Finally, An Answer to How We Do it

(or,  How Blogging  Can Be a Cheaper Alternative to Marriage Therapy)

Recently, Denise and I were talking to a woman we know who, after sixteen years with her partner and after producing two beautiful kids, is getting a divorce.  This came at the end of a fusillade of similar dissolved marriages—some friends, some parents of our children’s friends, some relative strangers—in our tight-knit community.  Listening in disbelief to our friend’s tale, Denise and I looked nervously, intensely, at each other at one point, commenting that we were in the midst of a divorce boom of sorts, that we had arrived at a self-reflecting age where bonds are broken, and that we hoped it wasn’t contagious.

The woman who capitulated this trend for us is a super good lady and, as far as we know, a good mom to her two kids.  She said something to us that we hear a lot but rarely spend any time considering.  Her quote: “How do you two do it—the restaurant, the kids, marriage, and now a second restaurant?”

She was referring to Hopestill Garage, an ambitious endeavor we have been pursing for over a year, one which we hope will be a kind of Black Trumpet Jr. (or perhaps Bride of Black Trumpet), set in the charming community of Newmarket.  When the question was posed, “How do you do it?” Denise and I glanced at each other with crooked smiles and stammered polite platitudes before confessing that we have no idea how we do it.  It helps that our parents are present for our children.  That helps quite a lot actually.  It helps that we put the lives of our children ahead of any other priority in our lives.  It helps that our children, almost 10 and 13 years old, are just about perfect; and it helps that their mother is the kind of human anchor that could stop continental drift in its tracks without perspiring.  And it helps that we, two imperfect souls still in love after being together for almost twenty crazy years (fifteen of them in wedlock), remain committed to talking to each other about everything.  I will add here, in the interest of narrative transparency, that I am not always interested in talking about stuff.  I blame that on my pesky Y Chromosome.  The Y makes me do certain irreversible, incorrigibly shameful things…like avoiding meaningful dialogue.  There are other things too, like embracing projects without any clear strategy for completing them, and the inability to find, say, the mustard jar in the fridge if it is even partially eclipsed by another grocery item, forcing me to grow frustrated enough to holler across the house the pathetic refrain, “Denise, where the [adult language] is the mustard?”  On the flip side, I would have no trouble whatsoever finding a bottle of delicious beer buried in a haystack of broken glass.  Can you picture me holding my beer reward in my bloodied hands with a victorious smile on my face?  I can.  But I suppose I digress.

So, because I am better trained at this point, we as a couple do talk things out.  We respect each other and--despite sometimes feeling like the other is fundamentally wrong, or even outright impeachable—we talk through our thoughts, feelings, plans and dreams, even if it means working through our nightmares together.  The unfortunate side effect of this type of arrangement is that much of our disagreement, no matter how heated, occurs in the company of others because we are often surrounded by our staff and family.  It’s like the opposite of PDA; let’s call it PDB (Public Display of Bickering).  We might have more friends if we didn’t do that, but what good are outside friendships if we don’t have a healthy bond of our own, n’est-ce pas?  So we talk stuff through.  As a result, Denise and I have evolved into a team that has found a way to mesh our gears, each of our weaknesses interlocking with the other’s strengths.  I realize this sounds at once mechanical, clinical and sappy, but it’s true, and I think it’s one of the keys to happy, long-term marital success.  At least, that’s true for us.

So, you have to wonder (many of you already have) WTF are we trying to prove opening another restaurant?  Are we pushing the envelope too far this time?  Do we want to join the legion of new single parents of middle age?  Do we want to know where the threshold of ambition and stupidity lies?  Or perhaps we are out to map the abyss known as the Deep End. 

Truthfully, we are neither adventurous nor stupid.  We don’t want to prove anything to anyone, except that we can grow the ideas that we believe in, because they make good sense.  And I can say with certainty that I have seen the Deep End, and marriage is a kiddie pool in comparison.

Denise and I are well aware of the risks, to both business and family, posed by opening a second business.  We are painfully familiar with the statistics.  We dread the unknown, like anyone else.  We bicker publicly because we care, and a relationship of passivity is a lesser alternative I think.  Professionally, we want to bring good food and drink to as many people as we can while maintaining any semblance of balance we can in our lives. 

The restaurant business today has been built by and for the young and the restless; it thrives on drama, attention deficit, immediate gratification.  Yet Black Trumpet is built on something else—I don’t know what to call it, but it feels like a sense of permanence, a commitment to a space that demands a level of authenticity and quality in all of its constituents: the staff, the food, the dried cascade of linseed oil that imbues in the hallowed brick walls a reminder of our maritime roots.  I feel like our relationship has that same quality.

To those who doubt or fear for our future, I can only say that we—as domestic partners and business partners--are not in it to win it, but rather to do our best, enjoy the ride and put as many smiles as we can on as many faces as we can.

To my patient, wise and wonderful wife, I say thank you, I love you, and I look forward to working and living side by side with you—through failure and success--for the rest of our time on this side of the Earth’s crust.  After that, who knows, we might find a cool spot for a restaurant in the ether….

GRANDPA, WHAT’S A COD?

During the last three years of my career as a chef and restaurant owner, I have undertaken a Melvillian quest to find an answer to an unanswerable question.  This blog tracks the pursuit of that question, which is this:  Should I buy fish from our local boats, or should I buy fish that is most plentiful and sustainable?  The goal of this pursuit is that my children’s children will never have to ask the question posed in this blog’s title.

