July 27th, 2009 by Trevett

the week ahead
We were really happy with the peekytoe crab that we used on Sunday for the corn dinner. Tasty and easy; this one’s going to be around a while.

We’re looking forward to our first shipment of faro and faro flour from Bluebird Grain Farms in Washington State to arrive sometime this week. I’ve been eager to make faro pasta for a while now especially with all the great summer vegetables in season, and so I was psyched to find a source for healthy, organic faro that is reasonably priced. Faro will surely be a frequent contributor to the Wednesday evening vegetarian tasting menus for a while.

More exciting than crabmeat from Maine or faro from Washington, of course, are the wonderful things growing in and around our humble little city that makes this a special and unique part of the country. Despite the cold weather, heirloom tomatoes are starting to pop up around town and will be at Legume soon (we’re holding out until Barb’s are ready). Fabulous eggplant, tomatoes, corn, wax beans and herbs are easy to find now. As always, we have the best lamb in the country.

tomato dinner: sunday, august 16th
The window for fresh tomatoes at Legume runs from July until October. On August 16^th, we will be celebrating tomato season and the lazy summer days of Pittsburgh with a light and refreshing four-course dinner with tomatoes on every course. Most of the tomatoes will be from Mildred’s Daughters farm and Hi-View Garden.

The idea of the tomato dinner is to celebrate tomatoes straight off the vine, picked at the right time and cared for every moment until they end up on a plate.

Seatings are at 5:00 and 8:00. Call or email us if you’d like to come!

sunday suppers at legume
Would you come? What time? What would you want to eat? Let us know below.

July 20th, 2009 by Trevett

the week ahead
Fish-wise, we’re going to start the week off with Nunavet char and monkfish. According to our supplier, the char is “hand harvested in weir traps by Inuit fishermen, just north of the Arctic Circle in Central Canada from lakes that flow into the Arctic Ocean.” The season for this wild fish is very short and it won’t be around for very long. I love farmed char and have high hopes for the wild stuff. (If the difference between wild char and farmed char is the same between wild salmon and farmed salmon, this stuff will be mind blowing.) Casco Bay mackerel caught this (Monday) morning is due to arrive Tuesday. Once again, we’ll be serving it raw in tartar form.
We have a lot of exciting beef news to report today. We’re expecting our first delivery of beef from Keystone Co-operative this Thursday. We tried their samples several weeks ago and were enamored with the remarkable character of the meat. This is the first time we’ve been able to get choice grade local beef delivered to our door that hasn’t been frozen and we’ll be really happy if we can make this a regular thing.

People really enjoyed the grass-fed beef steaks from Horizon View farm this past weekend and we’ll be bringing in more as soon as it is available. In other grass-fed news, John and Val will be offering their first grass-fed beef at the East Liberty Farmer’s Saturday market. The price is very reasonable too. We’re getting one tenderloin and will run it as a special Saturday night, so make your reservation on the early side if you want this.

Five years living in California and I never tasted an apricot like the one I had from the Wilkinsburg farmers market this past Thursday. Unbelievable. Due to their susceptibility to cold weather in the spring, PA apricots aren’t available every year so get them while you can. Also at the Wilkinsburg market is sweet corn, the usual July vegetables, and our good friends Todd and Sarah from Hi-View Garden with their amazing lettuce (and more).

corn dinner: sunday, july 26
The corn dinner is less than a week away. We still have a few seats available. The meal will include Maine Peekytoe crabmeat (pretty much the best crabmeat in the world [at least according to this biased Mainer]), the freshest summer vegetables and grass-fed beef (if we can track it down this week) or pastured lamb (serving corn-fed animals with corn would just be too redundant).

seafood choices
Before I enter too deeply into a discussion about the environmental impact of our food choices at Legume I want to make it clear that our goal is not to be perfect, but rather transparent. Pound for pound, more food than we’d like comes to us from conventional agribusiness. Nevertheless, even though we are still heavily dependent on the industrialized food system to bring us much of our food, we try to do what we can in certain areas that we feel strongly about, such as minimizing our dependence on animal factory farming and in making good seafood choices.
We’ve been serving monkfish lately and it has been pointed out to us that monkfish is not considered a sustainable fish these days. The information is conflicting. According to the Monterey Bay Seafood watch, “Monkfish is thought to be recovering, but concern remains due to the type of fishing gear used,” mainly bottom trawls and gillnets, which results in high bycatch and damage to the ocean floor. Given that information, we buy our monkfish from Browne Trading Company, who buy their monkfish from local fishermen who catch monkfish either buy line, or more often, from special traps that result in very little bycatch.

Is this a good choice? I think it is, but I can’t claim to know for sure. I spent hours online this morning gathering information in an attempt to make a good choice. What I do know is that Browne Trading works with independent fishermen who have worked on the Maine coast for generations and who have a personal stake in the survival of the local fish populations. I know how it was caught and where it was caught, and to some extent, who caught it. This is much different than buying a fish that might even be considered a “Best Choice” by a seafood watch, but of which I have very little information about its source.

