that a pizza joint is going to be held to any less of a standard. Nearly every ingredient comes from Apple Ridge Farm and the beer is from nearby Shawnee Craft Brewery. (The taps rotate often, so be adventurous. Even if you luck into a new favorite, which we did with the lambic, it likely won’t be there your next time through anyway.)
The women manning the wood-burning oven flick pies in with a fluid motion and lunge after them without so much as a flinch. We split the Garlic 3 Ways pie, which arrived with a large, artistic swirl reminiscent of aged balsamic. Really, it’s pureed black garlic and worchester sauce. The crust was beautifully charred. And the ricotta was so impossibly creamy, I’d a been happy eating it alone with a spoon.
As we wheeled our cooler toward the exit, our stomachs full to bursting, we hesitated and wondered aloud whether we maybe should try something else before we called it a day. You will, too. The market starts to feel like an amusement park for adults. Dizzy from being knocked about ride after ride, you still want to hit the rollercoaster one more time because the moment you step outside the gates, the next decision you make isn’t going to be determined by your id.
With an opening date finally set, we surveyed the scene at La Cabra Brewing, in Berwyn. If it sounds familiar, it’s because its brewer’s been testing the waters for a while now.
By Mike Madaio Photography by Matthew J. Rhein
In recent weeks, Dan Popernack’s found himself reflecting often on the circuitous route that’s led him, a home brewer once upon a time, to the cusp of opening his own craft brewery and gastropub.
“I’ve been developing this concept for 10 years,” he told me last month, as we surveyed the construction-in-progress at the future home of La Cabra Brewing in Berwyn. Though, later, I’ll find an interview he did back in 2013 in which he quoted the same duration. “Ten years of thinking, planning, researching, talking to every bartender, brewpub owner, distributor that I could before I felt confident enough.”
What he’s created is a compelling lineup of beers that deftly walks the line between and adventurous, paired with a Latin-inspired menu that runs much the same, served in a dramatic setting in which every intriguing, historic feature’s been restored and accentuated.
“We probably could’ve been open by now, but we don’t believe in rushing,” Popernack says. “We’ll open exactly on time.”
That time came Tuesday.
Popernack taught himself home-brewing in college. “My parents wouldn’t let me drink in the house, but they gave in when I said I’d make it myself,” he says. Later, he worked at The Beeryard, in Wayne, while he pursued his master’s at Villanova. La Cabra started to come into focus in 2013, while he was teaching at The Phelps School and home-brewing in his spare time. It was then when he launched a mailing list that quickly found a cult-like following. In it, Popernack described his latest experimentations and made available “samples” to the recipients. The arrangement is officially described as a “brewery-in-planning.” Aspiring craft brewers can make and share their beer with the public, but they can’t sell it. Think of it as a means of fostering a grassroots following with the expectation that it’ll lend some momentum to an eventual brick-and-mortar opening.
Popernack’s since built his reputation, and, in turn, La Cabra’s, on sour, funky beers crafted from wild yeast and barrel-aging, the kind that the nerds seem to make the most noise about. But they tend to not play as well with the casual-drinking crowd. “Of course I’m going to keep doing that,” Popernack says, as he shows me around an aging room in the basement. “But if that’s all I wanted to do, I would have stayed home.”
One of his aims is to riff off the food menu. “Playing with food pairings is actually one of my favorite things,” he says. And he’s quite talented at it. La Cabra’s Juno Pale Ale, infused with lime zest and rosemary, may be the best taco beer I’ve ever had.
Popernack’s, of course, devoted as much intention in partnering up and assembling his staff, from the chef to the servers, as he has to every tangible component. But while their missions may be aligned, they’re not singular.
“The bottom line is that we want people to feel welcome here, like they’re walking into our home, whether they’re really into beer or not,” Popernack says. “I’m obviously passionate about it. I’ve devoted my life to it. But beer isn’t everything. If we can be good neighbors, great members of the community, then we’ll really have achieved something.”
La Cabra Brewing, 642 Lancaster Avenue, Berwyn.
