Peaches arrived late Monday afternoon. 20,500 pounds of them– fragrant, fuzzy and lusciously juicy. We’ll spend the next two weeks hand-peeling and pitting them for our irresistible Red Haven Peach Preserves.
It’s messy and monotonous and completely exhausting, and it’s one of the coolest things we do here at American Spoon. We love peach season.
Carl and Cornelia Dhaseleer are fixtures at the local farmers’ markets. They farm a beautiful piece of land just south of Charlevoix, and many of the Brandywine tomatoes for our Heirloom Tomato Preserves are delivered to our kitchen by Carl himself. The Dhaseleers are also deeply committed to their community, and they host a series of concerts and events in their century-old barn to foster those community connections.
Last week, Carl and Cornelia invited us to join them for their first-ever farm dinner. Carl set up old wooden tables and chairs in the field beside the barn and Cornelia hung empty jam jars filled with wildflowers from their ancient apple trees.
Chris, our Culinary Director, made a savory potato tart and a fresh pea panzanella with produce he’d picked up from Carl earlier in the day, and we all sat outside in the fading sunlight sipping chilled white wine and enjoying food that had been grown in the fields we could see in the distance.
It was an altogether lovely evening, so lovely that we’ve already begun to plan the next farm dinner with the Dhaseleers. We’ll share details as we finalize them, and we hope you’ll be able to join us there beside the barn in the green shade of the apple trees.
UPDATE 08.04.11:
Join us on Saturday, August 13th for another dinner on the farm. We’ll post the menu a few days before the event once we know what produce will be available, but we’re planning a delicious seasonal meal. We’ll have grilled steak and three accompaniments made with fresh produce from Dhaseleer Farm, followed by dessert made with fresh local fruit and American Spoon Preserves. After dinner, the George Cole Quintet performs its original jazz music in the Dhaseleers’ barn.
Tickets for this event are $40 and will be available starting Friday, August 5th in our Petoskey, Harbor Springs and Charlevoix stores. Space is limited, so don’t wait long.
For more information, please call us at 800-222-5886, ext. 3008. Map and directions here.
Rhubarb grows like crazy throughout the upper Midwest—in long, tidy rows on rural farms, in ruffled red and green clusters by barns and backyard fences, and in scrappy patches at the edges of alleys. Wherever it grows, it grows in abundance. Midwestern homesteaders dubbed it “pie plant” and revered rhubarb for its thrillingly acid flavor. The allure of rhubarb is timeless. We modern-day Midwesterners still revel each spring in the arrival of this vegetable whose vibrant crimson stalks we treat as fruit.
There is always pie, but this Spring there’s also an incredibly beautiful Rhubarb-Hibiscus Conserve. Last week, our friends at Pond Hill Farm in Harbor Springs harvested 1400 pounds of their field-grown rhubarb for us. Less than twenty four hours later it was simmering away in our copper kettles. We macerated chopped chunks of this lovely rhubarb in Michigan beet sugar and combined the resulting juice with a tea made from dried hibiscus flowers to create the ruby red syrup in which the delicious chunks are preserved. Hibiscus and rhubarb share a similar tartness, but while rhubarb has a bold, flashy astringency, hibiscus is much more subtle, with lovely floral undercurrents that soften and mellow the sharp acid of our puckery pie plant.
Our Rhubarb-Hibiscus Conserve captures the first harvest of the season in all its zippy, zingy wonder and enhances it with the lingering floral notes of tropical hibiscus. It’s wonderful with freshly whipped cream or triple crème brie, and best of all, it marks the beginning of another summer filled with the exceptional fruits of this special place.
Available online now and in stores on Monday.
Spring was slow in arriving to Northern Michigan this year, but with near-90 degree temperatures on the heels of a lovely Memorial Day weekend, the signs are everywhere.
Spring moves swiftly through the woods and waterways, leaving an abundance of green in her path and rousing wild mushrooms and watercress and leeks from their winter dormancy.
She dances across orchards and farmland, peppering the landscape with blossoms and blooms and bursts of bright color.
Finally, she settles in over our towns, transforming them into bustling resorts and filling the American Spoon stores and Café with friends new and old. As spring melts into summer, we look forward to welcoming you back to this special place and to sharing the preserved bounty of our beloved Northern Fruitlands.
American Spoon’s Spring catalog should arrive at your home sometime this week, and because so many of our customers tell us how much they love reading each season’s letter from Justin, we thought we’d share this Spring’s letter here. Enjoy!
Greetings from Northern Michigan.
After a winter of forgetting summer’s pleasures, spring in our Northern Fruitlands is a time for remembering. The first clues are faint and few: a patch of last year’s grass rises from beneath the snow drifts glistening like spun gold, a pool of water that reflects the sky forms on the ice of Little Traverse Bay. The first morning of mild breezes holds the subtle scents of waking soil and a sip of the sweet sap dripping from the maples as it runs up from thawing roots stirs something akin to happiness.
A drive on a mid May afternoon through the Northern Fruitlands from Charlevoix to Northport is a joy ride among panoramic proofs that nothing has been lost or forgotten under the snow. Up on the hilltops of the lake view farms the old apricots trees erupt first risking their red and white flowers that show from a distance as veils of the palest pink. On the airy heights just below, the voluptuous white blooms of sweet cherries soon appear along glistening burgundy limbs followed everywhere by abundant tarts bursting pristine popcorn on charcoal drawn branches against the greening hills. Just as the cherry petals begin to fall, the peach orchards turn comes, their shocking salmon flowers and tawny branches flaming against the still cool skies. And finally, with the warmth moving down into the valleys the gorgeous apple blossoms open on muscular trees of every age and shape. The land remembers all; the trees still know their parts. Spring has come at last and all the treasured fruits of summer are sure to follow.
We look forward to seeing you in our stores again in the months ahead, and on your next visit to Petoskey take time to stroll down East Lake Street to the Bear River. A short hike along its banks reveals how our legendary river has been revitalized with footpaths, a new pedestrian bridge and a mile of cascading white water rapids perfect for river kayaks. In the meantime, please let us know how you like our newly-redesigned catalog, in which we strive to honor the crucial connections among our dedicated local growers, the artisans in our kitchen, and you our customers. Here is the fruit of our land, the work of our hands, may it bring you pleasure!
Justin Rashid
President & Co-founder
Facebook