A Plateful Proposal

Finding an exotic and unusual venue for one’s marriage ceremony is near de rigeur in our adventure seeking society. You may know a couple who tied their knot on, under, or over water, or while hanging cliff side, or while schussing around slope side.

And the proposal of marriage is now just as important as the wedding ceremony itself. There are web-sites and books devoted to unique engagement ideas, but we’ll save you the trouble of searching them out by divulging the story of an exceptionally devoted lover.
Hemingway's has long been noted as a hideaway for romance and weddings--even dubbed by Esquire as “One of the most romantic restaurants in America,” so the clever paramour solicited our help.

We happily oblige the gentleman's request, and with our usual aplomb the lady is served her main course. ‘Twas on a plate, of course, but not just any plate. This plate was shipped two weeks ahead along with another plate as well as detailed instructions of with what and when to serve. Nervously, he squirms with giddy delight as he watches his lady slowly eat her meal. She takes a bite, she speaks of the meal’s fineness, she sips some wine. She makes another cut, takes another bite, murmurs, sips a bit more wine.

At a do-it-yourself ceramic center and with no prior experience the starry-eyed admirer created plates of his own design and permanently inscribed under the glaze his secret seductions. Nonchalantly and with patient intent, the boyfriend watches his girlfriend squint. She, not wanting to believe something could be amiss, dines with silent smile, a gentle push of fork, a smear of sauce, a delectable bite, until finally she ruminates about a grander design.

Then she does see, “Will you marry me?” and he jubilantly confesses. The lady being questioned relishes her paramour’s request and says she will! And he too was served dinner with a plate inscribed “I Love You” so that they should dine happily together in anniversary ever after.

Killington Wine Fest Dinner

Origin of the Species: Château de Beaucastel begets Tablas Creek

Friday, July 17 / 7 PM

Robert Z. Haas, founder of Vineyard Brands importing company and managing partner of Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles, California, will conduct our annual Friday night wine tasting in conjunction with the Killington Wine Fest.

In keeping with Bob's connecting role between California and French wine producers, he will compare the stylistic similarities and differences between the wines of Tablas Creek Vineyard and the esteemed Château de Beaucastel, partners in his Tablas Creek venture.

It is a closer connection than you might imagine!

Visit our website, Hemingway's Restaurant, for menu details.

Morel Adventures

I love to stumble across a morel on a spring morning as my less than focused gaze glides along the base of ash trees--a sort of soft radar, a non-evasive foray into the mystery of brown and golden soldiers scattered across land, convincing me that any rational or scientific approach to determine their whereabouts will be dismissed by them as not an arcane enough approach and therefore one not to be rewarded. The harder you look the less you see. You look and rant and try to control the universe in which they belong, and then suddenly, they are there at your feet saying, “I’ve been here all along.”

Everyone has their favorite morel recipe, which more often is a morel story, as the adventure is half the prize. Recently someone dumped some dirt into a mound on a hill top road, where walking, not stalking to forage, is the rule. But there they were, popping out of the top of a small heap. The perfunctory ash tree stood watching me snap a blondie just inches away.

I prefer to cut out the bottoms, get a pastry bag, fill it with some rabbit mousse and shoot it into the hollow cavity of the morel. Bake in the oven not too hotly with some stock in the bottom of the pan until the mousse firms up, gets warm, and the morel starts giving off its woody tobacco sweetness without drying out.

Add some butter at the end into the pan with stock and there’s your sauce. Haunting textures, aromas, and flavors never forgotten.

Aside from sautéing them in butter with a drop of lemon, I also like to dry out the morels and grind them into a powder that can be used as a seasoning--or better yet as a coating, like breadcrumbs, on a piece of lamb or chicken. Great nose on that one coming off the stove.

Killington Wine Fest

Saturday, July 19

Mark Raymond will be available for most of our dinner hours to answer your questions and discuss the wines of Frederick Wildman and Sons, which will be highlighted for the entire weekend on our nightly four course Wine Tasting Menu.

Special for the KWF weekend (FRI-SUN)
$75 for four courses of foods & wines
Menu TBA.
Featured Wines:
Astica, Torrontes, Lujan de Cuyo, Argentina, 2008
Olivier Leflaive, Bourgogne Blanc, Les Sétilles, Burgundy, France, 2007
Melini, Chianti Classico Riserva, Vigneti La Selvanella Tuscany, Italy, 2003
Hugel et Fils, Gewürztraminer, Alsace, France, 2005
Paul Jaboulet, Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, Rhone, France, 2006

Fiddlehead fern

Fiddlehead refers not to a specific plant but to the general aspect of young, green, unfurled fronds of ferns looking like the curled head of a fiddle, thus circinate vernation.

Also known as the shuttlecock fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, the Ostrich fern is the most edible species of the fern family. It can grow up to six feet tall and likes to live in places that offer constantly moist soil, such as flood plains. It has a papery sheath around the frond which needs to be peeled before cooking, and it has no fibrous hairs like some other ferns.

