What could be more fun than judging a cooking contest with four of Medina’s best chefs at the Saturday farmers’ market?  Picture a glorious September morning with rows of market tents covering tables filled with sweet corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, bright bouquets of flowers on a green common.  Now add the smells of garlic, olive oil, and roasting apples.

   I could really get used to this job! 

Gary Quesada – Main Street Café, Chris Rose – Good Taste Culinary (Catering), John Kolar – Thyme, the Restaurant, Mark Simak - The Medina Steakhouse & Saloon, and August Scarpelli – Sully’s Irish Pub worked their craft putting forth samples for the crowds and beautiful plates for the judges. 

Everything was tasty, but there was an important difference between the winning chef, John Kolar of Thyme the Restaurant, and the others.  One of the criteria for judging was “creative use of products from the market.”  This was not the only criteria, but John’s understanding of the use of local, seasonal foods made his offering outstanding in every category.

 He didn’t say so, but I could tell that John started with the market—what’s in season and how to make those products as delicious and visually appealing as possible.  The result was an acorn squash stuffed with a mixture of butternut squash, other vegetables and gnocchi made from market potatoes.   There was a side of butternut squash soup flavored with a little vanilla bean that enhanced its sweetness in a surprising and subtle way.  John clearly knows his ingredients and wants to show off the best our local bounty has to offer.  This is the mindset of the locavore chef.

Not every chef has this understanding or commitment.  There were other yummy treats that contained products from the market, like Sulley’s smoothie made with raspberry and chocolate goat cheese from the Caprine Dairy and a beautiful heirloom tomato and beet salad with local lettuces offered by Good Taste.

But I hope those talented chefs learned something at the market that I have learned over the years: getting to know your ingredients from the ground up, restoring the experience of seasonality, starting with your local farmers to build your menu can be a delicious and rewarding enterprise: for your farmers, your customers and your restaurant!

Congratulations, John (he won the customers’ choice first place as well!)

Every year, all of us at fire gear up for the weekend when we make Dr Katz’s Pickles.  My dad has made these pickles since I was 7 or 8 and always included me and my family in the process.  At times, my mom was not interested in dealing with the mess, but the results were always savored and used. 

This year, my dad trusted me and my crew to do it without him.  The process begins about 2 months before, when we order all of the jars and lids.  As we ran out last year with 600 jars, we decided to up it to 720 this year.  Wow, is that a lot of jars. 

After we get the jars, we need distilled water, local pickles, local hot peppers including finger hots and Hungarian hots – and the most important ingredient of all- flowering dill.  This is where the problems occur, as you never quite know when it will be flowering.  We usually find out a week before and have to line up the rest of the local product within that time.  We also have to find the staff to help pack the pickles carefully, with passion and scientific exactness.  One slight alteration to the recipe and the pickles may become compost.

This year, the hardest part was finding local pickles that were small enough to fit in the jars.  We like big pickles, but we have to get at least 5 in a jar.  This year, we received 1 delivery that had to be returned and by the second try – got the right size pickles.

It is always a great day for me as I remember packing pickles over the years with my family.  I am able to show my crew the importance of teamwork and care with this family recipe.  Every employee has tasted the pickles and loves them, so it is fun for them to see the process.  We work diligently for 9-10 hours, measuring salt, pickling spice and garlic.  We squeeze the pickles in the jars and cut really spicy peppers, occasionally getting heat rashes from our spiced fingers and hands.  Even after washing hands and many hours later, the heat is still around, so we don’t forget the daylong process.  I smell the peppers until I am fast asleep.

Once the picles are packed, we top the jars with the aromatic dill flowers and seal the jars.  They get shaken a few times and then we wait, and wait.  In 6 weeks we will get to experience the local harvest, when we open our first of the 720 jars.

Hopefully we will make it through the year with what we have made.  We top our burgers with the pickles, we sell sides of pickles, we sell them as gifts and we have some die hard customers that come in every other week – to get their fix. 

It is a special ritual that we look forward to all year, and luckily, we are able to speak about almost everyday. 

Doug Katz, owner and chef, www.firefoodanddrink.com

What a great market this last weekend at Shaker square. Melons are finally starting to come in with some variety, we picked up some Passport (a honeydew cantaloupe cross very sweet and soft,) French cantaloupes (the most aromatic  and superb with a bit of sea salt,) Korean melon (a yellow skinned white flesh melon with a good bit of crunch) from Rainbow Farm. I cleaned them out mostly for the lack of planning cause I should have called in a day ahead; sorry Tina. I shop a bit compulsively on Saturday mornings, and while it does make my life a bit hectic it feels right. A few phone calls save a lot of runaround but it always just hits me when I’m in front of the stand, chatting with whomever “ Ahh, look at these red candy onions!” and then I know what’s going out today.

