Notes from the Kitchen

I get excited about Spring cooking around January when I’m feeling done with pumpkins, squashes and kales. Every Winter, I start a notebook with pages of ideas for Spring dishes. My inspiration comes from all over—conversations with visiting chefs, ingredients that draw my attention while I'm dining out, the abundance of herbs and vegetables I anticipate from the garden or just thoughts I want to revisit. When Spring finally arrives, I’m ready to play with the ingredients.

We don’t get to spend much time in the garden or out foraging in the Winter, so the second it gets warm, I’m out on the property. The first thing I look for is miner’s lettuce—a wild lettuce that grows all around the Farm. Even after Spring begins, we have to wait for some ingredients to keep growing, so our early Spring menus are full of ingredients like miner’s lettuce, ground sorrel, ground cress and dandelion—all the great little edible wild greens that are the best when they’re young plants. Soon enough, pea tendrils, pea flowers, peas and carrot tops will arrive too. Then in late Spring, when the Indian pipe plants turn black and the Mayapples start to die off, we’ll find our first chanterelles—one of my favorite ingredients.

This Spring, I want everything on our menu to evoke some memory for our guests. Many of our dishes are presented in an elevated way, but at the heart, it’s still just really delicious food. I also like people to get excited about healthy eating in the Spring. We can use fewer preserves and more fresh ingredients this time of year, so everybody eats a little bit lighter in Spring. I think that lightness allows you to bring more flavor into the food— the menu doesn’t have to be so warming and comforting. Hopefully, our food shows that you can eat really healthily, and it can still be super delicious.