5 Fall-inspired Beers You Need to Try—And Not a Hint of Pumpkin to be Found
It’s not seasonal and it’s not especially trendy—the extra special bitter was big at the inception of the craft movement, back in the nineties—but this ale’s a near-perfect match for this schizophrenic weather. Toasty, mild sweetness up front, crisp and dry on the back end.
Crafted by cold-steeping an already-rich, brown ale with freshly roasted coffee beans, the resulting flavor is fueled by waves of sweet raisin and molasses with a pleasantly bitter undercurrent.
Pick up your lagging grill game with these under-appreciated cuts.
The bacon-looking cuts, pictured alongside the pork shoulder, are the kalbi.
We’re all well aware of how long your burger recipe was under development before you finally branded it your own. And, yes, your chicken breasts are impressively moist, the cross-hatching on your T-bones, a masterful display. But it’s all starting to feel a bit stale. When you grill almost year-round and your wheelhouse consists of a few different things, it’s inevitable. Longevity comes from being bold enough to constantly reinvent yourself. Now’s not the time to hide behind a little bit of success. Or your smoking grill. (We can still see you.)
To spare you from the need to humble yourself, we asked Damon Menapace to show us the way through the dog days ahead. Damon’s the executive chef at Kensington Quarters, the Frankford Avenue restaurant that’s developed a stout reputation for knowing how to handle meat. Case in point, KQ has its own butcher shop, which Damon also took on earlier this summer.
Here, he offers up a few under-appreciated cuts that cook up especially well on the grill. (All, BTW, are available at the KQ butcher shop.)
Kalbi Short Ribs
Also known as galbi, these Korean barbeque-style steaks are cut thinly across the bone, so they’ll grill up fast. “Nobody wants to braise a big, square-cut short rib in the summer,” Damon says. Marinate them beforehand. They’ll come out tender, juicy and concentrated with flavor.
Country-style Pork Ribs
The name is misleading. These aren’t actually ribs. They’re bone-in slices of pork shoulder that are cut to resemble the barbeque favorite. They cook similarly, too. Think of them as a cross between pulled pork and ribs. Damon says, “Cook ‘em low and slow and with plenty of smoke.”
Chuck Eye Steak
“The poor man’s rib eye,” as he calls it, is taken from farther up the shoulder. “Most people hear the word ‘chuck’ and think it’ll be tough,” Damon says, “but this lovely little steak is tender, fatty and super-rich.”
Lamb Shoulder Chops
Sliced with a band saw across the bone, these inch-thick chops are an affordable alternative to the more widely-known lollipops, and they’re packed with way more meat and flavor. “Throw them on the grill with a little baste,” Menapace advises. “They can be chewy, but it’s fun to get messy ripping into them. This is summertime grilling, after all.” —Mike Madaio
At the forefront of the wild food movement, lawyer turned forager Tama Matsuoka Wong is turning weeds into a thriving business and a way of life.
By Jessica Downey • Photography by Josh DeHonney
Tama Matsuoka Wong was an international financial services lawyer for decades, working in major urban centers like New York City and Hong Kong for 25 years, but when she and her husband Wil decided to move to New Jersey in 2002, near where she grew up in Princeton, Wong was prepared for her life to change course. She wanted lots of land and big sky, so they bought a house on 28 acres in Flemington.
With all that open space, for first time in her adult life, Wong tried to grow a vegetable garden. What she got instead was a tangle of uninvited weeds and roots, which ended up being her ultimate good fortune. “Friends tried to show us how to grow tomatoes and vegetables, and everything died. I had a black thumb. We eventually found out we lived on a clay flood plain and all we could grow was weeds,” Wong says. “I tried to get rid of them, but I found that it was a losing battle.”
When she enlisted her Japanese father for help removing the weeds, she was surprised at his reaction—he couldn’t believe her luck. One of the weeds she wanted removed was chickweed, one of Japan’s “seven treasures,” known as hakobera, which can be delicious when prepared properly. Wong started scouring the Web and bookstores for recipes, but most books and blogs she found suggested boiling them three times to get out the bitterness, so she went in search of a more refined understanding.
One night, in 2009, she brought some of her chickweed and other “twigs” with her to Daniel, the four-star Michelin-rated restaurant in New York City known for its inventive vegetarian cuisine. The head chef, Eddy Leroux, was delighted by her offerings and asked her to return with more, as well as roots and any other wild plants she found on her land.
