Now that’s a starter.

• red shishito peppers, an heirloom non-hybrid variety of peppers from Alewife Farm, which, at least in this very first experience of them, we both found even more delicious than the familiar, less mature, green ones (they were chewier, in a good way, and while each boasted a little heat, the hottest of this batch was still not as hot as the hottest green shishito we might regularly experience), washed, drained, dried, then sautéed over medium high heat in a seasoned 13.5″ cast iron pan for a few minutes, stirring, seasoned with Maldon salt, arranged on the plates, more of the salt added, to taste
• slices from a She Wolf Bakery miche
• the wine was an Italian (Abruzzo) rosé, Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo, Sirio 2017, from Astor Wines

The main course was just as delicious as the appetizer, although without the frisson of anticipating a surprise level of scoville units; also it was a little more complicated to prepare.

• four tiny loin goat chops, each averaging less than 3 ounces, from Lynnhaven Dairy Goat Farm, marinated for about 45 minutes in a mix of a couple tablespoons of olive oil, 2 small sliced cloves of fresh garlic from from Alex’s Tomato Farm, freshly-ground black pepper, 8 slightly-crushed juniper berries, some roughly-chopped rosemary from Phillips Farms, one medium crushed bay leaf from Westside Market, and a little zest from an organic Whole Foods Market lemon, then pan-grilled for a few minutes, turning 3 times, seasoned with sea salt and freshly-ground pepper after the first time, finished with a bit juice from an organic Whole Foods Market lemon and a drizzle of olive oil, garnished with micro red basil from Two Guys from Woodbridge

• eight tiny golden zucchini or yellow summer squash from Berried Treasures Farm, the last on the farm’s Greenmarket table that afternoon(one of those in the picture didn’t survive the journey), washed, dried, halved lengthwise, tossed with a little olive oil, sea salt, and freshly-ground black pepper, pan grilled until softened and slightly charred, turning once, arranged on the plates, scattered with cut parsley and torn spearmint leaves, both herbs from Phillips Farms, a bit of one finely chopped medium spicy ahi rico pepper from Alewife Farm, also 8 or so halved pitted kalamata olives from Whole Foods Market, drizzled with a little olive oil and served at room temperature
• some peppery red watercress from Dave Harris’s Max Creek Hatchery
• the wine was a Spanish/Catalonia/Priorat red, Sao del Coster, Priorat 2015, from Flatiron Wines 

• the music throughout the meal was the beautiful symphonies Joseph Martin Kraus composed in the 1770’s and 1780’s, Werner Ehrhardt conducting Concerto Köln

 

[the image of Kraus as a student in Erfurt is a portrait attributed to Jakob Samuel Beck, and it appears on the composer’s Wikipedia page]

These were quite possibly the most delicious goat chops either of us had ever had. This makes me very happy, because, for what it may be worth, I don’t think either or I have ever been served goat chops outside of our own home.  I’m going to share my happiness with Lynn Fleming, the local goat breeder from whom I had purchased the meat, commending her for the quality of her production.

The extraordinarily pungent marjoram flowers were stars too,..

..even if they couldn’t rival the splashy color of the micro radish.

• four loin goat chops, each averaging just over 4 ounces, from Lynnhaven Dairy Goat Farm, marinated for about 45 minutes in a mix of a couple tablespoons of olive oil, 2 small sliced cloves of fresh garlic from from Alex’s Tomato Farm, freshly-ground black pepper, 8 slightly-crushed juniper berries, some roughly-chopped rosemary from Phillips Farms, one medium crushed bay leaf from Westside Market, and a little zest from an organic Whole Foods Market lemon, then pan-grilled for a few minutes, turning 3 times, seasoned with salt and freshly-ground pepper after the first time, finished with a bit of a fortunate nicety, some tomato water that remained from an earlier meal, plus some very aromatic marjoram flowers from Stokes Farm, and a drizzle of olive oil
• a knob of purple micro radish from Windfall Farms, as a plate garnish

