This blog is devoted to consuming and preserving our local food sources and to embracing what is in season. Eating what grows around us can help us eat healthier, less expensively and will help us participate in sustainable living by caring for our planet. Hopefully, Seasoned Fork may assist you in trying seasonal farm to table ingredients for simple everyday recipes as well as help you explore more elaborate recipes for special occasions and holidays.
I have been cooking and teaching in my kitchen at The Greenporter Hotel, for over a decade. I was always a cook at heart even though my education and career took me in other directions. I found that learning about local food is how you learn about culture. How people feed themselves is key in maintaining the health and welfare of a society. By sharing recipes and techiques, I hope to help make good food accessible to all people. I keep a garden at The Greenporter and encourage all of you to plant something. Some herbs in your windowsill, tomatoes during the summer, radishes in chilly weather. Use them in everything from soups to salads to lavender for desserts and cocktails. Having a kitchen on the North Fork of Long Island is every chef’s dream where you have local products sprouting in farms all around you. Whether it’s local oysters, duck, mushrooms or Striped Bass, all of it is fresh including the wines to accompany your meal. We cook with as many local ingredients available to us year-round. In the winter you’ll find us here on the weekends and from Memorial Day to Labor Day and during the high season we are here most days. Let us know next time you stop at a farmstand and pick up some really beautiful locally grown or harvested goodies.
The idea for Seasoned Fork, was born of the the many interesting culinary inquiries I would receive from visitors to the North Fork who would visit farmstands during their weekends away from the big city. What do I do with the cauliflower I bought at the farmstand? How do I cook fava beans? Butternut squash? Turnips? How do I preserve this food and get as many meals out of it so can avoid throwing it away? These were the questions I received at the end of a relaxing wine-filled weekend as my visitors set off back to Manhattan, Boston or Greenwich as they considered using their farm stand purchases. I began to answer these city dwellers who had been my guests at Greenporter Hotel and Cuvee, my inn and bistro in Greenport, Long Island via email and as the emails kept coming in.
As a North Fork chef and gardener, I am endlessly inspired by leftovers–whether they are fruit peels or vegetable pulp from juicing, I strive to reduce and eliminate the food waste in my kitchen by coming up with new recipes. I hope you will be inspired to reduce the food waste in your own kitchen while cooking delicious and healthful meals for your family!