These weeds were valuable, she soon learned, a discovery that coincided with the early days of the foraging movement, which was quickly gaining speed and momentum. These kinds of ingredients were gaining prominence on the menus of fine dining restaurants from New York to Copenhagen, and her 28 acres of twigs, roots and leaves provided her with an opportunity to be on the forefront. Later in 2009, Wong started her own company, Meadows and More, with the primary goal of helping people turn their yards into more natural landscapes.
While the concept of foraging brings to mind images of scavengers or anthropological ancestors scouring the earth for food, a more culinary interpretation has led to a movement described by the iconic chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud as “harvesting the wild, ephemeral and rare flavors found in nature.” The movement has blossomed around the idea that we’ve been selecting plants for many generations that are increasingly high in sugar and starch and consistently lower in vitamins, fiber and minerals. Wild foods, foragers contend, are more nutritious and easy enough to find when you know what to look for.
A quick Google search will turn up plenty of resources and food blogs with ideas on cooking with foraged and wild foods, but when Wong made her discovery in 2009, books and sites to turn to for inspiration and advice were sparse.
“Publishers were looking for an American book,” Wong says. She obliged by writing a field guide/cookbook with Daniel’s Leroux called Foraged Flavor: Finding Fabulous Ingredients in Your Backyard or Farmer’s Market, which was published in 2012.
The book garnered plenty of attention and was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2013, which, of course, was a boost for her budding business. Today, she grows and cultivates weeds and wild plants on her land and land she leases from local farmers. Then she partners with restaurateurs and chefs, including Brick Farm Tavern partner/executive chef Greg Vassos, supplying them with the likes of garlic mustard and nettles and helping them develop flavor profiles for each plant.
It takes consistent trial and error to figure out what will grow, sell and taste good, but Wong says the experimental nature of her work is a thrill. “For every failure there’s this new and good thing happening,” Wong says. “I have relationships with conservation groups where I take things they don’t want, and I work with organic farmers. And it’s completely invigorating.”
[divider]Walk on the Wild Side— But Watch Where You Step[/divider]
If eating your weeds is more tempting than constantly battling them in your garden, Wong offers some advice on how to start foraging. —JD
Look down. If you have a backyard or a vegetable garden, instead of throwing out something you don’t recognize or didn’t plant, take a closer look and try to appreciate it. I have a forum on my Web site (meadowsandmore.com) that lets you upload a picture, and we’ll identify it for you.
Start small. Try something you’re already familiar with, like a dandelion, and be patient. Find out when its tenderness and sweetness peak. (Those initial leaves can be bitter and harsh.)
Get to know it. Engage with the plant and get to know it—it’s behavior and what you can do with it.
Don’t rule anything out. I came across some hickory bark. It looked like a house shingle, and I was like, Oh, great, bark. But to my surprise, my client came back and said it was amazing. He used it in shag bark/hickory bark ice cream, which tasted like smoky caramel.
Drew Abruzzese is a relentless chef. So when a smoker landed in his lap, he, naturally, dove down the rabbit hole.
By Mike Madaio
“I can’t sit still,” Drew Abruzzese says. “I’m always looking for my next big thing.”
Abruzzese is the executive chef at The Pineville Tavern, which is owned by his family. It’s a position he’s held since 2010 at a restaurant he’s helped out at in one way or another since he was a kid. So that hyperactivity may be rooted in a restlessness. But Abruzzese is also someone who’s keenly conscious of his evolution as a chef, perhaps because he realized early on that if he didn’t challenge himself, no one was likely to.
So when his mother-in-law gifted him a home charcoal smoker, it was an impetus. The kindling was already arranged. “Salty, crispy, crusty meats are maybe my favorite thing on the planet—besides my wife, of course,” he says. Overnight, he became consumed with barbequing. Soon after, he and a friend went in together on a 55-gallon drum smoker. Abruzzese christened it with a dozen chickens.
He spent the ensuing summer studying the nuances imparted by slight adjustments in temperature and different kinds of smoke, consuming book after book, experimenting as he went along. All the while, it was purely about mastery—until it became evident that it wasn’t.
