Party shopping on the North Fork: Better than Mrs. Dalloway

We have a barbecue party every year in early June to celebrate my husband’s birthday.  It is such a beautiful time of year out here.  The weather is usually great, but I do remember one year when it was in the 50s, and another year when it was in the 90s.  This year they were predicting thunderstorms and there was even a tornado warning, but they spared us and the spectacular weather we have been having this season held out all afternoon.

One of the many great pleasures of my life is driving out Sound Avenue (the northerly of the North Fork’s two main arteries) with party planning in my head.  It takes me past Briermere, past horse farms, vineyards and innumerable planted fields with avenues of sight down their crop rows opening up for a split-second as I drive by. 

I love to cook for parties but I’m careful not to overdo it.  It’s no fun to be so exhausted and stressed from cooking and preparations that you can’t enjoy talking with your guests.  Believe me, I’ve been “in the weeds” (as they say in the restaurant biz) at many of my own parties.  This time I managed to stay out of the weeds by planning a menu that combined a few homemade items with some prepared foods from local institutions.

My first stop was Sang Lee.  We’ve been devouring every bit of our CSA items (mainly in the form of salads, salads, salads), but for a party I needed extra provisions. 

I picked up some exquisite little baby squash to grill along with several bunches of asparagus.  Perfect multicolor carrots, sugar-snap peas and cucumbers to serve as crudites with dips.  Two bunches of beets to steam-roast and marinate, and local Catapano Farm goat cheese to top them.  Also three 8-ounce bags of their pre-washed baby spinach with a bottle of Sang Lee’s own Asian Dressing to make a quick, easy salad.  (Pretty much the only time I allow myself to use a bottled dressing is Sang Lee’s Asian Dressing, which everybody loves, for a party when I don’t want to take the time to dress it my usual way.)

My next stop was for vino.

There are so many wonderful vineyards on the North Fork, we are literally spoiled for choice.  I swung into Lieb on my way back west and picked up a mixed case of Bridge Lane chardonnay (unoaked), Pinot Blanc (a Lieb specialty and a personal favorite grape) and Cabernet Franc (my favorite of the local red wine varietals).

In the old days, before I had my son, I was deeply into wine and bought all kinds of local vintages to age in my basement.  I don’t do that any more.  But for a party featuring local foods, it only makes sense to serve local wines.

For hors d’oeuvres, I made beets with goat cheese (marinated beets with a dollop of goat cheese and a sprinkling of fleur de sel.  This was the opening spread.

The beet hors d’oeuvres were a big hit, as always. 

Here are the veggies before they went onto the grill:

The rest of the menu included barbecued spare ribs (homemade, yummy), Sang Lee spinach salad with their Asian Dressing, and, from another North Fork institution — the Modern Snack Bar, in Aquebogue — delicious potato salad, cole slaw and fried chicken. 

As my cousin once remarked:  “any place with ‘modern’ in the title is certain not to be.”   So it is with the Modern Snack Bar:  it has not changed since 1960 at the latest, thank god.  It still has the same businesslike waitresses in uniform dresses and a classic, limited, home-cooked menu that is totally unaffected by any food trend of the last fifty years.  In fact, while a large part of its clientele comes from the retirement home across the street, I could imagine the place becoming trendy these days simply by virtue of its immunity to trends.

Dessert was two fresh strawberry-cream pies from Briermere.  They were devoured before I could snap any pictures, but I can describe this pie for you:   a sweet, flaky crust, piled with not-too-sweet mixture of whipped cream cheese and whipped heavy cream, and on top, a huge pile of fresh strawberries and a light glaze.  Some of our repeat guests at this barbecue dream about this pie all year (myself included).  It’s only available for a few weeks, when strawberries are in season, and it’s a perfect way to celebrate a birthday at the beginning of summer.

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The meaning of life. Or, salad.

Until I was about 20, I never ate a salad.  I hated salad.

Now, salad is my favorite food.  But I feel it is widely misunderstood.  Salad is not a bowl of lettuce or supermarket mesclun with wedges of cold off-season tomato and bottled dressing poured on top.  (And by the way, how many ways can restaurants misspell the word mesclun?  I know, restaurant menu typos are a classic white-person problem, but seriously, I have even seen it spelled “mescaline.”)

Salad, to me, is a carefully chosen, balanced selection of greens and a few other items tossed with oil and lemon juice or vinegar, salt and pepper.  Period.

The place that changed my mind about salad was Russia.  I visited a family at their dacha outside St. Petersburg, where they spent their summer weekends.  It was very basic, with no indoor plumbing except for a cold-water kitchen sink.  Their grandmother lived at this dacha full-time in the summer and was an avid gardener.  Almost all their food came from her garden, and they made a salad from vegetables they harvested twice every day — at lunch and again at dinner.  Their salad contained freshly cut lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, and, most memorably, loads of fresh parsley and dill.  Everything was chopped small.  They added a chopped soft-boiled egg or two (from their hens), and dressed it with plain vegetable oil, distilled white vinegar, salt and pepper.  It was amazing.

Another misunderstanding about salad is that it is easy to prepare.  Usually, it’s not.  It is the most time-consuming dish I make, and I generally try to avoid time-consuming dishes.  But salad is a labor of love. 

A good salad can make a meal.  I prefer to have it with the main meal, as a counterpoint to whatever protein I am serving.  In the summertime, I like to serve grilled meat or fish, salad, and bread for dinner.  That is really all you need.

Today was a perfect spring day.  Since my Sang Lee CSA has not started yet, I went to Briermere Farm in Riverhead to see what they had.  Briermere is a good place to go in the spring, because Riverhead averages 5-10 degrees warmer than the south fork, so their products are usually harvested  earlier.  There is a reason that Riverhead has been an agricultural center for generations: it’s a great place to grow fruits and vegetables.  Briermere has fantastic fruit.  They use this fruit in their delicious pies and baked goods for which they are justly famous, but I rarely buy those because they are way too caloric.  I just buy the fruit, and sometimes also vegetables. 

The great “fruit writer” David Karp had an article in the New York Times a few years ago about rhubarb, in which he noted that Briermere has five acres planted with rhubarb — probably the largest in the state.  Five acres is a lot of rhubarb!

They had rhubarb today, of course (it’s always one of the first crops of the season), but I didn’t buy any.  I just bought veggies.  This was my haul.

It’ll take several days for me to use all of this stuff.  Tonight’s menu was grilled pork chops, grilled asparagus, salad, and bread. 

The pork chops I marinated in an ad-hoc asian marinade, with soy, rice wine, sesame oil, sriracha, sugar, ginger and worcestershire sauce.

The asparagus I tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and grilled them after I took the pork chops off the grill.  This is a great way to prepare asparagus. 

The salad contained baby arugula, scallion greens, multicolor greenhouse cherry tomatoes, grown on the North Fork and sold at Briermere, and a few crumbles of Maytag Blue cheese.  I like salads that have a little bit of something rich —like an egg, avocado, bacon, or cheese — and in this case, the Maytag Blue did the trick.  

I always use the same method of dressing salad.  First, I drizzle it lightly with olive oil and sprinkle it with fleur du sel and pepper, then I toss it with my hands.  Then I drizzle on red wine vinegar and toss it again.  Fini!

The salad was simple but good, mostly because Briermere’s baby arugula was extremely delicate, but still had a strong peppery bite that is missing from lots of plastic-box baby arugula.  I’ve bought full-grown arugula from Briermere later in the summer season in past years, and it’s always super-spicy.  These babies were obviously thinned from that future crop.   

My picture doesn’t do it justice.  If I am going to have a real blog, I am going to have to learn proper food photography!

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