Don’t worry. Your drive’s probably even shorter than it was. And with that convenience comes even more incentive to grab your apron and put those new knife skills to the test.
By Kendra Lee Thatcher
Ian Knauer and Shelley Wiseman, our trusted guides in this bountiful but sometimes-confounding new landscape.
While you were having a good ol’ time last month, what with all the eggnoggin’ and mistletoin’, one of our most creative and entertaining kitchens picked up and moved about 15 minutes downriver. News of The Farm Cooking School’s relocation to Gravity Hill Farm in Titusville, New Jersey, came as a bit of a surprise. Its chef/owners, Ian Knauer and Shelley Wiseman, appeared to be planting roots at Tullamore Farms, with talk of additional Airbnb rentals there and programming that catered to those overnight guests.
Gravity Hill, though, offers what Tullamore could not: a more central location. Lambertville (and New Hope) sits about 10 minutes to the north and I95, about 10 minutes to the south. There’s also a larger movement unfolding there, in which The Farm Cooking School will be playing a prominent role. Whereas, at Tullamore, Knauer and Wiseman were the farm’s one and only draw, for the most part. Coinciding with the move, Roots to River Organic Farm is taking over Gravity Hill’s fields and its onsite weekend market, where Knauer and Wiseman will be selling prepared foods. (Roots to River owner Malaika Spencer is a former Gravity Hill apprentice.) The impetus for all of this? A new facility called The Barn at Gravity Hill, which’ll be used for workshops and retreats with the aim of turning the farm into a sort of locally-grown hub.
Knauer started The Farm Cooking School about four years ago. From its inception, he and Wiseman nurtured a loyal following of aspiring cooks and enthusiastic eaters through a user-friendly—actually, friendly, period—approach to locally sourced cooking that preaches fundamental techniques and constant enjoyment. Their quaint teaching kitchen at Tullamore became known, through both an extensive roster of classes and regular dinners, as the place to savor elevated food of almost every kind in decidedly unpretentious ways.
Most of us have entered this brave new world through a farmers market only to then discover we’re pretty much on our own to piece the rest of it together. Sure, there’s no shortage of blogs, cookbooks and shows, but little of it is personalized to our experience, living here in this moment, and none of it is interactive. Which makes Knauer and Wiseman practically necessary, whether you’re simply curious (craft an authentic French brunch) or all-in (butcher a side of venison and make terrine with it). And now, with some breathing room, you can expect the subjects and dinners to only become more adventurous—Northern Central European cooking, real-time recipe testing. After all, this is unchartered territory.
Photos courtesy The Farm Cooking School / Guy Ambrosino
With the counsel of a few seasoned pros, we amp up the flavor (and the moistness) while also simplifying a notoriously overwrought recipe.
By Kendra Lee Thatcher
Thanksgiving 2002. My best friend, Lisa, introduces me to what will become my new holiday obsession. The evening is a perfectly orchestrated scene from Martha Stewart’s playbook. Summoned to the dinner table, we gather around the glistening turkey, a fire roaring behind us, Bruce Springsteen roaring over the fire.
Until tonight, I’d only known flavorless, white breast meat drowned in gluey gravy. With ninja-like swiftness and precision, Lisa grips a leg, rips it from the carcass, places it on my plate, then repeats the process and places the other on hers. Sisters in legs. Not really. I stare at mine for a good while, trying to figure out the best way (read: the least embarrassing way) to go about this. Finally, I look over at Lisa, who’s already polished off hers. No help there. Screw it. I pick it up and start gnawing away like I’m at Medieval Times. The skin, caramelized and crisp, seduces me at first bite. The dark meat’s so, so moist and laced with herbs, nutmeg and orange. This is what turkey’s supposed to taste like?! How did I make it into adulthood without realizing this?
Every year since, I’ve had dibs on the leg. It won’t be so clear-cut this year, though, because I’ll be playing the role of Lisa for the first time. Those legs aren’t naturally that moist, and nutmeg-y and citrus-y. Which means I’m in trouble. So I called around and asked a few friends who should know, flat-out, “How do I not f— up my turkey?” The following is the step-by-step plan I assembled from their advice and tested during a recent trial run.
Step 1: Buying
Convenient as those massive grocery store-birds are, shell out for a fresh, local, heritage turkey. They tend to be smaller and more manageable.
“The smaller the bird, the less time in the oven. The less time in the oven, the juicier the meat,” says Ian Knauer, who established The Farm Cooking School in Stockton, New Jersey.
I bought an 11-pound, Lancaster-raised turkey at None Such Farm Market in Buckingham. I had it quartered, based on the recommendations of Emily Peterson, the host of “Sharp + Hot” on Heritage Radio, and Matthew Martin, the owner/chef of More Than Q BBQ Company. The butcher broke down my bird into two breast-wing and leg-thigh segments, bones-in, skin-on and odds and ends packaged to make stock with.
Step 2: Prepping
Pour yourself a glass of wine. Proceed.
I’m a fan of adding fat under the skin. So when Ian reiterated this, I felt completely validated. I mashed up zesty-herb butter and massaged it into the meat. But I didn’t stop there. I then slathered the reserve fat from smoked bacon all over the skin and seasoned it with salt and pepper.