“When we pulled that smoker open and met this amazing meat, that was the beginning of Big Q BBQ right there,” Abruzzese says. “That was when we said, we can do something with this.”
Big Q BBQis the fast-casual restaurant Abruzzese opened last summer in Levittown. Earlier this summer, he opened a takeout-only offshoot at the tavern. But before it was either of those things, it was a massive smoker (his second upgrade) that Abruzzese carted between the tavern, where he served barbeque on the patio during the weekends, and the Wrightstown Farmers Market down the road on Saturday mornings. The latter became a testament to his latest progression. He arrived confident in his barbeque, dying to share it. But who wants to eat barbeque at 9 a.m.? Abruzzese adapted, quickly and creatively.
“I started putting pulled pork on an egg-and-cheese,” he says. “Which turned into brisket, egg and cheese and, eventually, The Ultimate: pulled pork, brisket, bacon and cheese.”
Once word of mouth started to catch on, he was making 50, 60 Ultimates on a given Saturday morning.
In spite of his rapid spiral down the rabbit hole, Abruzzese seems to have emerged with an appreciation for barbeque’s simplicity.
“It’s easy to get nerdy about it, but you shouldn’t overcomplicate it,” he says.
Then you won’t mind sharing how you go about making yours?
“It’s hard to explain, other than to say, well, it’s proprietary.”
The Big Q BBQ site, at least, dissects the process, but only in broad strokes: “traditional, time-honored methods,” “dry-rubbing our meat cuts,” “our secret blend of awesome seasonings and spices,” “slow-smoke it in our authentic, custom-designed smoker,” “our own blend of aged and seasoned hardwoods,” “smooth, slightly tangy smoke,” “literally hours and hours for the smoke to cook, tenderize and flavorize the meat.”
“You can use the same rub, smoke over the same wood for the same time and yours isn’t going to taste like mine,” Abruzzese says. “That doesn’t mean mine is better or yours is better, just that every single one is different. It’s important to do your own thing.”
Read: He spent more nights than he cares to remember breathing in thick smoke, learning and then perfecting the oldest—and maybe most elusive—culinary technique there is, cooking meat over coals. So, yeah, we’re on our own.
Abruzzese’s eyeing up additional Big Q BBQ locations—with one eye, at least. The other, true to his nature, is scoping out a potential new frontier.
“There just happens to be an H Mart across the street from the restaurant,” he says, “so now I’m all over Vietnamese cooking and Korean barbeque.”
The Doylestown Food Market’s annual dinner pays homage to the growers at the heart of its mission.
By Kendra Lee Thatcher
To me, the only thing sexier than a classy crowd of farm-loving, loca-gastro-vores is a classy crowd of farm-loving, loca-gastro-vores dripping in sweat.
Saturday’s relentless heat index of 106 was no deterrent for the Doylestown Food Market’s supporters, who gathered around communal tables under tents at the Bucks County Audubon Society’s Honey Hollow preserve in Solebury for the market’s annual farm-to-table dinner, proceeds from which help support the cooperative grocery.
Responsible for the night’s menu were twins Keith and Kevin Blalock. Keith is the chef at PA Soup and Seafood and Penn Taproom, both in Doylestown. Kevin is the chef at Lookaway Golf Club in Buckingham.
The star of the cocktail hour was a decided underdog, given the stylish offerings. The Dublin-based Sole Kombucha’s watermelon lime kombucha mixed with Rushland Ridge Vineyard’s Trimonette was a refreshing respite from the stifling night.
Mushroom risotto croquettes and horseradish-crème filet mignon toast points were passed around. I stood at an out-of-the-way high top and took it all in—honey-colored beams crisscrossing in an architectural web above a fluid, mingling group.
Dusk cast its evening twilight over us and, mercifully, reduced the humidity to a comfortable level. Twinkly lights and filament bulbs, strung above our tables, gave the setting a quintessential summer glow. Almost right from the start, the conversation around my table flowed effortlessly, rife with gardening advice, recipe swapping and updates on a host of other grassroots movements.
