July 3rd, 2010 by Sarah

the month ahead
If you can’t stand the thought of standing in front of a stove to cook dinner this week, you’ll find plenty of refreshing dishes to eat at Legume.  While we’d normally be making corn soup this time of year, this week’s heat wave calls for some chilled soup.  We made a chilled buttermilk soup last Saturday with the year’s first fresh garlic, tomatoes and cucumbers.  It went over so well we plan to keep on the menu this week.  You can expect to see many other light, cooling dishes on the menu this week (which is an easy to do with all of the wonderful produce available right now.)

Dave Heilman brought some pork by which should keep some kind of terrine on the menu for the next few weeks starting this Wednesday.

We’re looking forward to wild striped bass season this year. This is the first week line-caught wild striped bass is available out of Montauk.  This is our favorite fish to use in July because it goes very well with corn, tomatoes, peppers and beans.  Since this is the first week it’s available out of Montauk there is a good chance the price might be a little high, in which case you can expect to see fluke and/or skate this week starting on Wednesday.

Cavan is bringing by some wild chanterelles and chicken mushrooms this week.  I’m not sure how long they’ll be available, but you can expect to see them on the menu as long as Cavan keeps bringing us some.

John and Jake Kennedy recently experimented with some pastured chickens, which will be on the menu this week. These are larger birds, which means we’ll be doing something other than the normal half chicken that we usually do.  One idea is to bread pounded chicken breasts with breadcrumbs and parmesan, fry them up, drizzle with some good balsamic and top with chopped basil and tomatoes.  That’s a dish I used to make when I worked for Kevin Roose at Café Zinho a decade ago.  Some of my happiest memories of cooking happened in that kitchen.  I don’t remember what we called that dish, so we’ll have to name it “Chicken A’ La Roose” this week.

Summertime, especially August and September, is typically a slower time of year for restaurants in Pittsburgh, which is really a shame since it’s the time of year when Western PA provides us with its most beautiful ingredients to work with. Even if you can’t make it to Legume any time soon, summertime is the best time to dine out in Pittsburgh. Seasonal, local produce is being utilized by most of the good chefs in this city and so now is the season to eat out!

summer
Spring creeps in—first some wild greens, then some herbs, then some rhubarb, then some asparagus, then some peas, then some turnips etc.—but summer downright explodes. It’s hard to believe that corn, peaches, blueberries, cucumbers, zucchini and cherry tomatoes are already upon us (with peppers, okra, plums, grapes, heirloom tomatoes, eggplant and more soon to come!)  As a group of cooks who strive to make the most of what the four seasons of Western PA provide us with, it’s hard to describe the positive energy in the kitchen this time of year when the Pittsburgh markets come alive with produce

This is the time of year when we gradually wean ourselves away from the braises, stews and slowly reduced sauces towards lighter, fresher flavors.  Still, the menu’s transition away from slow cooking towards quick cooking doesn’t necessarily lessen the daily work. Part of the reason for keeping the stoves clear of simmering stocks this time of year is to make room for the daily blanching of vegetables, boiling jars for pickles, ketchups, jams, jellies and chutneys for the fall and winter.  Most of this will be accomplished by the one and only Justin, whose hard work and sensitive palate is the real secret behind all of the wonderful preserved food at Legume.

three farms:
grow pittsburgh, who cooks for you, meadowlark farm

It has been an exciting spring for us at Legume in terms of what is available to us produce-wise.  In addition to the farmers at the Saturday East Liberty farmer’s market and Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance who have been providing us with food for a while now, we are very excited be buying more from Grow Pittsburgh this year as well as starting new relationships with two new-to-us farms.

Grow Pittsburgh has been providing us with a steady supply of peas, hakuri turnips, fava beans and herbs this year.  As we enter our fourth summer buying from them, it is really exciting to see them ramp up their production.  While their quality has always been very good, everything this spring has been superlative—harvested at just the right time and full of flavor that only bursting-with-life soil can produce—and available in meaningful quantities too.  (After tasting their favas and peas, I never want to use imported ones again.  It never pays to cheat spring by importing favas and peas in April…an error I’ve managed to repeat for the past three years.  Maybe next spring will be different.  But then again, by the time April rolls around, the desire to cook a vegetable that isn’t a root or a cabbage or from a can is very, very strong.)

We’re also very excited about our new friends from Who Cooks For You Farm.  So far everything we’ve gotten from them—mostly beets, kohlrabi and hakuri turnips—has been very, very tasty and very reasonably priced for local organic. It had always been difficult for us to find enough excellent produce at the beginning of the week.  Who Cooks For You has changed that.  We are very excited indeed!

On Thursdays, Danny Miller from Meadowlark Farm shows up at the back door with vegetables.  All of the food from Meadowlark farm is “naturally raised” which is another way of saying it’s organic without the paperwork.  So far he’s brought us strawberries, hot peppers, asparagus, peas, beets, black raspberries, cucumbers and zucchini.  When the weather gets cooler in the fall we’ll be trying their whole pigs as well.  (Right now our kitchen is too hot to butcher whole animals.)

We have never had this much access to top-notch produce before, and as a result, the food at Legume has never been better.