The closest I’ve ever come to living on a farm was the month I spent working as an intern in the kitchen of a New York City restaurant. That’s because the farm came to us. Literally. Not only did the restaurant order fresh produce and humanely raised meat and poultry from local farms, the farmers themselves came to regular four-course “Meet the Farmer” dinners to talk about the food that was on diners’ plates.  All we were missing was a few acres of dirt.

 I know the whole Farm to Table movement is pretty trendy right now. Jaded restaurant reviewers have referred to this kind of cuisine as “haute barnyard” and the chefs who prepare it as “lettuce whisperers”. But it is trendy for a reason. Aside from all the political and ethical arguments for eating sustainably and locally, there is this: the food tastes good! I guess I went to work behind the scenes to find out why.

 The answer turned out to be ridiculously simple. David Shea, the chef I worked for, was brilliant, but it wasn’t his ego that was center stage. It was his ingredients. There is an obvious difference between a generic box ripened tomato that grew a month earlier on another continent and a juicy red Brandywine straight off a vine in New Jersey. Grass-fed beef from a pasture in Vermont tastes a whole lot more flavorful than a corn-fed cow from a feedlot. Wild-caught salmon is another fish altogether from the insipid variety raised on a fish farm.

 So many ingredients that I thought I knew by taste, took on a new dimension once I understood the depth of flavor they could achieve by being cultivated in a healthy, sustainably farmed environment. Though David and his wife Laura, who manages applewood, are too unpretentious to use this word, you could say that in their kitchen I learned about “terroir”.

 I also learned that celebrating regional flavor in season is not always easy. March is a tricky month to be a locavore. Trickier still if you are running a restaurant with a menu that changes daily. In August when the peaches are ripe and the zucchini, eggplant, basil and tomatoes are practically jumping into the ratatouille pot and the corn is so tender and sweet you don’t need to cook it, life is as happy dance to the dinner table. But if it is March, after a long winter of cooking parsnips and potatoes a hundred different ways, being a chef can get a little trying.

 Laura still laughs about the Meet the Farmer dinner she set up one winter evening when the guest speaker was one of her vegetable growers. “I think all he had was a box of garlic!” And so, the featured ingredient was garlic. Even the pastry chef rose to the occasion and everyone loved it.

 When I showed up in my chef’s apron on the first day of March, my job was to peel a 10-pound box of Jerusalem artichokes. The next day I got to peel 10 pounds of potatoes.  So it continued throughout the month with carrots, beets, rutabagas and celery root. Not a tomato or a piece of lettuce in sight.

 “Huh” David or Daniel, his sous chef, would say as one of them approached the walk-in each the morning, ready to dream up his side of the menu.  Each would survey the pallets of cabbages and winter greens, and the crates full of tap roots, shake his head, and then head back upstairs to seek inspiration. It always came quickly. If last night the celery root had been pureed with creamer potatoes, tonight it would be julienned into remoulade. Sweet potatoes that had recently been made into dumplings might get smoked in a homemade rig on the stove. Carrots that had pureed into last night’s soup now became a spicy slaw. But still there would be a wistful sigh and the expressed wish that spring be soon to arrive.

 And then very modestly it did. There was a box of pea shoots in the walk-in. It was as if there was a celebrity in the room. For a salad starved group, it was hard not to give them top billing in every dish. They crunched like watercress, wilted gracefully and intensified in flavor when sautéed, and added a vivid green to any plate that needed a colorful accent. Best of all, they tasted like springtime.

Recipes

Wilted Pea Shoots, Caramelized Garlic and Diver Scallops

On a back burner at applewood, you can often find a bubbling pot of garlic cloves in olive oil. Chef David Shea uses caramelized garlic in many of his dishes. It has a sweet umami taste and a soft texture that adds character to a recipe. I love how it tastes with the earthy flavor of wilted pea shoots. You can serve it unadorned as a side dish, but because I wanted to serve it as an appetizer, I sautéed a few Diver Scallops and put them on top of the wilted greens. Delicious! One or two scallops make a nice appetizer. Three or four are right for a main course.