The dinner was studded with the fruits of nearby farms. An heirloom tomato salad with Blue Moon Acres microgreens. A vegan ratatouille with Roots to River squash.
And then there was the porchetta, made from a heritage breed hog raised in Lancaster. The chef placed a healthy serving atop my plate, but I didn’t budge. He looked at me. I looked at him. Our eyes dropped down to the carving board together and I asked, “Would it be weird if I requested a helping of the skin?” A wide smile spread across his face. “Are you kidding? Do you hear that crackling,” he said, as he crushed and snapped the skin in one hand. He piled several large pieces onto my plate, and finally I moved on.
The pork was not disappointing, succulent and seasoned deftly with garlic, rosemary, sage and thyme. But my table, the tent, the world went mute when I bit into the skin—crispy, caramelized, savory, fatty perfection.
The menu was not especially innovative. But, then, we weren’t soaking through our clothes in anticipation of witnessing any culinary feats. This audience and the chefs shared a fondness for the ingredients, harvested a day or two earlier at the peak of their ripeness. We were there to taste purity, which may actually be a kind of culinary feat.
Feeling good has a lot to do with what we eat. But it begins with forging the right mindset.
By Rose Nyad Orrell
Eating right all the time and working out five days a week is supposed to position you for a long, healthy life. Yet, there you are: stressed and stuck in a rut.
From my perspective as a certified holistic health practitioner, the concept of wellness has been rewritten to suit our goal-oriented nature. Eat this many calories, exert this much energy and none of the rest really matters. But it does. And so does our approach. Balance is key. There’s no one-size-fits-all regimen when it comes to achieving a sound mind and body. But there is a blueprint.
Back to basics
Over recent years, our diets have grown increasingly acidic. The most common culprits: fried and processed foods, sugar, dairy, white flour, coffee and alcohol. What they do is trigger inflammation. When that happens often enough, it’s no longer your body’s healing response but its natural state. And when you’re inflamed all the time, you open yourself up to a host of ailments. Tip the balance back in favor of alkaline foodstuffs—veg; most fruit, including blueberries, dates and apples; and certain whole grains, like quinoa and amaranth—in the neighborhood of 80 percent and your body will regain its sensitivity.
In defense of bacteria
Probiotics are getting a lot of play these days, but they’re being sold as a cure-all because it accommodates our pared-down version of wellness. In a healthy body, think of the intestines (a.k.a. the gut) as the engine and the probiotics, the fuel. They facilitate the growth of good bacteria, which primes the intestines to more easily breakdown and absorb food. And the more efficient the operation, the stronger the body’s immune system becomes. However, indulge too often in pizza, fried chicken and gelato and the intestines become gunked up with bad bacteria (yes, there are two kinds), which hampers digestion and weakens our immunity. Simply countering that with the occasional Greek yogurt is like trying to cool off by standing in a puddle. Start by eating more alkaline foods, then begin incorporating live-cultured things, like sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir and fermented coconut water. With the foundation already in place, the good bacteria will be free to flourish.
Peek under the hood
Our bodies have the incredible ability to adapt—as long as we get out of our own way. The point of the first two steps is lost if they feel like a chore. After all, true wellness, as it’s described by the World Health Organization, is “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Read: This is always going to feel like a work in progress, but a sound mind will keep it feeling like this is the way it should be, rather than this is the way it has to be.
We tend to suppress our emotions so we can deal with them at a later time, when we’re better equipped. Which, of course, never happens. When it goes on long enough, this inner turmoil starts to manifest in physical symptoms. If you’ve been bothered by a persistent ache, or worse, consider what you’re harboring and start to work it out.
And sometimes the sources of our stress are obvious—a dead-end career, a neglected marriage—but no easier to deal with. Change can feel incredibly daunting, but for the same reason we dread it—it’ll change the landscape of our lives—it’s also the single-most empowering act we’re capable of. And in order for this to have any permanence, bold moves are required.
Rose Nyad Orrellis a New Hope-based certified holistic health practitioner.
An insightful cookbook exploring the Chester County farm’s thoughtful ethos (and all its mouthwatering byproducts) drops this month, thrusting it and its photogenic owner into the national eye.
