egg

The second essay in a series by Egg’s cooks explaining why they choose to spend their days flipping eggs and making biscuits:

Before my third year of college, because I was about to move into my first apartment with a kitchen, my grandmother decided that it was time for me to learn how to make sauce. “Sauce,” in my family, is not a generic category of foodstuff, but means only one thing — tomato sauce — and it is the ultimate foundation of cuisine. No one in my family cares about the iconic mother sauces that form the base of classical culinary technique (bechamel, hollandaise, vinagrette, whatever) — for us, there is only one foundational sauce. And when you can make sauce, it is only a short step to the heights of Italian-American cuisine: lasagna, chicken parm, pizza, baked ziti, meatballs (which you must cook in sauce, and not in the oven, even though it is true that they dry out more in sauce). I don’t think I’ve ever celebrated a holiday or a family birthday that didn’t include a dish with sauce in one form or another. [Read more-->]

Our last farm dinner of the year is coming up! This coming Wednesday, October 26th, we’ll be serving the best of our fall produce from the farm and building a menu around goat from Heritage Foods. (You can read more about Heritage’s interesting work with goat dairies here

If you’ve never seen goat anywhere other than stewed in a curry, you’ll be surprised at some of the things we have in store: mocetta, a dry-cured goat ham. Goat sausage. Thin-sliced roasted hams tossed with some beans and new potatoes from our farm. Shanks and necks, braised and pulled for a sauce. Belly cured in the style of bacon.

And even though it’s starting to cool off–even dipping into frost at nights–there’s still lots going on at the farm: tomatoes are still ripening in the greenhouse, fall and winter squashes curing in the barn. Frost-hardy greens are getting a start in seed flats for a long winter in high tunnels to keep us eating fresh and local produce right through January.

Call us at 718-302-5151 any day before 6:00 and reserve a table for next week’s dinner. We’ll have one seating at 8:00, and it will include 4 courses and dessert, along with Brooklyn Brewery beers. The cost of the dinner is $65.

We’ve had an excellent season so far at the farm, floods and hurricanes notwithstanding. And even though it feels like summer is coming to a premature end, we’re still getting a lot of high-season vegetables–a dozen kinds of tomato, along with potatoes, carrots, peppers, and eggplants. 

Our September Farm Dinner is coming up and will feature these vegetables alongside milk-fed pig that our friends Raven and Boar Farm found for us. The dinner will be Wednesday, September 28th, at 8:00. We’ll serve 4 courses along with beer from the Brooklyn Brewery for $65. 

If you’d like to attend or if you have questions, please call the restaurant any day before 6:00. This will be one of the last farm dinners of the year this year, so if you’ve been meaning to come, reserve now!

Liza de Guia is one of our food heroes, so we were flattered when she asked us if she could do a story on us. She came up to the farm one hot day last month and filmed us harvesting for our farm diner. She posted the full video yesterday, and we’re busting with pride at it. Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment on her site, www.foodcurated.com!

The packing lists that accompany our produce deliveries from our farm are stretching out to a page long, and we’re just getting going. Along with the usual suspects like kale and chard and beets, we’re getting amazing little ground cherries, which look like a cross between a cherry and a tomatillo (we’re getting those, too). They taste like an extra-sweet tomato chased with a sip of wine.

If the weather holds, they’ll be on the menu at our next Farm Dinner, which is coming up in 2 weeks: Wednesday, August 24th at 8:00 pm. We’ll also have tomatoes and eggplants and peppers from the farm and we’ll build a menu around them and a variety of fish and shellfish from Westport Aquaculture and Sea 2 Table. The dinner will include 4 courses and dessert and will cost $65. As usual, there’ll be just one seating: reserve now to make sure you’re in on it!

If you’d like to make a reservation, call the restaurant at (718) 302-5151. If you’d like more information, you may call or email mail@pigandegg.com.

Krissy gathering lettuce before the heat sets in

We spent most of this past Monday touring farms in Orange County in the back seat of a minivan, guests of the local Cornell Cooperative Extension. We’d come up to meet some farmers and to see the area’s legendary black dirt.

That black dirt is no joke: it looks like the purest potting soil you’ve ever seen, deep black and light as dried peat–we kept jabbing our hands in it to see how deep we could go before it compacted–wrist deep every time (we later learned that it runs up to 90 feet deep in some places). It’s famous as a medium for alliums: row after row of onions, shallots as big as tennis balls, garlic. But we also saw incredible eggplants and brassicas and, at Glebocki Farms, some healthy looking artichokes.

We filled those black dirt farmers with pity as we talked about the challenges of running our farm, where vegetables have to fight their way through beds of dense clay to thrive. But we picked up some good hints for growing (including a better way to stake tomatoes) and we met some interesting farmers, including Jeff and Adina Bialas, who grow everything from ground cherries to hops & cotton on a little 6 acre pocket of land carved out of sprawling onion and corn fields.