In May of 2009, three fishing boats from Ogunquit and Wells, Maine landed some beautiful bluefin tuna.  That afternoon, the fishermen—none of whom had a license to sell tuna--brought their catch directly to several restaurants in town, whose chefs each purchased a portion of the fish to serve in their restaurants.  Shortly thereafter, a local fisheries officer from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) slapped a fine on each fisherman and chef involved in the  bootlegged tuna transaction.  The fines levied on fishers and restaurants totaled over $100,000.   Pretty much every chef I knew at that point, myself included, pooped his pants a little when word got out, not because any of us had done anything worthy of a fine, but just that it could happen at all.

According to an article on Seacoast Online, at least one of the fined Ogunquit chefs said he was unaware of the permit laws.  The article reports that “He said he didn’t understand why federal agents targeted businesses in town, adding he thought he was doing a ‘nice local service’ for patrons by offering local, fresh fish from Perkins Cove.”

Fast forward a few months to a similar, albeit more innocuous, conundrum in my restaurant.  While I was away on a trip, my sous chef purchased locally landed bluefin tuna from a legitimate fishmonger and ran it as a special on a Saturday night.  The special was posted on a then-nascent Facebook, as we have been doing since the marketing meteor of social media first crashed on our doorstep.  Within twenty-four hours, one person’s post on our Facebook page expressing outrage about our choice to offer “endangered” bluefin tuna led to a barrage of defensive responses from our loyal fan-base.  Chef Evan and Black Trumpet are as conscientious as they come! the defenders cried.  But my heart was filled with doubt. 

A week later, I found myself at a Chefs Collaborative sustainable seafood initiative at a highly regarded restaurant in Cambridge.  I pleaded my case to a roomful of chefs about the conundrum we chefs face trying to do the right thing for our local economy but also for our greater ecology.  My confession met with nods and grimaces from some of today’s most respected chefs in the Greater Boston area.  Since then I have attended sustainable seafood symposia from Italy to Seattle, including many right here in our fragile Seacoast foodshed.  In Italy, at Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference, I was particularly moved by a fisherman from a small island nation in Oceania who could not afford to eat the fish he caught, which fetched top dollar in Japan and Europe, so when he fed his family fish, it was usually inexpensive, cellophane-wrapped farmed salmon from Europe.  More stark images of a fractured food supply chain to come.  Stay tuned…

I still don’t know the right thing to do, but I feel like I’ve been inching toward a sound philosophy ever since the bluefin debacle.

There is a statistic that gets bandied about whenever I find myself around sustainable seafood cognoscenti that at once depresses and motivates me.  In New Hampshire, the state with by far the smallest shoreline, over ninety percent of all fish consumed comes from overseas.  Meanwhile, our few New Hampshire fishing vessels, who are struggling to meet ever-changing regulations while facing severely depleted wild stocks,  are shipping over ninety percent of their catch outside of New Hampshire.  And our distribution system, unfortunately, is hardly exceptional in today’s world.  In fact, the more I look into our global seafood distribution system, the more I am shocked by my findings.  Check out Point Judith squid from Rhode Island, for example, and you will find that massive blocks of “dirty” squid are frozen at sea and shipped to China, where it is processed (basically just cleaned), refrozen, and shipped back here to New England.  When you eat fried calamari at 99.9% of restaurants, that is what you are eating.  As a child living on Cape Cod, I remember being appalled to find that the Ocean Spray cranberry juice I was forced to drink resulted from our local cranberry crop going to Wisconsin to be made into juice before it returned to us for our consumption.  Suffice to say, the squid thing really makes the cranberry thing look like small fry.

At Black Trumpet, when squid is on our menu, we buy so-called “dirty squid” from local boats (who catch it, interestingly, to use as bait for other, more lucrative catches) and then clean it ourselves.  The product is difficult to work with, messy, time consuming, and—in some cases—more expensive.  Its shelf-life is shorter than the processed squid, and there is considerable waste from the cleaning process.  So, why would anyone go to such extremes?  What’s the point?  The point is, simply, that fresher food has more flavor, and supporting small local fisheries makes infinitely more sense than buying from anonymous overseas megafleets. In this country, we have moved in the direction of efficiency, convenience and (perceived) value to such an extent that most chefs—even plenty of renowned ones—don’t know what a whole squid or even a whole fish looks like.  Although the tides are turning, whether out of heightened awareness or out of necessity, the current disconnect between food source and end-consumer is nothing shy of appalling.

I have spoken with many chefs who point to ethnic communities around the country who buy their fish from sketchy, unlicensed sources who often pull up in the alley behind the restaurant in unmarked trucks and—yes, of course—white vans.  Fish bootlegging is fairly commonplace but hard to enforce, sort of like the federal eschewal of marijuana laws in states where it is legal.  Once, on a trip to Greece, my wife and I ate in a charming taverna at the base of a dock where fishing boats came and went by the minute, or so it seemed.  When we sat down at a table, a boat was unloading its bounty into the kitchen behind us.  Fish were still wiggling.  The restaurant enforced a strict policy that each patron should meet the fish they were going to enjoy before it was cooked for them.  There was no menu—just the fish itself on parade.  A direct connection from sea to consumer with no red tape?  This doesn’t have to be a faraway fantasy.  It has been a way of life for most of the world for most of human history.