• a vegetable assembly that began with preparing 10 or 12 small, one-ounce artichokes from Alewife Farm (removing the outer leaves, trimming the stem, cutting off the top third, slicing in half lengthwise) while a little olive oil and 2 smashed fresh garlic cloves, again from Alex’s Tomato Farm, were heated inside a large antique copper pot over low heat, and when the oil began to sizzle, a handful of oil-cured black olives, a few branches of fresh thyme from Campo Rosso Farm, a pinch of sea salt, and the artichoke halves (cut side down) were added, the heat raised a bit and the chokes moved around until they had browned, when a handful of a mix of ‘wild Mex tomatoes‘ and Coyote tomatoes, both from Eckerton Hill Farm, was added, along with a splash of water, and everything cooked until the chokes were tender, the pot covered for part of the time, the dish seasoned to taste and served [NOTE: it can also be served at room temperature, which makes this recipe very convenient]
• the wine was a zinfandel a California (Lodi) red, Karen Birmingham Reserve Zinfandel Lodi 2015, from Naked Wines
• the music was Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1755 opera, ‘Montezuma’, Johannes Goritzki conducting the German Chamber Academy Neuss and the Cantica Nova Chamber Choir 

 

* although not really a caponata at all, it turned out to be an excellent accompaniment for the goat

This was a sublime winter meal, and almost embarrassingly easy to put together.

I used a recipe, with almost no deviations, from a specialty cookbook I bought in Brooklyn almost as soon as I had learned that I could buy local goat cuts in the Union Square Greenmarket. The title is ‘Goat: Meat, Milk, Cheese‘ and the authors are Bruce Weinstein (he cooks) and Mark Scarbrough (he writes).

It was great fun, and even though our shanks were a little smaller than those described in the recipe, we were surprised to sit down to dinner roughly an hour and a half earlier than the recipe’s program had suggested: After quickly getting the braise together inside the pot I was looking forward to an interval during which I could catch up on writing or reading (about food, to be sure), but when I got up to check and stir the pot the second time, maybe 50 or 55 minutes into the 2 1/2 hours my guides had predicted it would take, I realized that the meat was nearly ready. I know it could have gone further, but not for an additional hour and a half, and the meat already offered no resistance when pierced with a metal tester.

I then worked rapidly on the rest of the meal, rushing the Brussels sprouts into the oven and quickly assembling the ingredients for the polenta, both of which might take 25 minutes. I knew the goat braise would be understanding, so there wasn’t any panic with the timing, and everything came together perfectly in the end.

The picture below shows what the shanks looked like just after I had replaced them in the pot in which they had earlier been browned then removed to the side, and after sautéing the vegetables, adding the chicken broth and white beans, and bringing the liquid to a simmer.

