The entrée was unanticipated: I had gone to the Greenmarket stand of our friendly Vermont cheese makers to buy one of their new ‘experimental’ cheeses, but when I arrived Peter showed me some quite small frozen pork tenderloins, and I couldn’t pass them up.

Consider Bardwell produces absolutely wonderful goat and cow cheeses, and a certain amount of meat from the farm has become increasingly visible at the market. It’s all been first rate, but this was the first time I had taken home any of their pork, and it was equally delicious.

• two 6 or 7-ounce pork tenderloins from Consider Bardwell Farm, dried, rubbed all over with a mixture of chopped garlic from John D. Madura Farm, chopped sage from Eataly, salt, and pepper, very quickly sealed over a medium-high flame in a copper au gratin pan, placed in a 450º oven for about 6 minutes, the pan removed to the top of the range, the pork put onto warm plates, some scissored wild garlic from Lani’s Farm scattered into the pan over medium heat, along with 2 halved Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ from Whole Foods, all quickly stirred around a bit in the juices with a small flat-end wooden spatula, the tomatoes then arranged on the plates and sprinkled with chopped oregano from Stokes Farm and the pan juices drizzled over the roasted pork [that’s a very old flat wooden toothpick in the picture; it held down the thin end flap of the tenderloin while it was cooking]
• Yukon Gold Potatoes from Norwich Meadows Farm, scrubbed, cut (unpeeled) into half-moon shapes, tossed in a little olive oil, chopped thyme from Forager’s, 5 garlic cloves, unpeeled (to prevent them from buring) from John D. Madura Farm, salt, and pepper, then roasted, uncrowded, in an unglazed ceramic pan at 425º for about 25 minutes, potatoes and garlic removed and tossed with chopped lovage from Two Guys from Woodbridge
• the remainder of the small store of tender collard greens I had picked up from Norwich Meadows Farm a few day ago and used with the duck breast, washed, drained, then braised very lightly (they were very tender) in a heavy pot in which one halved garlic clove from Norwich Meadows Farm had been allowed to sweat in some olive oil, the dish finished with salt, pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil
• the wine was a Spanish (Valladolid) red, Bodegas Rejadorada Reja Toro 2014
• the music was, during the earlier part of the meal, that of a tragic (dead at 18, in 1715) collector, commissioner and composer of music, Johann Ernst Prinz von Sachsen-Weimar, his ‘Complete Violin Concertos’, and, later, a work completely unrelated, Nathan Davis’ magnificent 21-minute piece, ‘On The Nature of Thingness’ (2011), played by the International Contemporary Ensemble [ICE]