FLIRTING WITH THE LAW

New Hampshire Law states that a fisherman must have a license to sell directly to a restaurant.  The fish must be sold whole and gutted.  It is up to the chef and her crew to fillet the fish.  Most restaurants operate on a scale (no pun intended) that prohibits fish processing on location.  If fishermen don’t want to buy licenses in the first place, then there will be no local fish except for what is distributed by the very few retail fishmongers.

A direct connection between the source of the seafood and the place where it is served is an important step toward ensuring that our community eat its own catch instead of falling into the absurd status quo that punishes fishermen AND chefs for working together, while ensuring that our already-restricted ocean harvest (popularly regarded as the most precious wild food source remaining on earth) be shipped to the ends of the Earth instead of to our own tables.

Our fisheries are being depleted, and along with them our fishermen.  Recently, at the Chefs Collaborative Sustainable Food Summit in Seattle, a scholarly fisheries advocate named Barton Seaver stated evocatively that—of the so-called “red-listed” species of fish in America, the most endangered is the fisherman.

Like the chefs in Ogunquit in 2009, I have broken the law.  I have bought fish, recently, from boats who did not have a license to sell it to me.  I didn’t know that at the time, and when I found out, I stopped buying fish from that source.  But am guilty of breaking the law nonetheless. The difference is, I was buying the ignominious and maligned spiny dogfish, a skinny shark known best for its tendency to tangle gillnets and eat other “choice” fish.  Although it is delicious when properly cooked, dogfish is an abundant food source that no one here in New Hampshire particularly wants to eat; almost 100 percent of it is shipped to England for fish and chips.  There are no agency watchdogs or NOAA dragnets (ha!) lurking under the town pier in wait to slap fines on dogfishermen, because no one cares about the lowly dogfish.

I believe that one of my responsibilities as a chef is to capitalize on the seasonality of  all ingredients, including seafood.  When dogfish season ended, I took dogfish off my menu.  When pollock season ends, I will take pollock off my menu.  I am committed to building trust through direct connections to the sources of food on my menu.  I know that most of my guests at Black Trumpet share that trust and appreciate that it takes extra effort to source the freshest, most responsible ingredients available.  Please, can we please work together to make it possible for restaurants like mine to work closely with our local fishing fleets?  Thank you.

By writing this blog, I realize that I am inviting scrutiny, possibly even a fine.  But my intention is only to invite conversation and awareness of a broken food supply chain that we--through the power of our democracy—have the ability to correct before our seafood stocks—and those that harvest them—become a story we tell our grandchildren. 

If you aren’t going to have grandchildren and don’t care about the future of the planet, go ahead and eat halibut, bluefin tuna, cod and haddock to your heart’s content.  If you want to be a part of saving the world, then diversify your diet.  Instead of haddock, try hake or pollock.  Instead of tuna, eat bluefish and mackerel.  Instead of farmed salmon, eat locally farmed steelhead trout.  Learn how to prepare and cook fish you don’t think you know how to handle.  Your education as a cook may inform generations that will follow you.

But most of all, I beseech of everyone who reads this to share with everyone they know that demanding local, sustainable products for your tables will lead to the health of our bodies, our economies, and our foodshed.

VOTE PROSTALGIA IN 2012: ruminations from a hospital bed

Let’s face it, people: not all calendar years are built alike.  We have just entered into one, in fact, that carries with it the weight of great expectations.  To add to the excitement, soothsayers are (once again) suggesting that the end is nigh.  And if it isn’t nigh, it is surely moving nighward, our planet having been battered by a litany of wars, droughts, famines, natural disasters, man-made disasters, economic vortexes, reality TV programming and other cataclysmic crap that is certain to bring us all down.  It’s enough to make you want to surrender to the inevitable…or rise up and meet it head-on, perchance to alter the fate of the world.  I would like to place myself in the latter camp.

Not to wax sanguine about the whole mess we’re in, but I can’t help feeling an unfiltered ray of hope about it all.  In fact, I am going to tilt my head back and let the extra-potent violets and ultraviolets from the man-hewn fissures in the atmosphere warm my face while I stretch my becalmed brain around the idea of a self-cleansing universe.  And I urge you to do the same.  Not only is this stance easier on the sphygmomanometer than anxiety; it promotes long-term happiness.

The truth is, perhaps more than ever before, I am looking forward to looking back at this year.  When the Mayan calendar ends and we weather the fin de siecle tempests that ensue, and after we survey the post-apocalyptic landscape, we will—I think—see 2012 as a pivotal year, the beginning of the post-post-postmodern Renaissance.  We can draw our inspiration from the sybarites, Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, the court of the Sun King, the Roaring Twenties, the Nineteen Eighties, The Lorax, pre-mortgage crisis America and other eras of wanton human excess as examples of coda crescendos in the epic worksong of humankind.  

All good things must come to an end to make way for the birth of new good things.  But, in order for that to happen, we have to let stuff go, and—for those of us lucky enough to face this choice--we have to be OK with minimizing luxury.   If I were a politician—and thank God I’m not--this is where I would lose my audience.  And I get that.  Unlike the Mayans, I have trouble with the idea of sacrifice, too.  I like my modest luxuries: iTunes, massage therapy, smartphone apps, vacation.  I want to keep those things.  But, in the end, they are extras, ornamental contrivances designed to cushion the blow of living in a sometimes real world.  I denounce thee, driver’s seat warmer!  I shun thee, New York Times Travel section!  And you, social media demons!  You know how I feel about you….But I’ll keep my smartphone for now, thank you very much.

