egg

At the end of last summer, a small crew from Lantern Fish Media spent a couple of days filming what we do: they came to the restaurant well before dawn to watch us open; they came to the farm in the middle of a downpour to watch us harvest and braid garlic.

Their short film–“Egg: Farm to Table”–was finished this spring, and it’s been selected for the New York Food Film Festival. Check it out here, and then get some tickets to the festival, where you can watch this and dozens of other movies while you eat food featured in the films!

Farm to Table from Lantern Fish Media on Vimeo.


This month, Parish Hall and Egg restaurants begin a series of dinners called Taste of a Place. In these dinners, we’ll explore the culinary character of our foodshed through meals drawn entirely from small agricultural and cultural areas.

For our first dinner, on Wednesday, July 18th, we’ll celebrate the produce of a small pocket of the northern Catskills centered around our own farm in Oak Hill, New York.

Food for the dinner will come from these farms, all within a few minutes of each other:

The dinner will be served at Parish Hall starting at 7:30. Dinner will include 4 courses and will cost $75.

For reservations, call Parish Hall (718 782 2602) or contact us online.

 

Catskill Creek

Catskill Creek, Oak Hill, NY


Smoking Cherries

June 28 2012

It’s hard to beat a straight-up cherry tart at the peak of the season, but once you’ve eaten half your weight in fresh fruit you sometimes start pining for something a little different to do with them. Our cook Robert got to thinking about cold-smoking cherries the other day, stopped by the hardware store for some duct hose on the way to work, and set up a little smoker on the stove at the end of the day yesterday:

cold smoker

A little while later, he had a rack of transformed cherries–sweet, tart, and smoky:

And now? Now comes the fun part…. Stay tuned.


We’ve wanted to buy new chairs and tables for egg for years–tables that aren’t scarred by 10 years of abuse, chairs that don’t squeak and sway even before you’ve eaten your grits. We’ve just had a hard time gathering together the money to do it. It’s a problem thousands of small businesses face, and usually they solve it by resorting to credit cards or bank loans.

A group of entrepreneurs in New York have started a new way for small businesses to raise capital by turning to their communities and customers. a vehicle for companies and their customers to work together through “social loans.” Like other small-scale financing vehicles (e.g. Kickstarter), Smallknot helps businesses raise money through small contributions from many people. Unlike Kickstarter, Smallknot pledgers are paid back–so they get a 3-fold return. They get their money back, they get the option of incentives at various pledge levels, and they get the satisfaction of helping to support a business they already belong to and believe in.

We’d love your help replacing these chairs and tables: pledge any amount on Smallknot.com to help us reach our goal of $10,000. It’s an investment you’ll be able to dine on–literally–for years.

 


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–>]


Farm Dinner #6

October 19 2011

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.

squash_and_seedlings


Farm Dinner #5

September 14 2011

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!


Farm Dinner #4

August 15 2011

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.

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Krissy gathering lettuce before the heat sets in

Orange County Farm Tours

August 03 2011

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.

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.

cooks among the 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.

Evan & Jeff
Krissy & John

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:

pierogies and a non-extension agent
mixed sausage grill

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.

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