Yes, we can squeeze the peaches before we buy them in the supermarket and cherry-pick the basket we like at the farmer’s market, but there is nothing more satisfying than standing under a a tree limb full of ripe peaches. There is a tangible joy in choosing one, reaching up to feel the soft fuzz against the firm fruit and inhaling it’s perfume as you gently twist it from its stem. This was our experience yesterday and not one person in our party of 8 put their first picked peach in a bag. Bishop’s Orchards in Guilford can offer you this experience 4 times over, as their orchards are currently yielding peaches, pears and raspberries. Bishop’s is a straight shot up Rt. 95N(exit 57; take a right) and the 45 drive is well worth it.
CTBites readers who don’t live in Bridgeport now have an excellent reason to drive and dine there with the opening of Can Tiinin the downtown area. The dishes at Can Tiin (pronounced “canteen”) lead with a Vietnamese influence, are based on French techniques, and incorporate other Asian flavors. This culinary panoply is deftly handled by Chef Brian Reilly, who explained, “We take traditional Vietnamese dishes and honor them, but allow ourselves the latitude to experiment and go out of the box a little. We continually challenge ourselves to push the envelope without getting cute or overly fussy.” The result is neither cute, nor fussy, but fun, inventive and tasty. (Read our opening announcement for details on the management team.)
Consider the cookie. For many of us, it was likely our first dessert – if you can consider a zwieback cookie a dessert (but what do infant palates know?). Through the years they become our ‘quick-grab’ to satisfy a sweet tooth, or our ‘go-to’ when we want to bake something home made. For Kelly Clement, eating and baking cookies was all of the above, until baking also became her physical therapy. For years, Kelly baked cookies as a hobby that satisfied her own sweet tooth, and made her visits to family and friends deliciously anticipated. When she was sidelined by a misdiagnosed knee injury, physical therapy included all the usual grueling exercises, with one exception: her physical therapist ordered her to stand in the kitchen, and bake.
For years, Michelle Weber has fulfilled the artisan chocolate needs of the Westport community. Now, with the opening of CM Gourmet Bistro in Saugatuck Center, she is filling a chasm in Westport’s otherwise crowded dining scene for full service breakfast and lunch. Thanks to chef Molly Brandt, who shares Michelle’s discerning taste, creativity and attention to detail, CM Gourmet Bistro brings us a menu that is simple yet sophisticated, and just bold enough to separate it from the area’s usual breakfast, lunch and brunch fare. The setting can be described similarly - sophisticated, yet approachable, with white linen napkins on reclaimed wood tables, and chairs covered in signature Cocoa Michelle blue fabric, it’s an equally comfortable setting for a business meeting, lunch with friends, or brunch with the family.
The Drawing Room is a trio of businesses - a design boutique, a café, and most recently, an art gallery - all owned by the husband and wife design duo Kenleigh and Michael Larock. As designers, they are called upon to combine disparate elements and select accents that will bring harmony to a space. In this regard, The Artists’ Table Dinner was a perfect expression of their work. The Larocks, along with the Gallery’s Curator, Cameron Schmitz, and the Café’s Chef, Paul Lockely, brought symphonic harmony to their pairing of a five-course dinner with the art in the gallery’s current exhibition, Homeland.
The attention to detail and care with which the menu and the evening were planned were apparent not only in the way the staff spoke about the process from concept to creation, but also in their genuine level of excitement in sharing the art and the chefs’ inventive interpretations of it. Chef Paul Lockely, of the Drawing Room, and Guest Chef Bjoern Eiken, of Thomas Henkelmann at Homestead Inn, created 5 dishes each inspired by one of the five artists’ works.
Mike Geller likes that he can tell his customers stories about how the food he delivers is grown and about the farmers who grow it. Conversely, he states, “There are no stories to tell with big agricultural suppliers. No one wants to know about thousands of chickens crowded in a small space with no room to move and no access to the outdoors.”
Mike started Mike’s Organic Delivery in June 2010 with a mission to reconnect people in Fairfield and Westchester Counties to where, how, and when their food is grown. After careful research, he selected 12 farms from the Hudson River Valley, Westchester County and Western Connecticut to become the suppliers for his nascent farm to home delivery service. The farms all use practices many of us look for when supermarket label gazing: organic, sustainable, free range, pesticide-free, no added hormones, no steroids, and no antibiotics. While we may find some of these methods on supermarket labels, Mike guarantees that his produce is picked no more than 36 and usually less than 24 hours before it reaches your door. That is not likely the case with the produce we cart home from the grocery store.