I propose that we Earthlings need to draw the line between pleasure-seeking and gluttony.  Likewise, ambition and greed.   Finally, I’ll throw in ingenuity and technology.  In order to make any real progress, we will have to release our baggage and be ready to make short-term sacrifices for a much greater long-term gain.  This will be the revolutionary idea that changes the world in a single generation.  With my head still tilted back in the carcinogenic UV rays, I envision a world that can feed itself, regulate its growth and begin the long, shameless walk back to the sheer naked bliss of Eden.  Which is to say, growing biodiverse organic gardens in every suburban backyard and urban rooftop can actually feed the world.  I swear.  I counted backyards and rooftops, and I can prove it.  Besides, John Forti at Strawbery Banke agrees with me on this point, and he knows everything.

I hope 2012 will be the first year humans work together irrespective of race, creed and nationality, to fix the broken planet of which we have appointed ourselves stewards.  I predict that the retro-progressive agrarian movement will continue to grow like a hardy perennial despite the many industrial, economical and political obstacles that still clog its path.  More and more school gardens will breed more and more home gardens, and from there I expect the idea to spread like a Monsanto GMO shot from a tractor beam.

So, I’m wistful yet hopeful.  It’s like raaaaaain on your wedding day.  What I mean is, I really can’t wait to survive the bleak end and look ahead with a new hope on the horizon.  I dub this idea “Prostalgia,” and I invite you to join me in making our immediate future the kind of past our children will be proud of.

Most of these prostalgic perambulations came to me along with a low fever while I lay in a hospital bed.  Nothing’ll make you feel prostalgic like an overnight hospital stay on the eve of a major holiday with a misdiagnosed hernia that ends up being an advanced, unidentifiable bacterial infection in the soft tissue of your right leg.  I was supposed to be cooking for the masses on Christmas Eve, not brooding over Mother Earth’s (or my own) mortality.  And despite my children’s exhortations to the contrary, how could I not be home on Christmas morning to play Père Noël?

After pleading with the doctor to let me go home for Christmas, I finally got released from the hospital—on Christmas Eve night—with one major caveat:  I had to have an IV catheter called a PICC line inserted into a vein in my arm that would snake its way into the upper chamber of my heart.  Twice a day for two weeks, the doctor mandated, I would have to hook up a balloon full of potent antibiotics and let them slowly drip into my heart, where they would battle the bacterial beast that was threatening to take over my body.  The radiologist—later described as an eccentric genius with an unorthodox approach—had no support staff due to the holiday, so he asked me to help with the procedure.  After some fumbling around for the requisite equipment, he (actually, we) embarked on the insertion.  Blood spattered all over the dropcloth as the little tube went into my arm.  I continued to perform the tasks required of me by the doctor as he conducted a play-by-play of the little tube’s travels through my arm and torso.  We watched it on X-ray television.  It was pretty cool and in some ways more suspenseful than watching a holiday bowl game.

Erin & RJ in full 1920's character!

Thankfully, this story—in spite of a few subsequent mishaps—had a happy ending.  I got to watch my kids open their Christmas presents, and I was pretty much back to normal for the hectic onslaught we call New Year’s Eve.  I even got to participate fully in our annual holiday party, which began as a 1920’s murder mystery with each member of our staff and their partners playing a role, and ending with a fabulous meal at 50 Local in Kennebunk.

When I got home, I sequestered myself in my office to wrap some last minute presents.  There, on the wall, on a wrinkled and faded sheet of construction paper, was my son’s footprints from a few years ago.  Under the words “HAPPY FATHER’S DAY,” and above my son’s name scrawled in blue marker, is a poem called Footprints.  I have read it hundreds of times, and I keep it up on the wall by my desk for a reason, but two stanzas of the poem on that occasion leapt out at me and gave me my New Year’s Resolution:

 

“’Walk a little slower, Daddy,’

Said a child so small.

‘I’m walking in your footsteps

And I don’t want to fall.

Sometimes your steps are very fast.

Sometimes they are hard to see.

So walk a little slower, Daddy,

For you are leading me.’”

Top Ten 2011 Highlights (in no particular order)

1. My daughter’s Columbus Day Lemonade Stand

2. Heirloom Harvest Barn Dinner (televised on Chronicle)

3. A Winter’s Tale: another spoken word paean about my love of wife

4. The James Beard Award nomination

5. Guest cheffing at events, most notably at Gracie’s in Providence

6. Pecha Kucha Haiku about my life in food

7. Chef’s Collaborative Summit, New Orleans

8. My new relationships with Archer Angus and other farmers

9. Our  Kitchen Farm Garden at Meadow’s Mirth Farm

10. Working with Slow Food, Chef’s Collaborative, Seacoast Local, UNH and other food-based local organizations motivated to continue our path toward a sustainable and self-reliant food community.

2011 Lowlights

1. Overbooking my September calendar

2. Overbooking my October calendar after overbooking my September one

3. The beginning of a high voltage line that will, by virtue of eminent domain, cut right through our tranquil, rural woodlot behind our house, effectively bisecting our property and carving a 100-foot-wide scar through wildlife habitat and mushroom foraging nirvana

4. Advanced Bacterial Infection to Soft Tissue landing me in the hospital two days before Christmas, followed by a PICC line I helped guide from my bicep to my heart. 
5. Accidentally snipping the blood line that led to my heart with dirty scissors.  (Medical personnel had a field day with that one.)