Also: “Lightly trussing the quarters will ensure the skin stays on and the juices stay in,” Matthew says.
I mixed brandy, fresh orange juice and star anise to roast and baste the turkey in. I picked that little cocktail up from Diana Paterra, the owner/chef of DeAnna’s Restaurant and Bar in Lambertville, NJ, and now I’ll never use another.
Step 3: Roasting
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. In two large roasting pans, place a “veggie rack” comprised of carrots, parsnips, onions and citrus and cover it with a bed of herbs. Add your breasts to one pan and the legs to the other. Pour the brandy-OJ-star anise mixture evenly over both pans and then stick them, uncovered, in the oven.
Step 4: Timing
Never—seriously, nev-er—lose track of your bird. Roasting it hot and fast is the way to go, but it requires constant attention. It’ll take about 30 to 40 minutes for the turkey to turn golden brown, which seals in those juices that make so much of the difference between a remarkable turkey and a blah bird. (Note: The breasts will cook about 10 minutes faster than the legs.) At that point, pull the pans from the oven and brush the turkey with the drippings. I then reduced the heat to 375—my oven runs a little hot—and basted every 20 to 30 minutes for the next hour or so.
In an hour and 45 minutes, my turkey had hit the sweet spot—crispy on the outside, tender on the inside—so I slid it out and let it sit for another 45 minutes, as per Diana’s counsel. From there, I sliced it up with an extremely sharp knife, as per Emily’s counsel, arranged the pieces on a platter and drizzled them with the remnants of drippings.
I still reached for the leg out of instinct, but, really, there was no boring bite with this turkey. And that’s not to say that I’ve mastered Thanksgiving. The turkey, it turns out, is actually a very small piece of that headache. But, dismantling the intimidation was as critical as any step in this, ultimately, fairly simple recipe.
Brandi Granett’s mastered the fickle art of nurturing grassroots support for her novels. With her latest, she’s taking a different tack: turning away from her computer and trying it in her backyard.
By Scott Edwards
It’s early 2000, and everything in Brandi Granett’s world is right. She’s fresh out of graduate school and her first book just dropped. The world is opening up before her. Until it abruptly flips upside down. Her publisher, William Morrow and Company, is bought by a larger publisher, HarperCollins, and overnight, everyone she works with is dismissed. Just that quickly, she’s alone and adrift.
“So, I didn’t want to do it again for a very long time. I walked away from it. I was saying, ‘I’ll just be a teacher,’ ” Granett says. “But then I started competitive archery on a lark.”
Her daughter was aiming to star in either the Olympics or a renaissance fair, so they scoped out a school in Lambertville, New Jersey, near their home, and the director confided in Granett, with a wink, “You know, women are better at this than men.” She was hooked from that moment. With writing and then publishing, everything Granett thought she knew deteriorated to nothing. But archery revealed itself to be surprisingly profound. The more she practiced, the further it grounded and focused her in the rest of her life, including the writing.
“There’s a coach that I admire, Jim White, out of Georgia,” she says. “And he teaches his people, relationships determine results.”
It became a kind of mantra for her as she gradually worked her way back to the thought of taking a run at writing another book. The rules are different now; the book’s only part of the pitch. “You’re expected now to have a platform,” Granett says. “If you go to a publisher and you have two Twitter followers and one of them is your dog, they don’t want to hear from you.”
So she joined a peer group called the Tall Poppy Writers, comprised of 45 women fiction writers from across the country. And she launched an author profile series for The Huffington Post, for which she’s a frequent contributor. The aim of both is one and the same: To establish a self-sustaining community. The authors, these days, who draw a marketing budget that’ll reach mainstream America could be listed in a single breath, and there’d be some air leftover. The rest are left, largely, to find their own ways. And as with all grassroots efforts today, that means social media networking. A well-placed Retweet is as valuable to these workingman writers as a New York Times endorsement.
When it came time to promote her latest novel, Triple Love Score, published last month by Wyatt-Mackenzie, Granett was inclined to make it a group affair, naturally. Over the last few months, she’s organized what’s become quite a massive book fair, for lack of a better term. In all, 45 mostly-Delaware Valley-based authors spanning a range of genres, including children and young adult, will present themselves and their books October 23, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Prallsville Mills, in Stockton, NJ, as part of the event Granett’s dubbed River Reads.
[divider]River Reads[/divider]
WHAT A book fair featuring 45 mostly-local authors. Plus, crepes and a Unionville Vineyard tasting
WHEN Sunday, Oct. 23, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
WHERE Prallsville Mills, Stockton, NJ
“I didn’t want it to be about my book,” she says. “That sounds so—I don’t have this mysticism about, like, oh, I wrote a book, so I’m somebody special, because thousands of people, every day, hit publish on Amazon Createspace. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. But what means something is connecting people to readers and sharing books with other people.”
Some of the authors, Granett knows—a few Tall Poppies will be there—but the majority simply answered her public call. The total number of participants doesn’t even represent the true extent of the interest. It’s only where she was forced to cap them for lack of space to accommodate any more.