Chef Ted makes a soup of fiddleheads puréed with shallots, (chicken) stock, and an herb such as tarragon. At our spring foraging supper he served it with a small Maine crab cake, and garnished it with a few Canadian white violet flowers.

The easiest way for me to find the correct fern is at winter's end or in early spring. I look for the dried, leftover frond that looks like a feather, and I sometimes mark the spot. The Ostrich fern can grow beside other inedible ferns, but the smooth fiddlehead with paper sheath is tell tale. Do not confuse it with the frequently found dried frond of the Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis, that has little beads running it's length.

ABOUT FIDDLEHEAD PICKING:
There are some who say do not pick a crown clean, rather only 2-3 fiddles from a crown. (The crown is the largish mass protruding from the ground from which the fiddle heads sprout and the underside from which the roots are attached.) They say if you do, the plant will die and/or there will be less fiddle heads the following year. Some old timers say fiddleheads are not as big as they used to be because of over picking.

Consider fiddleheads an endangered delicacy and only pick a few. Be sure to cook them throughly, as they are not ingested well when undercooked, and may even be toxic to some when raw.

Cattails

grab your boots and use your hands
wade in water usually muddy
tasty and so sweet
cattails are a fine treat to eat!

Sung somewhat to the melody of "Sunny Side of the Street" while you contemplate your adventure into a muddy mire to grab lunch.


Not to be confused with water iris which also grow in marshy areas and ponds, cattails have stalks that wrap around one another as opposed to splayed fronds rising from a base.

Once you get to the cattail, straddle it, and peel back the outer layers sliding your hands down the stalk till you reach bottom, which is inevitably under water. Gently snap and pull the cattail out of the water. To prepare, cut off the bottom few inches, which is pale green to white, and peel off this section until you get to the tender nearly all white area.

Now you can make a raw salad of the white shoots or cook them so they magically turn into a "poor man's hearts of palm."

Poach them for about a minute with a little lemon, water, and a dash of sugar and salt. Cool and serve dressed with a citrus vinaigrette.

It is the hearts of cattails we want to recover, the white inner core at the base about 4-5 inches long. If they are invasive in your pond perhaps you want to yank them out--weed and feed of another sort.

There are other uses for cattails, like collecting the golden pollen that oozes from the fat brown "flower." This can be used like "flour" as a coating for fish or fowl before cooking or as a thickening agent. The roots too are edible, though we haven't tried them yet--saving this for another blahg....

Trout Lily

This must be the year of the trout lily, at least if you saw my lawn, you'd think so. Our field lawn is bordered by woods which is where trout lilies like to grow. Eastern trout lily, yellow trout lily, Erythronium americanum, is also known as dogtooth violet or adder's tongue, and their is a white Minnesota sister lily or two.

Our Vermont version has pretty brown speckled basal leaves with a single, slender center stalk sprouting a delicate yellow flower. At first only one small leaf appears from the ground and it takes awhile before another sprouts. It takes several years for a flower to appear, so unless they are as abundant on your property as on ours, take heed in harvesting.

Trout lily corms are worth digging out unless the plant is endangered as is the white Minnesota dwarf trout lily (Erythronium propullans). Digging out the sweet, small fragile corms is not easy, so consider these little white gems a rare delicacy. Larger corms seem to have more starch and are less sweet. We happen to have enough trout lilies to last a lifetime--small and large, but digging them out of stony Vermont soil is a challenge. You can transplant them in the fall to encourage growth in an area where you would like them to spread so you can harvest for all to enjoy.

Now barely mid-May the flowers have gone, but the leaves are still around for picking. Wash well and use them raw in a salad as you can do with the flower heads and corms. You can see how Chef Ted uses some mid-size leaves as a flower petal on his wild leaf salad of our May 3rd post. Here is a link with more information and recipes.

Spring Forage Menu

Had a fabulous romp through Vermont fields and woods for an annual spring forage--or as some prefer to call it--wild crafting. Following is the menu Chef Ted hand crafted from our finds:




Vermont pheasant with wild leaf salad, sherry & citrus vinaigrettes

fiddlehead soup with Maine lobster & crab, and scallop

wood-roasted salmon with sautéed ramps, Japanese knotweed, and potato-ramp pie, sauces of ramp, chive oil, and duck stock

wild ginger cobbler with Japanese knotweed ice cream and candied Japanese knotweed


Lee Jones said of his experience,"We thought it would be mildly amusing but it turned out to be a blast." T'was a beautiful and delicious feast!

This wild leaf salad (pictured) was comprised of leaves from Canadian white violets, trout lilies, dandelion, sedum, plantain, and Ox eye daisy. The violet leaves are sweet and comprised most of the salad. Trout lily, violet, and dandelion flowers are all edible. We shredded the dandelion flower as a sprinkling garnish. Pick only two inch dandelion leaves as larger ones are too bitter. Use sparingly in a salad unless you love bitter. Hearts of cattail (similar to hearts of palm) were poached with lemon and salt, and dressed in a citrus vinaigrette and arranged around the leafy greens.