  

Evan’s Top Ten for Twenty Twelve

1. Holiday Party!

2. Doing the RPM Challenge with my kids

3. Going back to Gracie’s in April

4. Tough Mudder in May

5. Refurbished Wine Bar!

6. Cookbook?

7. My son’s passion for TaeKwon Do and geography

8. My daughter’s National History project, soccer exploits and screenplay

9. Black Trumpet’s Fifth Anniversary

10. Slowing down and spending more time with my family

Happy New Year!

Table to Farm

So, after three seasons of planning, another Heirloom Harvest Barn Dinner is behind us, and another post-partum melancholy seeps into my cold chef heart. 

The grand table
Photo by Michelle Samdperil

What a joy it is to have watched this event in four years evolve from a seemingly ingerminable seed to a hardy perennial that will likely last for generations.  So many people come together from our community at large to make it happen, it is truly inspiring to be a part of it.  As I said from my bully pulpit in the barn on Sunday evening, I don’t know any other event that has a waiting list, not only for tickets, but also for volunteers.  The solidarity and collaboration make this the most rewarding night of the year for me, and I am eternally grateful to everyone who played a role, however small, in bringing this idea to fruition.

With this blog, I’m putting some needed psychological closure to the Barn Dinner, but I can’t quite do that without pointing out a few omissions from my rambling emcee narrative on Sunday. 

First of all, from the loft, I thanked about a hundred people by name, including farmers, sponsors, the fantastic musicians, decorators, administrators and volunteers, but I left out three of the most important brains behind the operation.  Debra Kam--nominally affiliated with Seacoast Eat Local, but actually a vital part of every local food-based conversation in our area—was a key member of the steering committee for this event and remains one of my personal heroes.  Alison Magill, who heads up our Seacoast chapter of Slow Food, was instrumental in making the right connections and providing the necessary non-profit guidance to us, not to mention she worked the Slow Food Seed Table like the pro she is.  And, finally, my wife Denise, who held the purse strings, managed ticket sales, and coordinated lots of moving parts for the event.  These three women—all accustomed to being unrecognized angels—have put the gears of our local food network in motion, and I want the community to know what an asset they are. 

Meadow's Mirth Farm
Photo by Michelle Sampderil

In my welcoming words in the barn, I left out an anecdote that really illustrates my beliefs about agricultural biodiversity.  I think I omitted it because I was literally wired for sound for the Chronicle television episode coming up in October, as if the normal dose of  stage fright wasn’t enough.

This year, with the help of Josh and Jean (the farmers who work the land at Meadow’s Mirth, site of the Barn Dinner), my kitchen staff and I borrowed a plot of land to produce vegetables for Black Trumpet.  It was a labor of love, but also a great educational tool for our crew, many of whom have never grown vegetables or worked directly with farmers.

In keeping with my own philosophy, but also the Meadows Mirth mandate, I and our team planted only organic seeds—everything from tomatoes to potatoes, lettuces to legumes,  cabbages to carrots,  a pretty wide array of stuff, much of which has found its way onto the Black Trumpet menu.    One fifty-foot row of our farm garden was hilled up and planted with four different varieties of potatoes.  Three of the varieties were fancy hybrids that have been bred for cool color traits or unusual shapes.  One variety was a plain, white heirloom potato known as a Katahdin potato.  The katahdin variety, although no aesthetic prizewinner, tends to yield well, and its importance to our regional heritage makes it a good basic potato to have in the mix.

At first, our potato row showed great promise, the hearty goth-spiky sprouts coming up quickly.  But two weeks or so into the potato program, Beetlemania happened.  Flea beetles, potato beetles, dung beetles, Volkswagens, even a zombified George Harrison appeared, instantly stripping the fleshy foliage of its essence and leaving behind only the ghastly skeletal remains.  When I inquired with consulting farmer friends Josh and Jean about the tragic invasion, they laughed, exchanged knowing glances, and thanked me for planting potatoes so their miles of potatoes across the street would be spared. 

Savory Goat Cheesecake with Brookford Farm
Wheat Crust and Blueberry Glaze
Photo by Michelle Samdperil

When I returned to the field, feeling beetle-beaten (and a farmer-duped to boot),  I sat down among the skeletal remains.  It was then that I noticed the far end of the battlefield formerly known as Potato Row.  Six plants, rugged and defiant, stood tall among the carcasses of their relatives.  Six plants with nary a bug on them stood slightly bent but silently proud, like Aroostook farmers themselves.  Indeed, upon inspection of the crude garden map I had drawn, it became clear that these six rogues were indeed Katahdin potato plants, thriving in the midst of carnage. 

The lesson of my little potato disaster is best elucidated by Charles Siebert in his gripping article in the July issue of National Geographic, “The movement to preserve heirloom varieties goes way beyond America’s renewed romance with tasty locally grown food and countless varieties of tomatoes.  It’s also a campaign to protect the world’s future food supply.”  He follows up this powerful assertion by saying that 90 percent of America’s historic produce varieties have vanished completely.  Our country’s wheat crops, having been reduced to a scant few varieties, cannot protect themselves from global scourges like stem rust.  Instead of genetically developing strains that resist specific diseases and pests, spraying the bejeesus out of them and planting them to the exclusion of all else for endless miles, we can be using agricultural biodiversity to ensure that no staple food is vulnerable to eradication.  This is the way it was meant to be, for Ceres’ sake, and to hell with any monoculture advocate that thinks otherwise,

And, if the bottom line of worldwide food security isn’t enough of a reason to convince you to grow, buy and eat heirlooms, imagine a world where your only option for a salad is a shrink-wrapped marble-hard GMO tomato named 223-QX.

