Sunday, July 20, 2008

Weekend in the Caskills (Caprese, Grilled Pork, Produce)

The local produce has emerged in New York's Catskills mountains. This weekend we hit our favorite farm stand and popped up to Kingston to visit the farmers' market and a favorite butcher. For any New Yorkers reading, I should note that Kingston's market is useful for a few interesting items like zucchini blossoms, gooseberries, and fresh mozzarella, but for your typical farm produce, it is expensive and sadly of mixed quality (that's not to say there isn't good stuff to be found, just be choosy). For wonderfully fresh produce, we go to a farm stand located at the back of Gill's Farm in Hurley NY, right off their fields.
Gills Farm Stand
We walked away with a ton of veggies and an enormous armful of fresh basil for making pesto, some of which Lisl used Saturday night to make her fried zucchini blossoms (the subject of another blog post).
Summer Veggies
Summer Fruit

Hot, humid weather inspires a simple, cool lunch -- in this case, a Caprese salad, with slices of tomato, fresh basil, mozzarella, and drizzlings of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper.
Caprese Salad

While we were in Kingston, we stopped by our favorite butcher shop, Fleishers, which not only has the most amazing grass-fed and organic meats, it is also run by the nicest couple (and I just learned they hit the Saveur "Top 100" list for 2008). I purchased two porterhouse pork chops and let them spend the day marinating in the fridge covered in olive oil, white wine vinegar, white wine, grain mustard, and a scattering of fresh oregano, salt and pepper.

Grilling Pork
I grilled them that evening to excellent effect, and while I'd like to give my marinade and grilling skills much of the credit, I think it really belongs to the Berkshire (aka Kurobuta) pork that Fleishers carries.

Wax Beans

The full dinner menu ended up being fried zucchini blossoms to start, then a main course of grilled pork, corn on the cobb (nothing like freshly picked corn), and wax beans (boiled for three minutes then tossed with some butter, fresh oregano, and salt/pepper). We served it with a chilled Malbec Rose from Crios, which I highly recommend.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice produce pictures!

That sounds like the perfect summer meal, and you're making me miss farmstand corn. While I love my farmers' market the corn there is always picked the day before; I buy it the next morning but usually don't cook it until dinner that evening.

Growing up my family always frequented farm stands where the corn was picked multiple times a day and often we'd stop in before dinner, wait for a batch to come in from the field, then take it home and cook it. The corn would be less than an hour old and when you've had corn that's truly fresh everything else pales in comparison.