Berkshire Tidbits: Hawaiian Dining, Italian Cooking
For the first time, this Saturday, June 11, starting at noon, the James A. Modolo Post 8348 Great Barrington VFW, 800 South Main St., 413-528-9701, will be holding a clambake and barbecue benefit, on their fields by advance sale ticket only. No walk-ins. VFW bartenders have the tickets.
Food made by Smokey Sweet and GB Mobile Catering will start being served at 1 p.m. Adult tickets are $35 and include clams, barbecue and draft beer. Children 12 and under have their own menu and eat free.
The band On the Rocks will perform from 2 to 5. There will be a tug o' war tourney at 4.
Wilburton Inn in Manchester Village, Vt., has been hosting weekly Wednesday evening Farm Night vegetarian dinners, which they call "a local, organic vegetarian feast grown and prepared by our very own Earth Sky Time Community Farm," for a number of years.
This year, the first dinner will take place on Wednesday, June 8. The weekly dinners will continue through mid-September. They are served buffet-style on the outdoor terrace from 7 to 9.
See the website for a plethora of previous menus with inventive, intriguing dishes such as lemon tatsoi and barley pilaf, bok choi and green garlic quiche, millet and kasha with orange and basil, spinach and nasturtium salad, chickpea salad with scarlet turnips and coconut-lime-basil dressing, vegan spanikopita, chocolate beet cake, melopita/honey cake with fresh raspberries.
And so much more!
Specialty garden cocktails, local beer and spirits are available for purchase and live music livens each week's event. While walk-ins are welcome when there's room, these dinners are popular so it's best to call ahead for reservations: 802-362-2500.
The $25 cost includes gratuity and tax.
For those coming from the Berkshires (or anywhere else) who want to spend the night and enjoy the inn's lavish country breakfast the next morning, it being Vermont, this summer the inn offers what they title their Bernie Sanders Package: "We at the Wilburton support our local political hopefuls! Our local Earth Sky Time Farm produces Bernie Sanders pumpernickel bread on a daily basis in honor of Bernie. With the Bernie Sanders package, 10 percent of your stay will be contributed to Bernie’s campaign!"
Local cooking teacher and personal chef Marco Belli will be teaching students how to create one of his popular personal style Italian dinners at The Chef's Shop, 31 Railroad St. in Great Barrington, 413-528-0135, Friday, June 10, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. The extra half hour will ensure that the fresh pasta Marco will be teaching and preparing will be able to rest before rolling out and being shaped.
Chef Marco told me he doesn't really offer his students recipes, "because the recipes are fairly standard. I like to teach technique so they can do it themselves. Make to their liking. Take out what they don't like. Use what they prefer or have."
Based on his own food background, growing up in Pittsfield with a French grandmother and an Italian grandmother, Marco like to teach categories of foods people can expand on. He's been teaching simple cooking classes at the Bushnell-Sage Library's basement kitchen every other month for the last two years.
"We made risotto from scratch, not from a mix. It's not really that hard. We made polenta. Pasta with a Parmesan Alfredo sauce. We made pâte à choux (PAT-uh-shoe), the dough they make éclairs and cream puffs, profiteroles and gougère rolls[/cheese puffs] from. It's not really that hard," he said.
"People come away from my classes feeling they can go home and make their own."
He will be using food donated by The Chef's Shop partner Guido's Fresh Marketplace to make an entrée of fresh Italian pasta which he will top with shrimp and spring vegetables and sauce with white wine and garlic. He will prepare Italian sabayon with Marsala wine and fresh fruit.
"Then we all sit down and eat," he said. With a wine selection courtesy of Domaney's Fine Wines of Great Barrington.
The class costs $35 per person. Payment is required in advance with a 48-hour cancellation policy. The Chef's Shop offers students a 10 percent discount on purchases made on a class day and for a couple of days after. Call or email@TheChefsShop.com, to reserve a place.
How seasonal can you get?
This will be true food of the Italy I visited one June long ago.
In every city and small village and, even, on the train between Firenze/Florence and Milano, all the food was so unexpected and fresh and light. Pasta was only housemade, even in the tiniest, hole-in-the-wall trattoria and, I'm pretty sure no one used pasta machines, then. Tagliatelle con funghi e piselli/long, thin, flat egg noodles with wild mushrooms and fresh spring peas. Every part new to me. The word pasta was not even used in this country at that time.
Mmmnn… I wonder how they ever made it on that train? One hour. Maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. Eleven courses. Impossible! But that is a story in itself.
And sabayon, the freshest of egg yolks laced with Marsala, also called zabaglione, was a frequent, light-as-air dessert, frothed from scratch in copper basins over simmering water in front of us by waiters with whisks — no electric mixers for them — just before it got spooned — warm — into large, long-stemmed wine goblets.
Heaven!
I've been invited to watch, participate and taste this Friday. I'll let you know how it goes.
This is the time of year those who love to eat street food should look for Grampie's Dog House on North Street just past the corner of West Street.
On nice days, you can stand around, order one of proprietor, chef and bottle washer Ernie Jordan's hot dogs or a sausage on a bun, choose your toppings, eat right there, watch traffic wait for the lights to change then whiz by.
Ernie Jordan's been near that corner in front of what is now Hot Harry's for, maybe, 19 years.
The North Adams Farmers Market, in the St. Anthony's parking lot at the intersection of Center St./Routes 2 and 8 and Holden St. in North Adams, will have its first market of the 2016 season on Saturday, June 11 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
From 10 to 12, you can shop to live music from Tony & Shira.
The market has found a pleasant way to raise money for itself.