I got so worked up about this whole thing that I called Tom Stearns from High Mowing Seed Company.  Tom himself is a rare breed: an organic hybrid of businessman and creative type, half entrepreneur, half farmer.   I told him my katahdin potato story and asked him what it meant to him.

Chuck Cox delivering heirloom melons
Photo by Michelle Samdperil

Favorite Memory from this year’s Barn Dinner:

Chuck Cox, timeless icon of New England farming, standing amid a sea of volunteers at the after-party, slicing his three varieties of heirloom watermelon that he brought to the dinner.  The man has a passion for what he does that should inspire would-be farmers everywhere.

Second favorite memory:

The perennial lump-in-the-throat moment when the chefs come out to an ovation, followed by the impossibly long queue of volunteers emerging one by one from the “kitchen” area and wrapping in a line around the grand table.

Least favorite memory:

Feeling compelled to break into a frenzied elbowy tribal jig at the conclusion of the dinner by the stomping ovation from the crowd.  If that shows up on the Chronicle episode, I’m moving to northern Saskatchewan. 

The Educator Gets a Lesson

Last Friday--a day that may be remembered as the only warm sunny day on record for this May--while the rest of the world was moving along apace and going through its quotidian rituals, I broke from my kitchen routine and made tacos for school lunch at Dover High School.  It may seem strange for the chef of a little Portsmouth bistro to be scooping from the steam table at one of our region’s largest public school cafeterias, but I gotta say, it was right up there with the most edifying experiences I have had in recent months, if not years.

To be clear, this was not my first time cooking in a school.  I have worked directly with small groups of students at New Heights in Portsmouth, and I have made smoothies for my kids’ first grade classes.  And, around the holidays last year, I made beet and spinach pasta for the elementary students at Central School in South Berwick, working at the behest of Kathy Gunst, a fellow food blogger, chef and cookbook writer who heeded the summons of Michelle Obama and attended the Chefs Move to Schools kickoff event on the White House lawn last year.  (Also representing our area at that event were Mark Segal of the 100 Club and Dan Dumont of Wentworth by the Sea.) I could not rearrange my schedule on the short notice I was given, and still regret not having attended the event.  However, one needn’t stand on the White House lawn to be inspired by Mrs. Obama’s philosophy: the way to improve school lunches in America is not to preach to the parents, but to reach the students who eat the lunches.  Cultivate the non-GMO farm field, as it were, and they will come.

So, back to the Dover High event.  I had been invited by Amy Winans, UNH Hospitality maven and indomitable force behind much of the knowledge transfer that goes on between generations on the food front in our area.  Amy, along with her husband Dan (who heads up UNH’s semi-revolutionary EcoGastronomy program), have positioned themselves at the forefront of the fight for fair, local and sustainable food systems in the seacoast region.  As a rule of thumb, when Amy or Dan asks me to participate in dinners or lecture to their classes, I don’t hesitate.  The power of their persuasion is not merely political; they are also uncommonly nice people.

My assignment, issued by Amy, was to produce a sample dish for 300-plus growing, demanding and sometimes vocally defiant high school kids.  The sample had to be built around the idea of locally sourced ingredients, and that was—it turns out—the easiest part.  A Maine farmer ponied up 25 pounds of beef, a New Hampshire farmer pitched in black beans and lettuces, and so recipe ideas quickly turned to tacos.  I made a gallon of roasted chile salsa the day before, spilled about two cups on the passenger seat of my car, and the rest was a matter of waking up really early and getting to class on time.

The Dover High School cafeteria—a far cry from what I had expected--was stocked with hundred-gallon steam kettles, Volkswagen-size standing mixers and seriously high quality industrial equipment.  All surfaces were spotless and food very well respected and handled.  I quickly realized that the problem with Dover’s school lunch, like that of so many other school systems in America, lies not with the facilities or the staff but with the food the eager and talented crew has to work with.  In short, subsidized foods are crap.  They have to be, in order to get calories into the kids at the lowest possible cost to the government, the school systems and—ultimately—the parents.  Even the most endowed public school dining budgets can only afford to buy the lowest-end commodity, and so that crap (which, unfortunately, can actually taste pretty good sometimes) goes into the kids who will grow up to make future food policy via their own shopping priorities.  Bottom line: we can’t keep teaching health and nutrition in the same schools that are shunning those values in their kitchens. 

So how do we twist that paradigm until the inconsistencies shake out?  How do we make good food a higher priority in the hallowed halls of education while simultaneously making local and responsible ingredients available at affordable prices?  The answer, obviously, is quite complex.  Judging by the recent presentations made by Dan Winans’ EcoG students at UNH, solutions might emerge in the upcoming generation of food policy makers. 

Back again to the classroom…..After greeting me at the DHS door, Amy introduced me to her charming and cheerful assistants—Lauren, Sarah and Kim—who were volunteering for their second such event at Dover High.  I would later find out that these young ladies had signed up not only to chop vegetables for a tyrannical chef but also to schlep the samples canapé-style through the dining hall, where they would be besieged by students clambering for free taco samples.  Brave is not a strong enough word for these dedicated young women.

In short time, I met the cafeteria staff.  Mark Covell, the District’s Food Service Administrator, could not have been more receptive to my intrusion on his turf.  He made me feel at home and played gracious host for the duration of my visit.