We stopped for lunch at Quaker Creek Store in Goshen, where we talked shop with extension agents over platters of home-made sausages and pirogies that rival any we’ve ever eaten:

We ended the day at S & S O Farm, whose owners helped pioneer the first Greenmarkets in the city. Their operation has grown to 450 acres since the early days, and as you’d suspect if you’ve ever shopped at their stall in Union Square, they grow everything.

By late afternoon, we could see that we’d have to outrun a ferocious-looking thunderstorm to get home, but we took our chances and stopped in at Bellvale Creamery for ice cream on the way, figuring we’d be a little harder to wash away if our bellies were filled with mint chip and Black Dirt Blast.

We’re one week out from our 3rd farm dinner of the summer. All the best vegetables are coming into season right now–we’re taking a crew up to the farm on Monday to harvest and bring down our first tomatoes, peak-season haricots verts, baby beets, garlic, and more.

The meats at this dinner will be a variety of game birds–cornish hens, pheasant, and quail, all from Quattro’s Game Farm–and we’ll pair each of 4 courses with beers from the Brooklyn Brewery.

We keep these dinners small and offer just one seating at 8:00. The game bird dinner will be on Wednesday, July 27 and will cost $60, which includes food and beer.

Call the restaurant at 718 302 5151 if you’d like to come, or email us at mail@pigandegg.com with the number of people in your party and a callback phone number (if you email, please note that your reservation can’t be guaranteed until we’ve called to confirm).

There were times this past Saturday, as we wrestled our new tents into place against cold rain blowing in off the East River, the Coheed and Cambria soundcheck hammering away in the background, that we thought we might have gotten ourselves in over our heads: it was our first effort at providing food at the Williamsburg Waterfront concert series, and we were off to a tough start. One of our crew was out sick; the weather was about as bad as it could be without causing the concert to be cancelled altogether; and we’d never used half the equipment we’d be using: not the grill, not the tents, not the lights. A park staffer came by to tell us to straighten up and get ready because they were about to open the doors and we hadn’t even found a place to park our truck.

But after a brief adjustment period of getting used to flipping and assembling burgers, pork belly sandwiches, and lima bean salad by the dozens while hungry metalheads looked on, we got into it. The experience of cooking while looking out at a mist-heavy river as Manhattan looms duskily in the backdrop is hard to beat.

Evan enjoying himself

Happily set up.

Grilling with a view

The dining room.

It’s time to begin our summer farm dinner series, and, as we do every year, we’re beginning with a benefit for Williamsburg’s Auto Garden, an organic garden and learning program at the Automotive High School on Bedford Avenue.

Our farm dinners feature produce we grow on our farm in Oak Hill, and they give us a chance to stretch and try some new ideas. This first one is especially exciting because the students from the Auto Garden help work the dinner with us, and their enthusiasm for what they’re learning about food is inspiring–a compelling testament to the importance of this kind of education.

We’ll serve 4 courses of food with beer pairings from the Brooklyn Brewery. The produce will all come from our farm in Oak Hill or from the Auto Garden itself; beef will come from Vermont Quality Meats. The price for the dinner is $65, and every cent of it will go to support the Auto Garden as they grow the garden, take students on field trips to local farms, and expand their cooking club.

The dinner will be on May 11 at 7:00. Reservations are strongly suggested—call the restaurant at (718) 302-5151 during business hours to speak to a server and reserve a table.

If you’d like to find out more about the Auto Garden, check them out on Facebook.

We’re looking for volunteers to help us tend to our farm this summer. Our farm is tiny by farm standards, but big by gardening standards–about 1 1/2 acres–and we grow a wide variety of vegetables and fruits. Working here is a great way to learn about cultivating a wide range of plants, from flowers grown for tea to heirloom varieties of beans to semi-wild blackberries.

We’re looking for enthusiasm as much as anything else, though the ability and willingness to do hard work under a hot sun are of course important. We’re also looking for someone to commit to a regular schedule: even if it’s only 5 hours 1 day a week, if we can count on you, we’d love to have you. We can’t offer you lodging or transportation to or from the farm, but we can promise you some good exercise, good company, and a great chance to catch your breath and grow.

Some of the things you’ll be doing include preparing beds; weeding; harvesting, washing, and packing; starting seeds; and pruning. If you’re handy, you can help us build trellises, tables for our greenhouse, or a mobile hutch for our slug-eating ducks.

You’ll learn a lot alongside our farm manager, who works year-round at planning and preparing for the growing season. You’ll learn about how a farm’s work plugs into a restaurant’s needs, and see the cycle that runs from seed to table to compost heap in a uniquely pure form. If you’re interested in the growing end of the farm-to-table movement, this will be a great place to gather experience.

Experience is welcome, but not necessary: what’s more important is drive, a love of getting dirty, and a passion for growing great food.

Email a cover letter and resume to jobs@pigandegg.com if you’re interested.