By Scott Edwards
Dean and Emelie Carlson
Dean Carlson had long been drawn to pastures. But when he looked closer, all he saw was a wasteland. As solid of an investment as farmland is—there’s not nearly enough of it to meet demand—the modern concept of farming itself is being undermined a little more every day by its reliance on cheap oil. Carlson saw no way around that. He was a trader, after all, not a farmer.
This was several years ago. Carlson ended up taking a hiatus when the bottom dropped out of the economy in 2009. He spent those months traveling and reading. It was then that he came across The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a book that introduced him—and millions of others, of course—to the idea of sustainable farming. From that point, Michael Pollan has basically been the GPS narrator for Carlson’s life.
He found a 300-plus-acre tract in northern Chester County that was under foreclosure and imminent threat of development and he dug in. In the six years since, Carlson’s turned Wyebrook Farm, which dates back to the 18th century, into the ideal. Heirloom-bred pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, turkeys and chickens are raised and butchered with a unique mindfulness and served in a fashionable, on-site market and restaurant, the latter headed up by Andrew Wood, the owner/chef of the beloved Center City restaurant Russet.
This month, Carlson and Wood, along with Ian Knauer, the owner/chef of The Farm Cooking School, in Stockton, New Jersey, are out with Field & Feast—Sublime Food from a Brave New Farm (Burgess Lea Press), a hefty, insightful cookbook that will move Carlson and Wyebrook onto the national stage. The recipes are inspired by, and the advice is derived from, Wyebrook’s ethos and its resources. Central to Carlson’s vision is accessibility and transparency. Short of killing the animal ourselves, the only way we can truly trust the quality of our food, he believes, is by knowing where and who it came from. In that vein, before Carlson’s handsome, Midwestern-friendly mug becomes a staple on our TV screens, consider this your introduction.
Those first months on the farm, when your days were eaten up entirely by clearing the property, what was going through your head?
Carlson [He laughs.] Since it had been in foreclosure, it really had been neglected for a year or two. The first thought was, Where do you start? I bought a few pieces of equipment so that I had some way to lift heavier things. And then it was just start in one spot. When the bank had owned it, they had a farmer that had leased it. He had some cows there, so there was literally two or three feet of manure everywhere. So that was the place that I started.
Knee-deep in manure, you weren’t reconsidering?
No. I mean strangely enough, I didn’t. To my friends and family, they were surprised that I was doing that because it was so different than what I’d done before. But in my mind, it was something that I just felt like I had to do.
How steep is the learning curve? It sounds like this is still a work-in-progress.
It is. I think in terms of the way things could have gone, it’s gone pretty smoothly. There are certainly things, if you knew everything, you’d do differently, but nothing major. After I read Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the characters in that book is this farmer, Joel Salatin. And he’s written a lot of books himself, so I’ve read a lot of them. And then through his books, learned about other books. So, I had a pretty good idea, theoretically or philosophically, what I wanted to do. Turning that into reality was the learning curve.
What drew you to Andrew Wood?
Before we’d become a full restaurant, we’d done a lot of chef dinners, where I would bring a chef in and we would do sort of a one-off, pop-up-type dinner. And he had done a couple of those, in addition to la tuade, where we would do the killing of the animal and also the dinner. At his restaurant, he basically sourced food that way already. He would buy whole animals. One of the cool things about this place, but also one of the challenges, is that we’re delivering a whole animal or several whole animals to the restaurant every week. A lot of chefs wouldn’t know how to handle that. It’s like, “Here’s what you’ve got to work with. Make a menu around it.” And so I needed to find somebody that not only understood that, or would accept that, but sort of reveled in that.
From the beginning, Wyebrook’s cool factor has been very high—the farmhouse-chic aesthetic, the pop-up dinners with rising, young chefs. Most family-run farms don’t make it into Martha Stewart Living. How much does that aspect factor into your consciousness.
I think the thing that sells it the best is that the food is better. I really tried to always make the focus the food itself. I really wasn’t trying to necessarily make it sexy. But I also—there was some idea of an aesthetic involved, only in the sense that, when people think about a farm, they picture in their mind it looking a certain way. And I know that that’s not really the reality of most farms. And so, in making this place, I knew that in order for it to be successful, it needs to look like that ideal rather than reality. That’s not to say that we don’t really do the things we do. It just needs to look a certain way.