Sue, the Assistant FSA, gave me a tour while rattling off her past cooking credentials, which were very impressive indeed, and Melinda (one of the key cooks) later came to my aid at the steam kettle.  Melinda’s culinary heritage included New Orleans and Las Vegas, combining the Old Guard and the New Frontier food cities, both of which would inform her culinary style if she were allowed to incorporate it more into the lunch program.  I suggested that I come back in the fall to do shrimp po-boys.  Mmmm.

I didn’t bring an apron, and the one I was loaned was a disposable sheet of thin plastic with a neck strap.  My new Culinary Rule Number One: Don’t work with large, boiling stockpots on a gas range when wearing a thin plastic apron.  It’s a good rule, especially for chefs who should know better.

I came away from Dover High School with a melted apron and a strong sense that those cooks I worked with are not only willing to learn, but already have the desire to do more with local foods that are whole, safe and nutritious alternatives to the “spicy fried chicken burger” that was being offered on the day we were in the kitchen.  I overheard Melinda, the Head Cook, say to her boss, “See, we could be doing this [pointing to the homemade salsa] instead of getting that canned stuff.”

I haven’t seen the student surveys that were passed out by Amy’s charming assistants, but I hear they were generally quite positive, meaning that high school students enjoyed the fresh taco experiment and crave an alternative to the packaged, processed and insalubrious status quo. 

For me, the defining moment of the day came when three jocks--the kind of linebacker material that would have eaten my lunch and then made me pay for it in high school (not that that ever happened, but you get the picture)--came into the kitchen while we were wrapping up the third seating.  One of them hollered at me, “Hey, are you the chef who made the tacos?” 

Reluctantly, pretending to be busier than I was, I replied, “Yes.”  Even though I’m beefier than I was in high school, I think my voice cracked a little, just for old time’s sake. 

The three boys (I say boys, but they were young men of great mass and height) approached me and reached out their hands in what appeared to be the conventional, old-school handshake gesture.  Unsure of how to respond, I went with what I knew and shook their hands without slaps, snaps, palm-slides or fist-pounds.  They seemed to fully understand the gesture and reciprocated in kind. 

“That was really good,” one of the three jocks said, stretching out the first syllable in “really” so that it hung in the air like a game-winning field goal.

Phew.  Happy jocks.  Happy chef.  Amazing how food can bring people together, eh?

3) ODE TO SPRING: intimations on immortality, power lines and mud

THE GRINGO AND THE MANGO

Now let’s flash to April 16, to Punta de Mita, a surfer-infested Mexican fishing village just south of the privatized point of land where St. Regis and Four Seasons have plopped down some pretty spectacular structures in the gated acreage on the point.

It’s Spring Break ’11, and my family and I are on vacation. For one week, we are like a Norman Rockwell family with a little Griswold streak.  There is Griswoldian pressure on us, because we don’t do family vacation—at least not of this caliber—more than once a decade.  The pressure can manifest itself in some strange ways.

For example, I am gazing up into a mango tree, thinking seriously about climbing it.  The tree itself weaves up through power lines at the edge of the street where restaurants and surfer shops block the view of the waves and the rock-studded beach.  I find myself there because of my own intrepid (read: stupid) spirit.  (While walking through the village under the heavy late-morning sun, my family and I had stopped, bemused, to watch five older gentlemen trying to literally pick the ripe, low-hanging fruit from the tree with a mangled rake.  The problem, as we saw it, was that there was no low-hanging fruit left on the tree.  The only mangoes worth groping for were fifteen to twenty feet up, above the rickety plastic chair, above the retaining wall, above the power lines.)

I rupture the charming image before us—men poking in vain at the low branches in hopes that ripe fruit would somehow fall from above—by gesturing to the men that I, a very pale but nimble tourist, was willing to scale great heights for their desired bounty.  Without hesitation and with plenty of bastardized Mexican slang, I promptly climb up into the tree, fully intent on being a gringo Samaritan, an ambassador of goodwill to these earnest Mexican gentlemen.

Once in the tree, like a graceless grimalkin, I realize that I have no means of descent.  As I make this realization, my wife brings to my attention the power lines weaving through the branches.  I have the metal-tined, mangled rake in my hand and I can see the wires but note that they appear to be insulated.  I continue to stab up into the branches unfazed.  I am on vacation and am therefore invincible (also impervious to the effects of harmful sun rays).  As I strike at the ripe fruits, they begin to fly from the tree like fat little jewels in the morning sun.  The phalanx of men, who are now cheering me on, have gathered below the tree and are attempting to catch the falling fruit in their inverted hats.  My quixotic folly has now become sport.  I have brought fruit to the village and feel like a god on high.

Engulfed in an aura of self-sanctimony, my attention lapses and I do the inevitable, brushing my forearm against the power line.  I gasp.  I pause. I live.  So, of course, I reach out and touch the line again.  And again.  I continue, to my amazement, to live.  The men are now watching me, twenty feet or so above their heads, as I face the true test.  Having survived electrocution, how does the silly gringo get down from way up there?  I know they are wondering this, because they are humans with common sense and survival mechanisms built into their brains.  When they were passing out this gene, I was taking a potty break, apparently.  Nevertheless, I am peripherally aware of the laws of gravity, and so I begin to calculate my next move.

