September 29th, 2009 by Trevett

The Month Ahead

Mushrooms This past rainy weekend bodes well for mushrooms. We’re looking forward to chanterelles, black trumpets and more chicken mushrooms this month. It will soon be time for us to start making our wildly popular (but not wild) cream of mushroom soup. As corn season winds down towards the middle of the month, the cream of mushroom soup will replace corn soup as a mainstay of the Wednesday evening vegetarian tasting menu.

Pork We happily received a delivery of Heilman’s Hogwash farms pork last Saturday. Two shoulders, two bellies. While most of the pork we use is local, Heilman’s pork is special. If it were up to me, Legume would use nothing but Heilman’s pork, but their operation is currently too small to provide us with all the pork we need.

We did a special dinner with them a few years ago and I remember thinking how amazing the pork belly confit I made turned out. Then, over the next few years, I tried to make the dish again with pork belly from other places, but it was never the same. I couldn’t remember what I had done that first time that made it so good. Was it the cure? Was it the oven temperature? Why couldn’t I make it that way again? Then it occurred to me that it had nothing to do with anything I did. The reason that particular batch of pork belly was so good had more to do with what happened on the other side of the kitchen door, before it even reached Legume.

Tuesday, we’re going to slow roast one of the shoulders and serve it with sage and sweet potato raviolis. Pork belly is curing at the moment and will be served later this week as an appetizer, probably with an endive salad. The other shoulder we’ll be breaking down and using for terrines over the next few weeks.

Headcheese (not from Heilman’s pork though) will be back on the menu this week too. It’s been a while since we’ve made it, and we are really looking forward to it, especially while there are a lot of crunchy fall vegetables at their peak this month like celery root, curley endive and (hopefully, though it may be too early) sunchokes. Tossed with a robust mustard vinaigrette, any of these vegetables make a fine partner with this humblest of the jellied meat terrines.

Apples, Pears and Quince It’s a wonderful thing when apples, pears and quince are in season. I love eating apples all year long, but nothing is quite so special to me as a freshly picked Cortland apple, which will be our apple of choice this month for salads and cheese plates. For crisps, apple butter and sauce, we’re using a mixture of apples as per Tim’s suggestion.

Pears find themselves in many situations at Legume. We love them in salads, chutneys and desserts. I have been especially eager for the arrival of pear season this year as an excuse to bring in some Mandelin almond paste. I was never a big fan of frangipane until I had the chance to work with this stuff in La Jolla. This stuff actually tastes like almonds. Pear-frangipane tart is one of my favorite desserts to eat, and I’m very eager to add it to our fall dessert repetoire.

Of all the tree fruits we use throughout the year, the most intriguing is the quince. Quince has a special affinity for spices. Spiced poached quince with a slice of warm gingerbread and whipped cream is one of my favorite desserts we make all year. Brian Greenawalt, the guy responsible for finding many of the interesting and unusual produce items we use at Legume, told me that the farm he got quince from last year lost their quince tree last winter. Brian is trying to find another source, but he’s having difficulty because most of the Amish farmers he buys from tore their quince trees up a few years ago due to the quinces unpopularity. If anyone reading this has quince or knows of where to get some, please let us know. We’re looking for pawpaws too.