Spread across both floors of the mill’s main building, each writer will have his or her own display. And there will be brief readings performed every 15 minutes or so downstairs and up-, “like a little commercial blast of what they have to offer,” Granett says. Also, nearby Unionville Vineyards will be hosting a tasting and the Bonjour Creperie truck will be stationed outside.
A community, virtual and actual, is currency in modern writing. The larger the population, the more likely you are to publish another book. But it’s also become a support system for a profession that’s notoriously isolating and disorienting. For many aspiring and established writers alike, Granett included, the former is the icing, the latter, the cake. Granett expects River Reads, if nothing else, to reinforce the following: “I know that I’m not the only person that had an agent break up with her. I’m not the only person who’s struggling to find time with writing and being a mom.” And that, she says, “kind of keeps me invested in the process.”
The time to register is now, before the growing gets good. But every share’s a little different, so allow us to play matchmaker.
By Bill Gelman
We’re in the throes of CSA registration season. A few years ago, that news would have elicited a faint “Yay!” from the back of the room. Today, a mad scramble just broke out, because there are precious few shares still up for grabs. Community Supported Agriculture is a booming industry. There are now more than 12,500 of them nationwide, but the interest has grown just as fast, if not faster. Even with work requirements and more cucumbers than you’d ever want to eat in five lifetimes. What follows is a field guide to some of our favorite to CSAs to help you find the share that’ll best fit your family. Or, considering the urgency, just help you find a share.
A pioneer of the movement around here—this is Anchor Run’s 13th CSA season—it’s also one of the earlier adopters of sustainable farming. All of its crops are chemical- and GMO-free. Those looking for an easy haul, however, may want to continue their search. Every share comes with a work (harvesting, planting, weeding and thinning) requirement—eight hours, at least, over the course of the season for full shares and four for half-shares. Seasons Spring, Summer, Fall Cost $410-$800
Half- and full-shares are available with and without work requirements (12 hours for full-shares, six for half). You’ll end up saving a little under 20 percent by pitching in. Sweetening the enticement even more, Myerov gets creative with how, exactly, you can knock off those hours. They don’t necessarily need to be spent out in a field under a soul-scorching sun. Host a pick-up location instead or a potluck dinner, or write the CSA’s blog. Wait. Never mind that last one. Seasons SSF Cost $360-$720
If you’re an adventurous eater, welcome to your new CSA. Blooming Glen will set you up with all the staples over the next several months—arugula, heirloom tomatoes, sweet potatoes—and they’ll also throw you the occasional curveball, like Hakurei turnips and kohlrabi. Come those weeks, refer to their blog, where they’ll post recipes so that you can act like you know what you’re cooking. Seasons SSF Cost $420-$795
Honey Brook’s actually comprised of four separate farms, two in Hopewell Township and another two in Chesterfield Township, in Burlington County, New Jersey. Pick-ups are available in both locations, and crops are shared among them (different conditions mean certain crops grow better and longer at one than at the other). An innovative box share program is also available. There, shares of various sizes are delivered weekly to several central locations around Pennsylvania and Jersey. If you’ve been overwhelmed by the size or your share in summers past, the box share is the way to go. Seasons SSF Cost $369-$769
It’s the end of July, and if you so much as lay eyes on another cucumber, you’re liable to fly into a Walter White rage. Brilliant as farm-fresh produce is, it can get a little monotonous, even at the height of season. Especially at the height of the season. Sandbrook’s come up with a savvy way around that. Membership fees are converted into credits, which you can then use as liberally or as frugally as you like throughout the season. Snatch up all the strawberries that you can fit in your car and then skip the next couple weeks entirely as you slowly realize your eyes were bigger than your stomach. Seasons SSF Cost $425-$925
Farms, of course, are good for more than fruits and veggies, but that can get lost in a CSA’s onslaught. Not with J & J’s, though. Every other week—it’s a biweekly schedule—they also toss in free-range eggs from their own chickens, along with something out of the ordinary, like pickles in the summer and apple cider in the fall. Basically, the kind of small-batch stuff that lured you to a farmers market in the first place. Seasons Summer, Fall, Winter Cost $195-$360
We realize that the costs we’re throwing around here are not insignificant amounts. And a lot of these farms require that the whole thing be paid up front since the brunt of their expenses comes over the winter. So, if you’re wading into the CSA waters for the first time, Jack’s is the safe play. The extent of your commitment here is one week. Seriously. Every week, the farm emails its subscribers a list of the available produce and what the share will cost. You decide then and there whether you want in—usually. Some weeks, there won’t be enough to go around, and because you’re a newbie, you’ll get last dibs. Seasons SSF Cost T.B.D.
You’re looking at the OG of the CSA movement around these parts. Barbara and Kerry Sullivan, with a little help from some neighbors, doled out their first harvest almost three decades ago, making Kimberton the first known CSA in Pennsy. Even now, Kimberton remains on the forefront. They’ll see your organic certification and raise you a biodynamic farm. It’s a deeply intensive practice. But all you really need to know is that it yields the purest fruits and veggies. Seasons SSF Cost $500-$910