Foodies Descend on the Westport Arts Center for a Delectable Reception on September 14
The connection between food and art shares such a long thread throughout humanity; it winds its way back to our cave dwelling days. Art has come a long way since those early drawings, and so has our food supply. To celebrate this lasting connection, and its progress, The Westport Arts Center will host an Opening Reception and Night Food Market for its upcoming exhibition, “Foodies.” On Friday, September 14th from 6 - 8pm, the Arts Center on 51 Riverside Avenue, Westport, will become an art and food gallery featuring local artists’ works and local chefs’ creations.
The most appealing aspect of John Barricelli’s new cookbook “The Seasonal Baker: Easy Recipes From My Home Kitchen to Make Year-Round” is the reassuring conversational tone of his introductions and tips, which are not just sprinkled, but dolloped throughout the book. The title is a mouthful, but accurate, with the emphasis on the home kitchen. If you want to recreate the multi-layered Chocolate Ganache Cake or Crème Brulee Tartlets from the Sono Baking Company’s repertoire, go to John’s first cookbook of the same name. The Seasonal Baker is a go-to resource of thoughtfully selected and approachable recipes,both sweet and savory, meant to be prepared in a home kitchen. They will dazzle the diners, and not daunt the baker.
The book is well organized, dividing its 135 recipes into 9 clear sections from Muffins, Quick Breads and Breakfast Treats through Crisps, Cobblers and Other Fruit Spoon Desserts to the savory Tarts, Quiches, Pastas and More, and finally Focaccia and Pizza on the Grill. With few exceptions, the recipes are designed for everyday baking and John’s heartfelt introduction sets you up for all you will encounter in the book, essentially a mash-up of food and family.
We know CTBites readers love food in all forms – casual, elegant, ethnic, constructed, deconstructed, and certainly in written form. We’ve recently learned about one more food form for you to experience: artistic.
The Westport Arts Center’s September exhibition, Foodies, will celebrate food as art and WAC is inviting the community to come to the table with their artistic interpretation of the ways food can feed our souls as well as our stomachs.
The Foodies Exhibition will open on Friday, September 14th when the gallery’s tables and walls will be set with works related to food that have been judged and selected by local foodies, Bill Taibe of LeFarm andThe Whelk, Pat Callaghan of Pepperidge Farms, Stew Leonard of Stew Leonard’s, and Michel Nischan of The Dressing Room.
Alina Lawrence opened her wonderful olive oil tasting room and retail shop, Olivette, in Darien days before the New Year, resolving to bring freshly pressed, single varietal Extra Virgin Olive Oils and brilliantly flavored vinegars to Fairfield County. I recently spent a delightful 2 ½ hours sipping and slurping my way around the room, grateful for her resolution.
If you are looking for true Extra Virgin Olive Oil, with all its health and culinary benefits, the grocery aisle is a convenient place to shop, but may not be the best place to find what you are seeking. Tom Mueller, has written extensively on the perils of purchasing olive oil, and recently published Extra Virginity, The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. To sum up his work briefly, the oil industry is fraught with fraud, and we are not always getting what we expect in the bottles we purchase.
Community Plates is a non-profit organization that has employed one simple idea to address the complex issue of hunger, and in just a handful of months, made a huge impact in our community. Community Plates connects food to people in need of it, by rescuing good food that would otherwise be thrown away and delivering it to hunger relief agencies in Fairfield County.
It has been less than one year since Kevin Mullins, Community Plates Executive Director, began asking restaurants and grocers if they were interested in donating food. Their response has been so overwhelming, that since CTBites first reported on CP’s launch in September, rescued food donations have grown from 5,000 pounds each week to more than 10,000 pounds a week. Their number of regular donors has risen from 12 to 22 and they are delivering food to 11 hunger relief organizations in Norwalk, Stamford, Bridgeport, Darien and Westport. However, now more than ever they need your help.
We have all been there: the post-party cleanup. Whether it’s in our homes, at a community event or following a corporate function, once the party is over, we survey the stove and the table tops, assess all the uneaten food, open a large plastic trash bag and throw it all away: the extra pot of rice, the tray of untouched beans, the pan of roasted potatoes, and we think, “What a waste.”
This thought also bothered Jeff Schacher, the principal of a software company that designs web-based applications to help restaurants manage logistics, inventory and scheduling. Jeff knew, all too well, that as much as restaurants strive to eliminate waste, excess food is inevitable: diners either don’t walk through the door as planned or don’t order certain items as anticipated. Pounds of potatoes, rice and ribs that never see the outside of a pot are thrown away night after night, across the county. What a waste.
