Food sanity in Mad River Valley - Part 3

Too rich to go into in this post, and far too interesting for you NOT to explore further on your own, The Cellars at Jasper Hill is a twenty-two thousand square foot underground cooperative cheese aging facility and an organization with a powerful cooperative marketing arm, storing and selling some damn fine cheeses! Most of the restaurants we'd visited featured Vermont cheeses very prominently, which we definitely appreciated, and when I started writing this post and pulling together the web addresses for you it became apparent that The Cellars at Jasper Hill was one of their principal providers. Like the Vermont Fresh Network, they are another strong connector of producers, preparers, and consumers, bringing together and bringing to market - and thereby sustaining - healthful and delicious, high quality food products and businesses. 

At breakfast on our last morning at The Inn at Round Barn Farm, we were talking with innkeeper Tim Piper about all the great food and food culture in the area. After hearing us out a bit on cheese, he told us that they were hosting a three-day cheesemaking class in late to be taught by the highly accomplished and decorated artisanal cheesemakers at Three Shepherds' Cheese Company located just down the road in Warren. - And wouldn't you know, it also turns out that the Vermont Fresh Network annual meeting was just hosted at Round Barn Farm as well. Integrating, churning, connecting, learning. Impressive.

I can't help but feel that the food community in Vermont is showing us all the way to organize and operate a sustainable, high-quality, healthful food chain. What they're doing in the Mad River Valley, at least, creates and preserves jobs, respects the environment, celebrates the full spectrum of food arts, and - as far as we could tell - really enhances the quality of life for visitors and year-rounders alike. It was a little jarring to return to the big city from a getaway in the country and realize that suddenly my perspective had reversed: Notwithstanding the number of great, progressive restaurants we do have in the Greater Boston area, I realize now how far AHEAD of us city-folk they can be in the country when it comes to collectively embracing and integrating the local, the seasonal, the natural - and the people, both local and "flatlanders."

It's good to be served a slice of humble pie every once in a while - especially when it's delicious!

They get it in Vermont: Organic. Local. Seasonal. Hand-crafted. Small, artisanal producers, celebrating, supporting, feeding each other. It's impressive and profoundly satisfying to plunge into their world for a while. I don't feel like I have yet completely figured out why the commitment to quality and purity felt so pervasive, but I do think that the Vermont Fresh Network has a lot to do with it. Self-described as "dedicated to connecting farmers, food producers, and chefs to support Vermont agriculture and bring fresh, flavorful, high-quality food to all Vermonters and [their] guests," nearly every place we visited happened to be a member of the Network.

Yes, there is an evident, active commitment among so many of the local chefs to using high-quality local, seasonal, and organic ingredients. But just as satisfying was discovering that they take risks with their recipes as well, with wild boar, squab, even rabbit confit could be found at Hen of the Wood in Waterbury, The Black Door in Montpelier, The Pitcher Inn in Warren, and The Green Cup back in Waitsfield. Even our favorite place to stay in the area, The Inn at The Round Barn Farm, with an organic garden of their own, is very well aware of and closely connected with the burgeoning high-quality local food world around them. One morning they found a way to use local yak sausage as part of a delicious breakfast. - But, perhaps the most pleasant surprise was a brand-new vegetarian restaurant that grew out of a tea shop we remembered from our last visit to the area last March: Mint, in the heart of downtown Waitsfield, where I found their "Tempeh Bowl" to be one of the best lunch dishes I've ever had. 

One of the most refreshing aspects of this visit was realizing how selflessly they promote one-another. All our servers and proprietors seemed eager to share with us their local favorites, actively referring us to other good places in the area. Otherwise we may not have discovered Mint, nor The Black Door. However, it was the chef at our inn, Charlie Menard, who connected us in a new way with perhaps Vermont's best known culinary commodity: cheese. We were looking for a mid-afternoon snack and so he pointed us toward the East Warren Community Market - a new local cooperative market - where he said we'd find a great selection of local, artisanal food products, including cheese. He was right. 

Although the Market had sold out of fresh bread by the time we got there, we left with two great cheeses: Von Trapp [yes, those Von Trapps] Farmstead "Oma" and "Cabot Clothbound," an aged English-style cheddar that is nothing like your typical sharp Vermont or Wisconsin aged cheddar, nor anything like the more mainstream Cabot cheeses we commonly find in our local supermarkets. What most surprised me was the fact that, although the two cheeses were from altogether different producers, they shared nearly identical labels, prompting us to take a closer look. In so doing, we discovered yet another inspiring, community-building concept: The Cellars at Jasper Hill.

Next: Collaboration

...We'll always have weather. It just may not be what we want, or are told to expect.

Seriously: Can there be a better gig than being a television weather forecaster? As "meteoroligists" they carry scientists' credentials, they're paid as entertainers, and there's no apparent penalty for poor performance. - Oh, right... they're entertainers. So their real job is to deliver ratings - which of course are up when the forecast is a downer; failing to actually forecast the weather correctly, at least to my amateur eye, doesn't appear to cost them very much.