“Sustainable farming,” you write, “sets out to produce food in a way that can be repeated infinitely on a given piece of land.” But is it economically viable? Is Wyebrook?
We’re at the point that we’re starting to make money, and this’ll be our fourth year or fifth year. I always looked at it as something that would become more viable as energy prices rose. When fuel is really cheap, commoditized food looks really cheap, because such a big input is oil. Whereas when oil would go up, the cost of industrial food would go up a lot. But mine wouldn’t go up that much. So I kind of looked at it as this would be the low-cost option. And in the meantime, you just have to take advantage of another positive part: that people are willing to pay more for organic food, willing to pay more for food where they know where it comes from, mostly because it tastes a lot better.
Field & Feast signals to me that you’re out in front of this thing now. You’re confident in what you’re doing and now you’re innovating. Is that an accurate assessment?
Yeah, definitely. I wouldn’t make major changes to what we’re doing. People always ask, “Are you going to continue to grow?” I don’t look at it that way. I don’t want Wyebrook to be bigger. I want it to be better. What we’re going to do in the future is continue to improve on things. An easy example of that is with grass-fed beef. A lot of the grass-fed beef out there is crap. It’s sub-par quality. It’s amazing when the animal is properly finished. Over the last four years, five years, we’ve learned a lot about how to get the animal to that point where the product, steak, is a lot better. And that’s one of the things I’m really encouraged about.
How much of this now is reinventing the wheel, if you will?
It’s hard to know, right? Because I can’t go back a hundred years and know what a steak tasted like then. But I know the way the modern system is doing it is not right. So I know I don’t want to do it that way. We have to figure out ways to make our product as good or better than what the industrial system makes. I read all these books that talked about the right way to do it, and I don’t think that those ways were necessarily the whole answer. We’re constantly still trying to figure out what the answer is and get better at it. And I think it varies a lot from place to place.
Between the featured recipes and the numerous guest-chef dinners you’ve hosted, what dish has resonated with you the most?
I eat a lot of the product from here. I can’t say that I’ve tasted every animal, but I really do try to eat something every week from that animal so that I can know what the progress of the quality of the meat is. Oftentimes, I eat the rib-eye. That’s a cut that is easily comparable. I look at it when it’s raw so that I can see the marbling in it. I kind of know what the level of tenderness should be and what the taste should be. That’s also one of my favorite things, probably my favorite thing to eat. The last two weeks, I sent out pictures to all of our people of this rib-eye and basically said this is the best steak we have ever produced. And it’s probably the best grass-fed steak I’ve ever had.
On a scale of one to five, with one being poor and five being excellent, let’s say this most recent example was a five. Where did the earliest examples fall?
A three, let’s say.
You mention in your introduction that food production is its most streamlined and natural when everything happens in one location. To that end, what are you working toward at Wyebrook?
Well, I guess the only thing that we don’t do here, the thing that we’re working on next, is vegetable production. In the beginning, we had to concentrate on a few things at a time. Meat was something that I felt was scarcer. And this farm was really set up well for that. But as we’ve become a restaurant, we’re buying a lot of vegetables. There’s no reason why we couldn’t be growing those here.
In the grand scheme, why is Wyebrook Farm important?
I guess if I had to give one answer for that, I think that it’s very important that people know where their food comes from. And the only way to really do that is to have a connection with it. Reading a label is good. Knowing who produced it is the next step. Going to a farmers market, having a conversation with a farmer, asking questions, that’s much better. But I feel like the ultimate along that continuum is to be in the place. That’s what we’re trying to do. You can ask us questions, and we do answer any question, but you can also use your eyeballs to tell if what we say we’re doing is what we’re actually doing. People can see the animals and see the environment that they’re in.
[divider]Cook Like a Farm-to-Table Chef[/divider]
Recipes from Field & Feast—Sublime Food from a Brave New Farm.
Roast Lamb Sandwiches with Tahini and Pickled Onions Serves six to eight.