From opening until 11 a.m., shoppers can purchase a raffle ticket for $20 to win a CSA produce share to either Many Forks Farm or Square Roots Farm. Then, at noon, there will be a drawing for the winner, who does not have to be present to win. The share is expected to be worth at least $500 in weekly fresh produce.
The vendors will include Caroline's Scottish Shortbread, Clarksburg Bread Co., Gray Raven Farm, Hop Hollar Farm, Jaeschke Fruit & Flowers Center, Many Forks Farm, MonArtistic Pet Products, Morin Gardens, Mountain Girl Farm, handcrafted rustic wooden home decor by MP Rustic Decor, Natalya's North Yeast Bakery, cutting boards by Lawrence Sands, Senecal's Sugarhouse, Mark Smigel, Square Roots Farm, all natural skincare products by Treetop Natural Homemade Health Products, fine silver jewelry by Uniquely Yours.
On Sunday, June 12, from 3 to 5, chef Julie Gale of At the Table Cooking School in Hillsdale, N. Y., will be giving the last class in her "Cooking at the Chef's Shop" series, 31 Railroad St. in Great Barrington, 413-528-0135.
Julie will be teaching Grilling Basics. She will be making Korean barbecued shortribs/galbi which are thinly cut across the bones, marinated and then quickly grilled. She will also be making bacon-cheddar hamburgers and chicken yakitori skewers. All Julie's classes are hands on participatory. When the food is done, the class eats.
The cost is $60 per person. Payment is required in advance with a 48-hour cancellation policy. The Chef's Shop offers students a 10 percent discount on purchases made on a class day and for a couple of days after. Call or email@TheChefsShop.com, to reserve a place.
Julie will be doing four summer cooking classes at The Chef's Shop. There will be two in July and two in August. Each will feature the seasonal foods of a different Asian cuisine: Thai on Thursday, July 14; Japanese on Thursday, July 28; Korean on Sunday, August 7 and Vietnamese on Thursday, August 18. The cost will be $40 per person per class.
More details later.
Multitalented West Stockbridge artist Diana Felber spent the winter contacting and visiting other artists to create her first season of exhibitions and other art events at her new Diana Felber Gallery at 6 Harris St. across from Truc Orient Express Restaurant in West Stockbridge, 413 854-7002, dianafelbergallery.com. It's open every day except Tuesday, "noon-ish to 6-ish," she says.
Diana started with a well-attended soft opening on a damp Saturday in mid-May. Her first show includes work in clay, wood, wire, photography, paintings, jewelry for which she had a grand opening and artists' reception the next Saturday, attended by several hundred people.
She arranged for and succeeded in turning a fairly rough little building into an airy, elegant space which is just finishing its first exhibit with two artists' talks on Sunday, June 12and Sunday, June 26, from 4:30 to 5:30.
On the 12th, internationally known clay artist Paul Chaleff will speak about his development. On the 26th, sculptor and photographer Naomi will discuss her work.
The gallery's second summer exhibit will include landscape paintings, watercolor collaged still lifes, photographs, tapestries and those same indescribably attractive wire sculptures of nude women by Naomi Grossman that are in the first show. The exhibit will run from Wednesday, June 15 through Thursday, June 31 with an artists' reception on Saturday, June 18 from 5:30 to 7:30.
Many people will appreciate the black and white photography exhibit of homeless Berkshire women, "I Am Not Who You Think I Am," by photographer Julie McCarthy, which is at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, 28 Renne Ave. in Pittsfield through Saturday, June 25. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 to 4.
Julie has taken sympathetic and revealing photographs of each woman, sometimes two women or a woman and a child, and shows them simply, above a brief writing each woman has done about herself. Each portrait is a story. At least one story. Maybe, more than one.
On Thursday, June 16, at 6 p.m. chef Chris Ryan, co-owner with his wife, Jasmine, of Cork 'N' Hearth restaurant, 635 Laurel St./Route 20 on Laurel Lake in Lee, 413 243-0535, will be hosting a 5-course 5-wine Hawaiian-themed wine dinner with the participation of Jim Nejaime of Spirited Wines of Lenox.
After a recent visit to Hawaii, where Jasmine was born and grew up, the couple came back with some new and some old recipes that reach into Jasmine's culinary heritage and inspired Chris to create this classic Island dinner to pair with specially chosen balanced wines.
Sarah Barry, wine educator of MS Walker of Somerville, Conn., will discuss the wines during the dinner.
The Ryans have decided that there will be an unspecified prize given to the guest who attends this dinner in the best/most authentic Hawaiian-style attire. Time to research.
The cost of this pairing dinner will be $85 including gratuity and tax. Call for reservations. Vegetarian options are available when you make your reservations.
This unusual — for the Berkshires — wine dinner menu and pairings will be:
fresh tropical fruit gazpacho of Maui gold pineapple, upcountry papaya, Lahaina mango and fresh vegetables in a zesty tomato broth
2015 Margerum Riviera Dry Rosé, Santa Barbara
Panko-crusted coconut shrimp served with a Hula grill-style sweet chili sauce
2014 Au Bon Climat W
inery Pinot Blanc & Pinot Gris, Santa Barbara
Kalua pork lettuce wraps made with Haole/non-native-Hawaiian style shredded pork with a hint of smoke and housemade bbq sauce served on fresh Bibb lettuce with kimchee
2013 Chanin Vineyards Pinot Noir 'Duvarita', Santa Barbara
Kiawe wood-fired filet mignon, lightly dusted with black lava Hawaiian sea salt, grilled and served with a pinot noir sauce and sweet uala/Hawaiian sweet potato cake
2009 Mayacamas Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Lilikoi/passion fruit sweet cheese served with a fresh mango coulis
Champy Brut Sparkling Lilikoi Mango Bellini
Tags: berkshire tidbits, judith lerner,