September 12th, 2009 by Trevett

notes from other people’s kitchens
I can’t remember a visit to a city in which I felt more inspired to cook than our short visit to Portland, Maine this past week. In the course of two and a half days, I was able to work side by side with a highly skilled fish monger, help another cook butcher a 290 pound pig, work in the kitchens of one of my cooking heroes and spend time in the most amazing cookbook store I have ever been to. Any one of these opportunities alone would have been worth the trip to Portland. To experience all of these things in two and a half days was downright incredible.
When I set up a stage at Browne Trading Company, one of the places we buy a lot of fish from, I didn’t expect I’d actually get to cut fish; I was expecting to watch. But Scott was open to letting me get a knife on the fish and for that experience I am truly thankful. I got to cut a halibut, lots of bass, loup de mer, cod, dabs, hake, fluke, redfish, monkfish, skate wings and a few other fish I can’t remember. I also was thrilled to watch Scott cut up a whole tuna which was quite a sight. It is a thing of beauty to watch a fish or meat cutter cut an animal precisely and efficiently. Scott’s enthusiasm for fish is infectious too. For every fish we were cutting up, he told me how to cook it and how it tasted. Scott knows his fish, and I’m glad to know Scott. It was extremely generous of him to patiently guide and teach me about these fish; I am sure my presence slowed him down in his busy workdays.
Browne’s operation is pretty amazing. I’ve never seen so much fish in rigor mortis before. That’s how fresh their fish is. One of the most impressive things about Browne is how clean it is. Like a good piece of fish, the place did not smell like fish at all. This is impressive considering the thousands of pounds of fish that passes through there every week.
In the afternoons, I was in the kitchen of Fore Street, a restaurant we have eaten at many times over the years and which has been hugely influential on the way I think about cooking. Sam Hayward is one of the first American chefs dedicated to cooking seasonal, local food year-round outside of Northern California. I’ve always found Fore Street inspiring because if they can cook food expressive of Maine in the winter, then I figure we should be able to cook food expressive of Western, PA year-round where our winters are much milder. (Granted, we don’t have an ocean at our doorstep.)
Usually when a cook stages at another restaurant, they’re stuck peeling potatoes, chopping herbs and doing boring little tasks that might give a line cook a little relief in payment for being in their way all day. This is what I was expecting. But when Ken, one of the kitchen managers, told me to make the day’s crab bake for my first task, I was very scared. Crab bake? I’ve never made a crab bake! I haven’t even eaten one at their restaurant! How was I supposed to know what they wanted? Ken’s only guidance was to keep it simple. He showed me where the greens and herbs were, gave me a loaf of bread and told me I could bind it with an aioli or cultured cream and left me alone for a bit.
Luckily, the crab bake came out okay. Over the next two days, I got to make the corn bread and cut fish, in addition to the little things that I had assumed I would be doing (peeling carrots, trimming beans etc.) At the end of the first day, when Ken told me that I should come in early the next day to help them cut up a whole pig, I assumed that meant I’d be watching them do their thing, stay out of their way and maybe helping them clean up afterwards.
As it turned out, the pig came in late that day and so all the other cooks were busy getting ready for service when it finally arrived. That left me with the chance to be the sole person helping the cook who butchers the pigs. While I didn’t get to make any of the saw cuts (they don’t have a band saw, they use a reciprocating saw—brilliant) I was able to get my hands on the thing and to see close up how they broke it down. When I asked the cook where he learned how to butcher, he said he learned by doing it, which I found inspirational since that’s how we’ve learned to do so many things at Legume.
I walked away from the Fore Street experience learning exactly what I wanted to learn, which was to get a sense of their kitchen culture. It is pointless to do a two-day stage with the goal of gathering recipes or ideas for specific dishes. The best you can hope for, in my opinion, is to get a sense of how a successful kitchen operates. I really appreciated the de-centralized power structure of the kitchen, which is what I strive for (but am not very good at realizing yet) for Legume. Line cooks have a considerable amount of input into the dishes that come off their station. The kitchen managers—three of them from what I could tell—all made purchasing decisions and each had autonomous, interesting projects going on whether it be charcuterie, meat aging programs or establishing connections with farmers. They’ve turned the French brigade system on its head and it was a remarkable experience to watch their system run so beautifully.
On our way out of the city on Saturday morning, we stopped at Rabelais bookstore which is absolutely amazing. With the kids in tow, we were only able to stay for forty-five minutes (which felt like ten) and I only got to see about a quarter of what I wanted to. We’re going back on Thursday to spend several hours there. Even in that short period of time, it was hard to walk out without buying three books. If you are a cookbook lover, this is definitely a store to check out. I talked to one of the owners and he told me their website will be set up to do more e commerce in the coming months.
Monday night John Winters, Legume’s sous-chef met us up in Bangor. It is important to me that he knows how boiled lobster and steamers should taste since we’re going to be doing quite a lot of it this fall at Legume. He’ll also be cutting fish at Browne later this week. We had a nice day on Tuesday driving along route one up to Sorrento where we were supposed to go lobster fishing, but the lobsterman never showed up. It was still really nice to sit on the dock for an hour. On the way back we stopped at SULLIVAN HARBOR FARMS. They were very generous in letting us sample every smoked item they made: salmon, shrimp, mussels, arctic char, and trout as well as several pates and other snacks. Their smoked salmon is absolutely phenomenal and we’d like to bring it to Legume sometime soon, but I’m hesitant about using farmed Atlantic salmon. It seemed like a great place with happy employees practicing a traditional craft at a high level of skill.