Our Farm to Our Table
September 13th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in eating local
We’d slaughtered a young ram for the occasion and what a meal last night’s dinner turned out to be. We invited several of our Cambridge friends who’ve played a special role in the success of Spy Dog Farm, incorporating a bit of everything the farm has to offer.
For starters, we served a white sangria infused with basil from our garden of raised beds. As an hors d’oeuvre, we served baba ghanouj made from our own Japanese eggplant–and who knew how vibrant eggplant could taste when it’s roasted fresh out of the garden? Two of the guests had spent the day tooling around our part of Washington County on the annual cheese tour and brought a blue sheep’s milk cheese from 3-Corner Field Farm in Shushan–one of my favorites.
For the first course, my wife artfully plated a variety of our raised bed tomatoes–red, yellow, green-striped, purple–along with slices of our Jersey cow ricotta, all dressed simply with olive oil, salt and pepper.
Then out came the ram for the entree, and never did a boneless leg of lamb taste so good off the charcoal grill. We wanted to serve it with my wife’s roasted tomatillo salsa, so we had given the meat a bit of Mexican slant, mixing a spice rub with cumin and a bit of chili powder. The guests groaned with pleasure at the first bite. Next to the lamb was our favorite kale salad, mixed with pickled shallots and smokey-paprika-roasted hazelnuts. Finishing the plate was my wife’s famous corn pudding. (The corn was one thing on the menu–along with the pita chips we served with the baba ghanouj–that we did not grow.)
Dessert really rocked the house–my wife’s gorgeous apple pie, made with Cortland and Empire apples from our own orchard of young trees. To serve with the pie, my wife had also made a cinnamon ice cream using fresh milk and cream provided by our Jersey cow, Emily.
Am I killing you with all this fabulous, home-grown food? I hope so, cause this is why we moved up here. Eat your heart out, D.C.
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