We use slices of our Seven Fires–Style Roast Lamb for these sandwiches, but the Sear-Crusted Leg of Lamb also works nicely. Either way, this take on a classic gyro is a fantastic alternative to a burger.
2 cups baby kale
8 flatbreads or large pitas, warmed
½ lemon
1¾ pounds roast lamb, thinly sliced
Fine sea salt
½ cup organic tahini
Water, as needed
½ cup pickled red onions
Scatter the kale over the flatbreads, then squeeze the lemon over the kale. Divide the lamb between the sandwiches, then sprinkle with salt to taste. Whisk together the tahini with some water to thin it, and drizzle over the lamb. Scatter the pickled onions over the sandwiches and serve.
Pork Belly al Asador with Salsa Verde Serves 10 as a small plate.
When you have access to high-quality pork, there is very little you need to do to let it shine. After an overnight brine, the meat gets grilled over hardwood, picking up plenty of smoke, before it is seared and served with a bright and herby salsa verde.
Place the pork belly in the brine and refrigerate overnight.
Preheat the grill, preferably with hardwood or hardwood charcoal. Remove the pork belly from the brine and pat dry. Grill the pork belly, moving it between direct and indirect heat, until charred on the outside and cooked through, but not falling apart, about two-and-a-half hours. Let the pork belly cool slightly.
Slice the pork belly a half-inch thick. Heat a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Sear the slices of pork belly, turning once, until golden, about eight minutes. Transfer the pork belly slices to a platter as seared, then top with the salsa verde and serve.
Blueberry-Dulce de Leche Gratins Serves eight.
This summery fruit gratin might seem too simple to be true, but something transformative happens after just a few minutes under the broiler. While the hickory nuts toast and crisp, the berries soften and burst, releasing their sweet-tart juice, which then mingles with the melting dulce de leche. The resulting dish is balanced and nuanced—a perfect base for a scoop of ice cream.
3 cups fresh blueberries
1 cup goat’s milk dulce de leche
¼ cup chopped hickory nuts or hazelnuts
Vanilla ice cream, for serving
Preheat the broiler. Divide the blueberries between eight shallow flame-proof gratin dishes. Drizzle the dulce de leche over the blueberries, then scatter the hickory nuts over top.
Broil the gratins about five inches from the heat until the blueberries have just started to burst, and the dulce de leche is melted, about two minutes. Serve the gratins warm with vanilla ice cream.
Two of the most innovative chefs around have set their sights on doughnuts. And they’re baking them right under our noses. By Scott Edwards • Photography by Josh DeHonney
In their seminal 2013 cookbook, Maximum Flavor—Recipes that Will Change the Way You Cook (which drew praise from the likes of David Chang, Michael Voltaggio and Sean Brock), Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot achieved new benchmarks for most of our staples: fries, burgers, wings, steak, doughnuts. But leaving well enough, or even pure perfection, alone isn’t who they are. After years of deflating paradigms, the couple’s only just begun to truly understand itself. They’re obsessive. “And there’s something really exciting about following an obsession,” Talbot says.
So when Kamozawa and Talbot wandered into the Stockton Market, in the riverside New Jersey town, last August and decided, on the spot, to rent a stall and start selling their own frozen custard and doughnuts, they were always going to start from scratch. Because that’s what they do. They made two doughnuts, an entirely new one and then the Maximum Flavor one, challenging themselves. The Maximum Flavor doughnut was way better. A third followed, made with the parts of both recipes that worked the best. So began the aptly named Curiosity Doughnuts.
Talbot, who picks up speed as the conversation progresses, is a firm believer that the humble doughnut is capable of revelation. Since they opened in October, he and Kamozawa have developed several iterations (naturally), but the simple yeasted doughnut is the origin of this particular obsession. The outside, or crust, if you will, is just crisp enough for a soul-quenching crunch. The inside’s unusually soft and moist, almost custard-like when it’s warm. (And it really should be eaten warm.) It’s sweet, but not cake sweet. Revelatory, yes. But perfect? “Well, today it was perfect,” Talbot says, conceding more than celebrating. “But doughnuts are interesting. Things change. You’ve got great doughnut days and good doughnut days. I think, right now, these are darn good doughnuts, but we’re tinkerers at heart.”