Every choice we make in buying food in this country is fraught with complications. Does the waste from the Styrofoam cooler and fuel involved in shipping this supposedly more ecologically friendly monkfish to Legume from Maine really better than buying bottom-trawled monkfish from a source that brings it into Pittsburgh in large volume thus saving packaging and fuel per pound of fish? I can’t claim to know this either. But as it stands right now, I like knowing that Legume’s money goes to a company like Browne Trading whose money goes to fishermen doing good quality work. I also know that it will be fresher than any other monkfish I could buy. Maybe this isn’t the best choice, but maybe it is. Either way, it wasn’t a choice that was made without consideration.

July 16th, 2009 by Trevett

the week ahead
Last year around this time we started writing down the good recipes we came up with. One of them, “Tomatoes for Fish,” came in handy last week when the first tomatoes of the year made themselves available. One of the things I hate about changing the menu so often is that it sometimes takes a few tries to get things right. Writing down the recipes allows us to pick up where we left off the year before so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

In the afternoon, peeled and seeded tomatoes are cooked with thyme, red pepper flakes, white wine, fumet, celery, onions and garlic. For service, we sear off a piece of fish, flip it, add the stewed tomatoes and cook until the fish is done, sometimes finishing it with mussels. With a spoonful of aioli and a crostini drenched in olive oil or crispy potatoes, this makes an extremely satisfying and healthy way to enjoy fish in the summer. If the fish order comes in the way we hope it does, we’ll be starting off the week with monk fish prepared in this manner.

We received Hiramasa for the first time ever at Legume, and it was incredible. We served it ceviche-style, which almost seemed like too much messing-with for such a nice fish. Look for us to serve it simply seared rare or in tartar form this weekend.

sunday night corn dinner: july 26
Corn gets a bad rap these days, and there are good reasons for it.  It’s in our soda, our candy, our ketchup and a bunch of other places it doesn’t belong.  But when it is treated as it should be–as real, sustaining food–there is nothing better.  Come join us for a fabulous summer meal that celebrates the lovely, pre-industrialized ways humans have been eating this fabulous grain for hundreds of years.  In addition to local sweet corn, we’ll be using polenta and cornmeal from Anson Mills, pristine seafood, healthy meat and the most flavorful summer vegetables we can find. For more information, click here and scroll down a bit. Call or email us if you’d like to come.

why we run out of food and what we are doing to fix the problem
We’ve had a few rough evenings of service at Legume over the past few weeks and I know that we have disappointed more than a handful of regular and new customers alike.  I’d like to offer an apology to those customers who were not offered a good selection late in the evening after we had run low on menu options. I’d also like to tell you about what we are doing to prevent the problem from happening again and offer a brief explanation of why it is we run out of food.

Our greatest strength is also our greatest vulnerability. Our food is defined by the careful attention we take to make sure things are made daily in small batches out of super fresh raw ingredients. Stockpiling fresh ingredients and prep so that we never run out of anything would be antithetical to what we are about, because stockpiling ingredients and prep guarantees the slow loss of vitality of the food. Why bother going through the trouble of buying pristinely fresh vegetables and fish or making fresh pasta on a daily basis to have it sit around for days on end?

That being said, we could be doing a much better job at making sure we don’t run out of so many things and we have taken decisive steps to help fix the problem. First, we’re ordering more food. As obvious a solution as that sounds, we have always been limited by our lack of refrigerator space and our dependence on niche purveyors and farmers who only deliver once or twice a week. Last Friday we bought a new refrigerator so that we can at least stock up on things like beef and lamb—things we should never run out of, since they last a while and actually get better with age.

Fish is something we almost always under-purchase so that it doesn’t sit around. My goal is to always get fish in and out of the bistro within 48 hours. Still, fish has been so popular lately that we have the confidence to increase our orders. In addition to increasing the size of our fish order, we are going to try and put two types of fish on the menu this summer so that if one type runs out, at least there is another type of fish for you to eat.

Second, I’ve hired more kitchen help so that I can dedicate more time to actually running the kitchen instead of allowing it to run me. A few months ago I began to realize that Legume won’t fall apart if I’m not physically standing in the kitchen 12 hours a day, as had been my habit for most of the past two years. The truth is quite the opposite; Legume will fall apart if I don’t learn to step away once in a while and get a handle of the bigger picture. Hiring more help is a step towards giving me the time and space to plan better and avoid running out of food. I’ll still be in the kitchen every day; I just won’t be peeling as many potatoes.

In order to make sure that our food is always fresh and affordable, there still may be occasions when we run out of one or two things on the menu. I think most people who come to Legume on a regular basis come here because the food is freshly prepared from fresh ingredients, and I will continue to err on the side of occasionally running out of something in order to keep the food moving throughLegume. However, I promise that we can and will do a much better job of avoiding the extreme situations an unlucky few have faced such as being out of everything except the chicken. Please bear with us; please know that we are doing our best to fix the problem while maintaining the freshness of our food.