 Ingredients

1 bunch pea shoots

Caramelized garlic

Garlic oil

Olive oil 

Kosher Salt

6 sea scallops (optional)

Lemon zest (optional) 

To make the Garlic and Garlic Oil:

Peeled garlic cloves

Olive oil

 •Place as many peeled pieces of garlic as you wish in a saucepan. Cover with olive oil.

•Simmer on low heat until the garlic is a deep brown. Turn off heat.

•When the oil has cooled, separate garlic cloves and oil with a sieve, reserving both oil and garlic in separate containers.

To prepare the dish:

•Place two tablespoons of garlic oil in a hot pan over medium heat.

•Add a bunch of pea shoots. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Stir just until wilted.

•Toss in a handful of caramelized garlic cloves.

•Ready to serve as a side dish.

To add Sea Scallops:

There is a trick to making perfect scallops. It’s in the heat of the pan.

   •Make sure you have washed the scallops and trimmed the little foot that is usually attached to them. Blot dry.

•Heat a skillet over a medium high flame. Add olive oil and continue heating until pan just begins to smoke.

•Sprinkle each scallop on both sides with salt

• Place scallops in pan, making sure there is space between each.

• When scallop is a deep brown on one side, quickly turn over, allowing it to barely “kiss” the pan. Remove from heat.

• Place scallops on top of pea shoots and garlic. Zest a little lemon on top of scallops. Serve.  

Pea Shoots, Pickled Corn and Wild Salmon

David Shea’s recipe for pea shoot salad and pickled corn was recently published in the The New Brooklyn Cookbook.  He serves it with a delicious coriander-cured salmon and lemon crème fraiche. You should look there to learn how to make the home-cured salmon, as the recipe printed here is a very loose adaptation of his. In deference to an early morning flight tomorrow, I skipped curing the salmon and made the dish with fresh salmon. Wild salmon in New York is hardly local, David Shea is quick to point out. But it is caught the right way and when it comes to eating fish, sustainability is the priority.

 Ingredients

1 cup fresh corn

¼ cup sugar

¼ cup kosher salt

1 cup water

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

½ cup white wine vinegar

Olive oil

1 bunch pea shoots

2 wild-caught salmon filets

1/3 cup crème fraiche

2 teaspoons Lemon juice

More salt

 To Pickle the Corn:

•Place sugar, salt, water, pepper flakes and vinegar in a sauce pan. Bring to a boil and stir until salt and sugar have dissolved.

•Pour hot liquid over corn.

•Cool mixture overnight. You can refrigerate for up to 3 days.

 To prepare the dish:

•Strain corn from liquid, reserving a little bit of the liquid.

•Mix 1 teaspoon pickling liquid with some olive oil and whisk into a vinaigrette.

• In a separate bowl, mix crème fraiche, lemon juice and a tiny pinch of salt. Set aside.

•Heat skillet and add 4 Tablespoons olive oil. Bring to smoking point. Sprinkle both sides salmon filets with salt and place carefully skin side down in hot pan. When skin is brown and crisp but the middle of the salmon is still raw, flip to the other side. Cook quickly, just long enough to cook outside, but leave the inside of filet very pink. Remove from heat.

•Toss pea shoots in vinaigrette with ½ cup of corn, saving the rest as a condiment for another meal.

 To assemble the dish:

•Place a dollop of crème fraiche on one side of the plate.

•Place pea shoot and corn salad next to it.

•Place salmon filet on top of crème fraiche. Sprinkle with a few flakes of salt.

•Serve either warm or at room temperature.

Happy (almost) spring!

Note: You can also find David Shea’s recipes featured in the cookbook Harvest to Heat. In addition, Melanie Rehak’s book Eating for Beginners is a great behind-the-scenes account of life in the applewood kitchen and on the farms that supply it.