I'll post more photos and blahg more in detail about specific ingredients in upcoming posts. Meanwhile don't assume you know what to pick by this list of ingredients, and if you do know, don't pick from polluted waters or unnaturally fertilized lawns.

Spring Forage

For us, spring is Vermont's Other Foliage season and it’s subtle beauty is also the season of searching the earth for early shoots of fiddle heads, Japanese knot weed, wild ramps, maybe wild nettles, even morel mushrooms if we get lucky! Of course dandelions will be ripe for picking too.
Come romp through Vermont with us in search of these short-lived and limited delicacies. Chef Ted will create a supper around our finds or you can take yours home and revel in the culinary delights of your own cooking prowess. More details here....

A New Dow Index

Up here in Vermont we have for years dealt with the daily vagaries of the local economy, but now the national and global economic crisis is creating a whole new correlative for us. We watch the jobs report, housing starts, GDP, consumer confidence, and all the rest of the so called indicators that the government or private industry publishes. The indices let us know how bad things are, or if things may be getting better. For our food loving friends there is also the Big Mac Index, most likely a better barometer for the value of things world wide.

This morning as I take out the trash--mostly paper, cat food containers, and other recyclables (owning a restaurant disallows us from normal garbage) the bag slips from the trash barrel and I notice something new. My wife has taken pieces of duct-tape and wrapped it around the barrel to secure the gentle disintegration of its sides. No big deal, but as the day unfolds I find duct-tape appearing in places it has never appeared before—a sock drawer, a pair of gardening clogs, a chair leg handsomely covered by a slipcover, a computer bag, my ski boots—and on the list goes to even the computer itself.

Then it dawns on me that I’ve discovered a perfect financial index, one so simple yet more indicative of the current malaise than all the logarithms the complex financial universe has to offer: The Vermont Duct-tape Index or VDI as its acronym asserts.

A simple measure of the number of feet or yards of duct tape used a year ago is subtracted from the amount currently used. This figure is divided into last year’s figure. If the indicator approaches 20% there is trouble in the household--and the world. Though it is a lagging indicator, it is also a desperation indicator, which mirrors the psychology of the consumer as well as their financial condition, due to it’s attachment to the idea that duct tape is a last ditch effort that may transcend logic.

As the use of this index prevails, it may even penetrate the big leagues when it moves from VDI to DOW: Duct-tape Overtakes World.

A call to our local hardware store provides further indication of the tape’s measure of successful indexing. Sales have increased by a whopping 18% over last year. We assume figures for 2009 over 2008 will be more astounding. We know for a fact from the Duck Tape Club that in 2005, 873 million yards of Duck® Tape alone was sold. We await figures for 2008 & 2009. Only time will tell if Countrywide’s canard will prevail globally and spur the rise of real Duck® Tape stocks!

Where has all the flavor gone?

Since most of the fat is now culturally omitted from fresh pork in order that we have our heart attack later rather than sooner, we’re left with the problem of lack of flavor in most of the pork we buy today. We can purchase rubs, marinades, salsas, and barbecue sauces to give the relatively neutral condition of pork some life, but a less expensive home-made method might work better.

Many restaurants, Hemingway’s included, choose to brine pork for a short period of time and then use whatever recipe and cooking method they prefer. You can control the flavor by starting with a basic recipe of salt, sugar, and water; then add any aromatics, spices, or fruits to get to your final goal. Join our email list for our next newsletter with a full recipe and notes.

Restorers and Chocolate Lovers

The word restaurant comes from the Latin root, "to restore," which is why when you feel in a slump, you may decide to eat out, reviving your corporal self as well as your soul.

Even though the economy is slumped, this doesn't mean you have to feel the slouch. Dining out is a stress reliever. You don’t have to spend big bucks even in your favorite big bucks place. A lesser bottle of wine, a shared chocolate--though for some sharing chocolate may be too hard to take--so if you have to, do whatever it doesn’t take.

This is a quasi poem entitled Restorers, and it is a musing about us at Hemingway's circa 1988:

There are tens that book, and tens that cancel.
We get ready, get set, get un-ready.
We're a constant flux of energy, sighing,
laping little waves.
It’s our little life. Here. There.
Providing sustenance in grand style,
and grand parties for grand occasions.
We endure, for fake flair is best left
to those who need to flare,
mere flashes in pans.
They soon extinguish,
their own juices gone dry.
Our nights continue, one after another,
just nearly nights in a bloodshot sky.
Stars spell out the marquis for real people of the night.
Our nights are sanctified, covered with roses in repose.
For some, a fortieth anniversary is more sacred than a second,
as if the enduring merits a medal,
and not the substance of the bond.
There’s sustenance in any relationship,
feeding when hungry, spoon-feeding if needed.
So eat and delete.
There’s no need to forgive chocolate lovers.
They can’t help themselves.