This is NOT an image of yesterday [not in New England, at least!]:

Yesterday was an excellent example of the high price we all pay when a sure-thing snowstorm turns out to be a fizzle. A couple of anecdotes shared with me by Rocky, a dog park friend of mine... One: Late yesterday afternoon a five-snowplow caravan was rolling down Route 3 toward the Cape plowing... water - when they could've stayed in the barn. The other: A friend of his who commutes back-and-forth to Lexington each day from the South Shore, took Tuesday night's forecasts of dire Wednesday weather seriously and so traded his 40 minute drive each way [which would've been even shorter yesterday, under the circumstances] for nearly 4½ hours on several different trains.

And at about 6:30 yesterday evening, I get back to our Waltham restaurant after an hour in the woods with my dog Jasper [and Rocky with Max], in light mist, over clear roads and maybe a half-inch of slushy snow on the sidewalk, to find our shift supervisor, two waiters, a bartender, a busser, two line cooks, a prep cook and a dishwasher... and not a single customer. By the time I left at about 7:30 we had welcomed 10 brave souls, when we might've been serving 60 by then on an ordinary Wednesday evening.

Don't worry: I know well what it's like when the situation is reversed, when the forecast is for an afternoon dusting and we get 10 inches. I was one of those incredulous drivers who lived that evening commute nightmare a couple of winters ago when it took me nearly 5 hours to drive from Kenmore to Waltham instead of the normal 25 minutes [and I hit the road that day before rush hour, before 2:30!]. So, of course we do need to be careful. Absolutely. And when the talking heads see something coming, of course they can't say nothing... I just wish that, more often, they'd get it right.

I don't know if it's true or not, but I read somewhere respectable once that, over the course of the year, weather where we live averages out to run in approximately four day cycles. Translation:  if you were to simply say "Tomorrow's weather is going to be very much like today's," you'd be right about 75% of the time. - I also heard that professional meteorologists - with all their radar and satellite imagery, with all their computer models, historical records, and professional training - get their forecasts right just a little better than 85% of the time. Really?

To me, that's a good argument for, before deciding whether or not to venture out for the day or evening, looking out your window first. Then go online, [and read read the forecasts - yes - but also] take a careful look at your local radar and satellite loops [I use wunderground.com primarily, but also accuweather.com and weather.com], and crafting your own best guess as to what's going to happen.

If your experience is like mine, you'll find you'll disagree fairly often with the weatherfolk on the short term [2-8 hour] forecasts for what is going to really happen where you live and work. And you know what? More often than not, it is YOU who will be right - and that'snow joke!

A restaurateur myself, it's fitting - and something we've celebrated - that in pursuit of a mid-winter retreat my wife and I stumbled upon a food-lover's paradise in rural, northern Vermont. Living in Boston, we've become spoiled by the growing abundance of great restaurants, even in the suburbs these days. But for the longest time, whenever we hit the road for a long weekend escape into northern New England, we resigned ourselves to the persistent, discouraging lack of good quality meals to be had away from our hometown.

For what seems like forever the standard menu one found in most restaurants outside the major cities has been American generica: potato skins, clam chowder, Caesar salads [with grilled chicken for a small upcharge of course!], burgers, dry char-grilled chicken breast, and green beans, broccoli, or corn on the side - oh, and perhaps updated to include "ethnic twists" like burritos, quesadillas and the odd stir-fry.

You know the drill: Way too much Sysco fresh-from-a-can or boil-in-a-bag, way too little farm-fresh or local, let alone organic - neither interesting nor particularly nutritious. And this has been true even in the more touristy areas that enjoy the economic lift from well-heeled visitors. - But a recent weekend getaway convinced me that real change can come to rural America, at least as far as the availability of good food is concerned!

In mid-January we visited mid-coast Maine, Camden, Rockland and Rockport, where we were married back in '01. Rockland's Primo is one of the truly great meals anywhere, but we were deeply disappointed to find that they now close seasonally. Forced to seek out alternatives, we were further discouraged to find that a winter shut-down was common among good restaurants in the area. Although we did find a couple of good meals in our three days in the area, unfortunately, most of those restaurants still open in January were those that played it safe - familiar, unexciting, and probably not very good for us!

No doubt the ski mountains are the crucial difference between the dormancy of mid-coast Maine and the relative vitality of the Green Montains in the dead of winter. We were much more than pleasantly surprised by what we found when we returned two weeks ago to Waitsfield, Vermont and its environs! 

For starters, no one was closed. But, even more impressively, just about every restaurant, market and dry goods merchant we visited seemed very engaged in a collective push for high quality - in concept, materials, and execution - all more than happy to refer one another. 

After an all-too-quick four day stay we left having concluded: They get it in Vermont. Later this week I'll tell you why.

Last September in celebrating with you our 2008 Best of CitySearch award for Vegetarian food at The Elephant Walk I explained that putting up our vegetarian menu was no simple matter. This is due to the fact that Cambodians, though mainly Buddhist, are rarely vegetarian.

I just visited the absorbing website/blog - Verdant Reports - of a gentleman who commented on that post earlier this summer. There you'll find an excellent post on this very same subject, Vegan and Vegetarian Food in Cambodia, including a very well-produced audio-blog entry wherein the blogger interviews a Frenchman who opened a vegetarian restaurant in Siem Reap, near Angkor Wat. It's worth 5-10 minutes of your time - especially if you are an avid traveler, a foodie, or - and especially - are vegetarian.