I begin my descent, dropping the rake to one of the men below.  When he moves to catch it, it hits him in the head.  I feel bad, but still invincible.  When I get to the top of the wall (was it brick? I remember it being brick), I find myself astraddle a power line.  Speaking to the men with the fallen mangoes, I make a joke in Spanish that won’t translate well at all: “Si me bajo asi, vamos a tener huevos revueltos para comer!”  Very loosely: If I jump down now like this, we’re all going to have scrambled eggs for breakfast!   (Ed. Note: the word huevos in Spanish refers not only to hen’s eggs that are eaten frequently for breakfast, but also to the low-hanging reproductive fruits of the human male.)

((Ed. Note Sidebar: The Spanish name for the avocado, aguacate, comes from a Nahuatl word meaning “testicles”.  Evidently, the word was used originally because the early denizens of central Mexico had not yet learned the word “cojones”.))

In a leap of faith, I swing a leg over the wire and jump from the wall.  It’s a high wall, maybe eight to ten feet.  Maybe less than that too, but I’m telling a story here, so let’s say ten-plus feet.  No eggs are scrambled in the process.  Again, I live.  I laugh a little as I land on the street.

The men are parsing out the fallen fruit in a democratic fashion.  My family rushes over to me and tells me they think it’s really cool that I just climbed a mango tree.  I don’t hurt, miraculously.  The men hand my wife three ripe mangoes (because, we assume, it is a woman’s duty to carry the mangoes for the family), which we will eat three days later in the form of a perfect breakfast smoothie.

As I am walking away, the men are talking among themselves, holding the mango bounty they have dealt out, and one of them turns to me and says, “Thank you, Soo-pear-mon.”

Soo-pear-mon.  He really says that, maybe with a slight undercurrent of playful mockery.  I walk away with three mangoes and a secure notion that I would rather risk life and limb so that I can taste the glory of the high-hanging fruit.

ODE TO SPRING: intimations on immortality, power lines and mud

AMAZING GRACIE’S, PART DEUX

For the second year running, I have been invited to participate in the “Star Chef” Series at Gracie’s, a truly inspiring restaurant in Providence, RI.  Last year, I worked with gifted young chef Matt Varga to produce some dishes paired with the always stunning wines of Michael Honig (see 4/10 blog).  At that dinner, I and then-sous chef Mike learned a lot about how technology can expand the creative palette of the cook while simultaneously reducing risk.  The dinner went off without a hitch, although being the day after Easter, attendance was lower than we had hoped for.

This year, the stakes and the attendance were higher.  We had to live up to the expectation set by last year’s dinner, and attendees included foodbloggers and Matt Jennings and his wife, Sarah.  In March, when I was nominated for the James Beard Award for Best Chef of the Northeast, I was shocked (to say the least) to see my name on the list, and simultaneously thrilled to see Matt Jennings in the running.  Our paths have crossed a few times.  I have eaten Matt’s lunchy food at Farmstead twice now, although I haven’t yet had the pleasure of dining at his full-service restaurant, La Laiterie, and Chef Jennings has dined at Black Trumpet a while back.  So, when I heard he was on the list of attendees at Gracie’s, I was thrilled to be able to feed him and cheer him on as he continues to go forward into the finals of The James Beard Award.  I want to see him win, not only because he embodies for his community the same values we do for ours, but also because he is the nicest guy ever to be nominated for a big award.  Winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on May 9th.  Go Matt!

Back at Gracie’s in mid-April, sous chef Carrie and I arrived the afternoon prior to the dinner and helped prep a few things.  When I say that, I mean the kitchen staff at Gracie’s let us stand around and talk about stuff that they prepped diligently in our midst.  Carrie and I are used to multitasking to the oldies, stressing out over deliveries coming in and phones ringing while we’re managing two pots, one oven, four pans and a cutting board.  There is an element of luxury attached to the “Star Chef” status that made us feel simultaneously luxuriant and somewhat uncomfortable.

The graceful and gracious Gracie’s owner, “Miss Ellen” Gracyalny put us up in the lovely Hotel Providence.  After prep, we ate dinner at the charming and delicious Beard nominee for Best New Restaurant in the U.S., an unassuming little spot called Cook and Brown.  Food and drink at Cook and Brown, it turns out, are humbly spectacular.  Barbecued pig tails for everyone!  Cook and Brown--with chef Demo, his wife and their newborn—get my unqualified Beard vote for sure.

The day of the dinner, the Gracie’s crew assembled in impressive numbers, led by Chef Matt and his magic spoons.  I was permitted to handle a few food items, but by-and-large, Carrie and I stood in awe as the Gracie’s team breathed life into a hard-to-execute menu right before our very eyes.  Props go to Matt and pastry chef Melissa in particular, for being so thorough in their preparation that I had to go out of my way to confuse them.

There were passed hors d’oeuvres that included lobster sangrita pipettes, fresh flower and ricotta pupusas, pig trotter cakes and something else I have since spaced.

Then came the spring pea flan with deliciously fresh local vegetables, a giant sea scallop served in its shell with lobster nage, a chicken roulade with morels, an intermezzo of passionfruit tapioca, a steak and egg dish that involved technical precision beyond the scope of most food pornographers, and finally, a beautiful peanut financier with bourbon-spiked black trumpet mushroom ice cream.

Art and science.  Passion and insanity.  Form and function.  Thank you, Gracie’s, for joining me in the quest to understand where those boundaries lie.  Yet it’s OK, I think, to muddy them a little.  It feels good, and we should—as often as possible--wallow in the muddy area, to be as simple and playful as pigs.  Ad astra per aspera!