• for the goat braise, the only changes I made to the recipe, which I halved, were the addition of a medium-width 6-inch celery stalk, sliced, from Philipps Farms; a crushed piece of dark dried habanada pepper; and a reduction by roughly half in the cooking time it describes, so rather than re-enter the recipe text, I’ll only list the source of the ingredients I used: two goat shanks, weighing a total of 21 ounces, from Tony at Consider Bardwell Farm; 4 medium orange carrots from John D. Madura Farm; one small leek from Hawthorne Valley Farm; one mediium Rocambole garlic clove from Keith’s Farm; a tablespoon of fresh sage leaves from Philipps Farm; one teaspoon of zest from a Whole Foods Market organic lemon; 2 or 3 tablespoons of Few Spirits Breakfast Gin; one cup of low-sodium Better Than Bouillon chicken base; and almost one cup of Eden Foods organic cannellini beans
• polenta made using this excellent Mark Bittman recipe, ‘Polenta Without Fear‘, very gradually adding, while stirring, two thirds of a cup of coarsely-ground Iroquois White Corn Project white corn flour from the Greenmarket Regional Grains Project stall in the Union Square Greenmarket) to a pot in which 2 cups of water and 2/3 of a cup of excellent Trickling Springs Creamery milk from Whole Foods Market (the proportion always begins as 3 to 1, but additional fresh water will always have to be added along the way) had been brought to a boil, then stirred continually for about 15 or 20  minutes, and when the mixture was creamy and the cornmeal tasted cooked, seasoned with a pinch of salt, finished with several tablespoons of several 4  tablespoons of Organic Valley ‘Cultured Pasture Butter’, and properly seasoned with sea salt, garnished with a few small fresh sage leaves from Philipps Farm
• four good-size Brussels sprouts from Phillips Farms, washed, trimmed, dried, tossed with olive oil, sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, roasted in a 400º oven on a small unglazed Pampered Chef oven pan until they were browned and crisp on the outside, or for about 20 minutes,
• the wine was an Italian (Puglia) red, Aglianico Polvanera 2009, from Garnet Wines & Liquors
• the music was Wagner’s 185-1861 ‘Tannhäuser’, Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Chorus., with Agnes Baltsa, Andreas Schmidt, Placido Domingo, Matti Salminen, Kurt Rydl, Oskar Hillebrandt, Clemens Bieber, Cheryl Studer, Barbara Bonney, Margaret Stobart, Ingrid Baier, Jeanette Wilson, Karen Shelby, and William Pell

I had only cooked goat ribs once before. It was early August, and I wanted to avoid turning on the oven, so I managed to devise a scheme that would allow be to cook them on top of the stove. They were delicious, and it was a very simple process, so I repeated it last night.

The ribs looked great on the plate, the aroma was wonderful, and they were very tasty, but we were both disappointed that they were quite chewy (the meat definitely did not ‘fall off the bone’). I might have had more success had I kept them on the grill pan even longer than I did, but I don’t know for certain. Even allowing for the fact that goat is nowhere near as fatty as pork, or even veal or beef, I think I could do better next time if I approached the cooking differently.

• one side of goat/cabrito riblets from Tony of Consider Bardwell Farm in the Union Square Greenmarket, cut along the bone with a kitchen shears into 4 pieces, dried on paper towels and pan-grilled inside an enameled cast iron ribbed pan for a total of at least 20 minutes, basting all along with 2 long branches of rosemary, tied together and repeatedly dipped into a mixture of oil, red Rioja wine vinegar, crushed dried dark habanada pepper (from fresh ones purchased in the fall of 2016 from Norwich Meadows Farm), sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, replacing a very loose cover of tin foil between each sweep of the herb with its basting mixture, arranged on 2 plates, garnished with micro red amaranth from Two Guys from Woodbridge
• ten or 11 ounces of not-large white beets from Norwich Meadows Farm, trimmed, scrubbed, and cut into approximately 1-inch wedges, tossed in a bowl with 2 teaspoons of olive oil, more than 1 tablespoon of a mix of chopped herbs (fresh thyme and winter savory from Stokes Farm, sage from Keith’s Farm), more than half of a teaspoon of freshly-grated zest from a Whole Foods Market organic lemon, sea salt, and freshly-ground black pepper, arranged one flat side down on a cured unglazed medium Pampered Chef oven pan, placed in the  lower third of an oven preheated to 450°F, roasted, turning once or twice, until tender and slightly browned, or 20 to 25 minutes, arranged on the plates and garnished with chopped lovage from Two Guys from Woodbridge
• the small amount of winter kale that remained from a large bunch from Hoeffner Farms we had enjoyed the night before, washed, drained, wilted inside a medium tin-lined antique copper pot in less than a tablespoon or so of olive oil in which 2 bruised and one halved clove of Rocambole garlic from Keith’s Farm had first been allowed to sweat and begin to color, the greens seasoned with sea salt, freshly-ground black pepper, and arranged on the plates, a little more olive oil drizzled on top
• the wine was a California (Lodi, I believe) red, F. Stephen Millier Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon California 2016, from Naked Wines
• the music was Wagner’s magnificent late (1887-1882) Bühnenweihfestspiel, ‘Parsifal’, a beautifully-engineered 1962 recording of a great performance, Hans Knappertsbusch conducting the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and the Bayreuth Festival Chorus, with soloists Jess Thomas, Gustav Neidlinger, Niels Moller, Georg Paskuda, Gerhard Stolze, Dorothea Siebert, Irene Dalis, Martti Talvela, Gerd Nienstedt, Ursula Boese, Anja Silja, Gundula Janowitz, George London, Hans Hotter, and Sona Cervena

