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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.


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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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).


Cooking Outdoors

June 13 2011

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.

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