    We have been stocking up on garlic, a mix of hard neck from the Green Corps Stand and the Music and Spanish red from Rootstown Organics for 2 weeks now, it seems we can never get enough in time for the holidays and winter. We have also been doing a lot of pickling and room temperature preservation with a natural ferment (think crock pickles and sauerkraut) so we are going to do a test run with the music garlic this week and I’ll get back to you and let ya know how it turned out.

       Tomatoes are still having a tough time with the cool evenings but we just got our first few heirlooms from Heritage Lane. They grow such an amazing variety of produce; I got half of my list there: White cabbage, leeks, banana peppers, chilis, basil, parsley, cilantro, baby zukes, tomatillos and two eggplant. Moving on down the line we couldn’t have been happier to see the shitakes of the perfect size at Killbuck’s stand and promptly got them stuffed with country sausage, white grass fed Colby  and diced candy onion and run out to Mary’s house just in the nick of time.

     This weekend we had a very cool event for the SOS dinner pre party at Michael and Liz Symon’s house. There were a lot of culinary heavy hitters there so I was driving myself crazy with details while we smoked a hog for 24 hours. All in all it was great, I love feeding people that appreciate and pay attention to food and not just to filling up. It was great talking with some folks and then getting tickets to the SOS dinner for the next day was a real treat.

     After the dinners and the hog roast it was nice to get in my garden on Sunday morning and prep my winter beds. I’ve been getting spent oyster columns from Tom at Killbuck and using it as mulch and tilling it is. As well as the 2.5-4 tons of food scraps that got composted out of the kitchen last year and the generous amount of goat manure from Jean at Mackenzie Creamery we have been very fortunate with our yields this year. Hoping to get the turnips, beets, chard, cardoons in this week, and follow with the kale and rapini, and winter spinach by the end of next week. With any luck we should be getting the low tunnel frames in by the beginning of September. This is my first year of any season extension beyond burying my crops with leaves, so the challenges should be plentiful. Wish me luck.

Cheers,

Ben

It’s such a simple idea.  We know the chefs around Cleveland who use local products have the best tasting food and most interesting menus.  So why not seek out the locavore chefs when you travel?  It is, by default, what we do when we travel abroad, because “national” or “regional” foods are, in fact, local foods or at least based on local ingredients.  This may be the most exciting opportunity in the “travel close to home” trend that has yet to be recognized.  The enthusiasm for local foods that has been fueled by the explosion of farmers’ markets across the county makes it easier than even to find restaurants that offer the taste of the place.

Last summer I went with my sister-in-law to the open farm tour at Polyface Farm in Virginia.  The lunch served that day was so local it had been alive or in the ground on the farm just days before!  But for dinner the next night we decided to find a restaurant Staunton, where we were staying, that featured farmers on the menu.  The Staunton Grocery was just what we were looking for–everything was fresh, seasonal, and prepared with skill and affection.  Our next time together we were in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and the local food passion took us to the Route 7 Grill–another farm to table success.

It has become my guiding principle when I travel.  Find the restaurant that features farmers on the menu and you are certain to have a delicious and memorable meal.  I was recently in Washington D.C., where I met Dean Zimmerman of Dino’s whose enthusiam for local farm products is so intense that he regularly sends email blasts to his customers about what he bought at the farmers’ market or from local farms that will be on the menu this week.  My three course fixed prix ($35) dinner started with white peaches from Heyser’s Farm wrapped in procuitto!  As we were leaving, he collared us to talk about the wild blackberries that were ripening in the backyards of a Maryland housing development, where foragers go each summer to pick and resell the sweet bounty.  He could hardly wait for the flats of berries they would bring him.

Cleveland is extraordinarily blessed with chefs who are sourcing as much as they can from local farmers.  For years, Parker Bosley was the lone champion of local foods and his efforts consistently put Cleveland on the Gourmet Magazine list of top 50 restaurants in the U.S.  But now, for a number of reasons, Northeast Ohio has an ever growing number of chefs who are connecting with local farmers to create some of the tastiest meals anywhere. 

Parker, of course, trained many of these new chefs.  Others, thanks to the Northern Ohio chapter of Slow Food, have experienced Terra Madre (see the link) and sampled “local” foods from around the world at the Salone del Gusto.  Some grew up with families that raised fruits and vegetables, canned, jammed, baked, and otherwise consumed the local harvest.  And many more are learning from farmers and producers as farmers’ markets spring up across the region.

I have invited these chefs to tell their own stories in this category.  Come back and visit often to learn more about what these folks are cooking up for us from the bounty of the western reserve!

Mary