While I was growing up, New Year’s Day was a pretty grand occasion at our home: There would be guests, always interesting family friends, but almost never relatives. We were family outliers in Detroit, hundreds of miles from eastern Wisconsin where most of the tribes of both our parents were still based, their ancestors having cleared the old-growth forests and settled down on large dairy farms over a hundred years before.

Our Christmas tree was always pushed out of the house 2 days before (having arrived only a couple days before Christmas), an important moment which may have been a disappointment but it was also a relief, even to the young ones. In the afternoon, as the light outside dimmed, there would a special meal, with all the best china and glass, and tall candles(!), arranged on the extended dining table around a green centerpiece now liberated from the attributes of the immediately preceding holiday. There would be a roast of some kind, usually roast beef or ham, as well as all of the accompaniments traditional in the 1940s and 50s. There would be a fire burning in the living room, both weather and Mother permitting (no romantic, she thought wood fires were just dirty).

The rooms would look nothing like ours did yesterday, and not merely because we needed fewer chairs at the table: Mackerel was unknown on Haverhill Road, and I don’t think we ever had lamb in all the time I was living at home. I know we never had goat, and even polenta wasn’t part of the heritage of our beautiful Italian-American neighbors and friends, whose families had likely come from areas south of Tuscany.

We were Midwestern American locals, and even the foods we enjoyed, because of the modesty of that era and class, might have been surprisingly local. Today, in a much more ‘connected’ world we have to make a conscious effort to be locavores.

Yesterday’s first course was almost as local as almost everything else that was a part of this meal, the fish and its processing being identified with Maine, a place and an idea to which I feel close.

• six ounces of Ducktrap River of Maine‘s  ‘smoked peppered’ wild mackerel fillets from Chelsea”s Westside Market, served with dollops of local Ronnybrook Farms crème fraîche, stirred with grated horseradish root from Norwich Meadows Farm and drops of organic Whole Foods Market lemon, sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper
• a few live hydroponic dandelion greens from Two Guys from Ridgefield, dressed with a good Sicilian olive oil, from from Agricento, Azienda Agricola Mandranova (using exclusively Nocellara olives), Maldon salt, and freshly-ground black pepper
• toasts from a several-days-old buckwheat baguette from Runner & Stone Bakery
• the wine was a German (Mosel) white, Weingut Axel Pauly Trinkfluss 2014

The second course was more tricky, and the timing the completion of its 3 elements was not made easy by having the polenta milk/water mix boil over onto the surface of the range early in the polenta process, putting out the pilot light (at a moment when each of the 4 burners was covered with a pot that had to be removed for it to be re-lit), but I thought it was something of a triumph in the end.

It was my first goat neck, so I looked for recipes. Goat is little different from lamb in most respects, except perhaps for its normally smaller size or its reputed stringiness, so when I found this one, which addressed both, I jumped on it, and ended up working pretty closely with it.

The sauce produced by the braised goat may have been the best I had ever been able to ‘shepherd’ inside my kitchen, and yet all I did was boil it down for a while – while stirring the corn flour mix – after straining out the vegetables that had flavored it; because of the gelatin in this cut of meat, it needed no outside thickening agent.