Jeff researched the idea of food rescue, saving perfectly good food from the trash and redistributing it to people in need,
Cookbooks used to be written for those who loved to cook or for those who needed to cook. Today’s food-centric culture has added breadth and depth to the genre. Food lovers and home cooks look to chefs not just for instruction, but for inspiration. “Harvest to Heat, Cooking with America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans” by Darryl Estrine and Kelly Kochendorfer goes one step beyond, showcasing the local farmers, ranchers and artisans who serve as muse to those esteemed chefs. The result is a celebration of the symbiotic relationship between farmers and chefs and the masterpieces created by their combined efforts.
Please join your fellow CTBites readers and contributors to fight hunger in Connecticut by walking with the CTbites team at the Connecticut Food Bank’s Walk Against Hunger. The walk will take place on Sunday, May 15th at Seaside Park in Bridgeport. For most of us, the biggest decision we face when we’re hungry or need groceries is where to shop. But for many of the 390,000 people in Connecticut who do not have enough food to eat, their decisions involve whether to buy groceries or pay the rent. For others, soup kitchens and shelters provide the only meals they will eat.
Each spring, the Connecticut Food Bank sponsors a Walk Against Hunger to raise money and consciousness about hunger in our state.
Ed Hartz is a milkman with a mission. He wants to “revolutionize the food distribution system” by taking us back to the days when milkmen delivered local dairy products to our doors. Even if you don’t remember pulling glass milk bottles from a galvanized container stationed by the back porch door, it’s likely you can picture the image. Ed’s goal is to turn that image into reality and revive the tradition of the milkman in Fairfield County. With a truck painted like a Holstein, he has aptly named his new business The Milkman Company, and he is working to spread the word that the Milkman is back and better than ever with deliveries of milk (including raw milk), eggs, cheese, yogurt, meats and other farm fresh products.
The sounds of the Farmer’s Market change with the seasons. The “mmm’s” in June when the strawberries arrive; the “ooh’s and ahh’s” in July when the tomatoes make their entrance; finally, the sad, sighing “uh’s” in the fall as the weather chills and the markets draw to a close.
This year, thanks to the unabated demand for local produce and the persistence of some devoted market managers, we can enjoy a new season of sounds at our local Farmer's Markets.
Most of us like name brand products - especially when it comes to food. How often do we drive to different grocery stores to buy our favorite coffee or coveted snack item? Occasionally, I’m tempted to buy a store brand or private label option, attracted by the value and the hope it will taste as good as the name brand I trust, but past disappointments make me skeptical, and more often than not, I move on to the usual suspects to fill my market basket. I admit, my brand loyalties run deep, so I was particularly skeptical when CTbites decided to review 4 bottles of a new discount wine, branded under the label Ninety+Cellars. Yes, images of another Two Buck Chuck sprang to mind, but after our tasting and some research, I am convinced that the Ninety+Cellars is a distinctive label in its own right and it is now available in CT.
The Cook’s Nook in Norwalk couldn’t be more aptly named. Twisting through its adjoining rooms, filled to capacity, brings you from one alcove and surprising find to another. As you step into the door, you are faced with a navigation decision: the room straight ahead or to the right? It’s not the last time you’re made to choose, but take heart, there are no bad choices here. Like being lost in the streets of Paris, winding your way from one enchanting street to the next, your shopping experience is more adventure than errand.
These days, going out for a cone often means visiting a scoop shop situated along a well-traveled roadway and eating your favorite flavor in a parking lot - think Carvel at 7 pm any summer evening. Small, mom and pop type ice cream stands are a rare and serendipitous find that usually require a lengthy drive into the country. But we’ve found an exception to this rule: Wells Hollow Farm in Shelton is a quick trip up Route 8 (to exit 12) and provides a surprisingly bucolic backdrop to your ice cream experience.
A working farm since the late 1800’s, Wells Hollow Creamery is located in a large red barn shared with 6 cows (although I was corrected when I asked for verification: 4 cows and 2 calves) and a whole bunch of chickens and roosters – I didn’t ask how many. With 30 hard-packed flavors to choose from,
You never know what to expect when you sign up for a cooking class. How much cooking will you do? Who will attend and what will they want from the class? How will the personality of the chef influence the experience? What if you could cut down on all those variables by gathering a group of friends with common food interests and visiting the home of a chef whose only motive is to ensure you have a good time and eat well? It would be a fabulous experience – wouldn’t it?
Recently, eight CTBites contributors had just such a fabulous culinary experience with chef, teacher and cookbook author Leticia Moreinos Schwartz at one of her in-home Brazilian cooking classes.