• one 26-ounce goat neck purchased from Tony at the Consider Bardwell stand in the Union Square Greenmarket, seared on all sides over a medium-to-high flame until brown in 2 tablespoons of olive oil inside an oval enameled cast iron pot (with a cover to fit), removed from the pan and set aside, the heat reduced to medium and one chopped sweet yellow onion from Norwich Meadows Farm; a few ounces of a celery root, chopped, also from Norwich Meadows Farm; and one huge Rocambole garlic clove from Keith’s Farm added and cooked until colored, one branch of thyme from Stokes Farm and several interesting spices (1/2 tsp each of smoked piquante Spanish paprika, freshly-ground cumin, cinnamon, and coriander, plus a little less ground cardamom), cooked for 3 minutes, followed by over half a cup apple cider vinegar and a quarter of a cup of turbinado sugar, everything cooked until the liquid was reduced by half, 8 ounces of canned tiny Muti plum tomatoes with their juices, and a teaspoon of sea salt, brought to a boil,  topped with the lamb neck, water added until the lamb neck was a little more than half covered, the pot lid placed on top and the whole moved to a preheated slow-to-moderate* (300º) oven the oven and cook for approximately 2 hours, maybe a little longer, or until totally tender, the meat almost (or actually) falling from the bones, the pot removed from the oven, the the neck removed from the pot and allowed to cool until it could be handled enough to pick the meat from the bones,  then kept warm, while the cooking liquid with the vegetables and seasonings was passed through a strainer, the solids discarded, and the remaining liquid reduced until somewhat thickened (as they say, “able to coat a spoon”), the picked goat meat placed in the sauce and served

*I love to see the use of traditional measures of oven heat surviving beyond the age of solid fuel cookers; there’s also the holding-one’s-arm-in-the-oven-until-it-becomes-intolerable tip (if you can count to thirty it’s not hot enough for bread)

• coarsely-ground Iroquois White Corn Project white corn flour (hulled, ground, & roasted and hand crafted in Victor, New York as a program of the friends of Ganondagan, from the Greenmarket Regional Grains Project stall in the Union Square Greenmarket) cooked with water and whole milk (in a proportion of 3 to 1), finished with several tablespoons of several (4?) tablespoons of Organic Valley ‘Cultured Pasture Butter’, seasoned with sea salt
• the white and lighter green parts of a Japanese scallion from Norwich Meadows Farm, sliced, heated along with a tablespoon of fennel seed in one tablespoon of butter inside a small, heavy tin-lined copper pot until the scallion had softened and the fennel become pungent, then set aside while another tablespoon of butter, or a little more, was melted inside a larger heavy tin-lined copper pot and one 8-ounce Napa cabbage, also from Norwich Meadows Farm, roughly chopped, was added and stirred until wilted, after which the reserved scallion-fennel mixture, some sea salt, and a little freshly-ground black pepper were added, and the cabbage stirred some more, finished by tossing in the green tops of the scallions, chopped
• the wine with the main course was a rally great California (Napa) red, ‘Declaration’ 1849 Wine Company Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2014, the generous gift from an artist acquaintance, Saber

We’re not ‘sweet-toothed’, so ‘treats’ usually last weeks in our apartment. I had been very excited about picking up what is essentially a German fruit cake in the Greenmarket a number of days before Christmas, but we hadn’t been interested in a sweet course since. We were being very well entertained with good holiday savories.  Last night might have been no exception, but as it was probably the last of the winter holidays, we decided to finally pay our little Hutselbrot the homage it had awaited.

• thin slices of a small (150g) Runner & Stone Hutselbrot (local organic all-purpose flour, almond paste, organic cane sugar, local butter, local eggs, oranges, 70% chocolate) from their stand in the Union Square Greenmarket
• the wine was a Portuguese (Porto) port, Porto Dalva 20 Years Old Dry White Port

 

• the music throughout the meal was a gorgeous brand-new recording of a newly-assembled pastiche representing Vivaldi’s 1726 melodramma eroico pastorale, ‘Dorilla in Tempe’, Diego Fasolis conductiing I Barrochisti (additional information on the piece here)

[most of the pictures above were taken while the food was still in the kitchen, since there isn’t enough light in the dining gallery for well-focused images]