Today we launch asparagus with lemon as the 3pm special. The asparagus is from the Pioneer Valley, which Ayr claims is the Asparagus capital of the world. He might have some bias there… and Julian (PRK truck manager) who’s from Germany says his country is rightfully the asparagus capital of the world.
Come on out at 3pm for these. If you’re not near enough to come out and sample, you can watch Rolando’s demo. This is part of a series of training videos we’re building for all 3pm specials.
We did a seasonal sandwich design contest with MIT customers. MIT Medical put it all together and took submissions. We narrowed down the list from 30 to 6 finalists and invited those folks to join our weekly Food Development Meeting. Here are the 6 finalists:
A. Beets and horseradish mayo sandwich
B. Smoked gouda and apple sandwich
C. Seared carrot/ middle eastern style sandwich
D. Rutabaga/black pepper onions sandwich
E. Pumpkin/black bean sandwich
F. Leeks/breadcrumbs sandwich
We loved all of these, they’re all going into development, and chances are you’ll see a bunch of them on the menu in late autumn/early winter. We’re pretty excited about the beet + horseradish mayo sandwich. The customer who designed it grew up eating pickled beets out of a can in Hungary. Michael Docter of Winter Moon Roots says he’s going to supply us with some amazing beets next Winter. I thought string cheese could be a good match for the beets. What do you think? Which sandwich sounds most exciting to you?
To be honest, I’m not the best person to write this post. I’m a New Englander through-and-through and we don’t know what hush puppies are.
But I hear they’re delicious. And I hear people love them.
Ours are probably not very traditional, not much we do is. But I’ve never had anything like them in Boston. They’re corn-based. A bit of scallion and black pepper. They’re sort of fluffy, but just enough to be light, they still have a satisfying crunch. After I took this picture Lucia and I battled it out, they were gone before they cooled from the fryer.
Rolando started working on these just after our trip to North Carolina when we visited Counter Culture’s roasting facility.
Some of you have been asking about non-fried 3PM specials. Don’t worry, the snow is about to melt. In the meantime enjoy the winter comfort.
I love Beets! Lots of people say they hate beets. I wonder why. I suspect it’s because I didn’t grow up eating them, and had never had them canned. I’m guessing lots of people have only known them from a can. Lucia used to hate beets, now at least likes them a little. If you’ve been participating in Clover’s CSA program, you’ve been getting red beets from Winter Moon Roots.
So we thought we’d share our recipe for Borscht. We get tons of feedback at Clover and I’m not sure if any other item we serve gets more of a personal reaction from customers than the Borscht. Mostly they’re excited to hear we have Borscht and then after they see it, they say something like, “That’s not Borscht!” I get it. It’s a very personal thing for them. It has deep connections to culture (parents, grandparents, country, etc.). Borscht is a beet soup from Central and Eastern Europe, served cold or hot, with beef or vegetable stock, blended or chunky, often times with sour cream and dill. There are countless variations (and countless spellings) throughout these countries.
So what I did with the idea of making a Borscht recipe was to take Continue Reading →
For those of you picking up your Winter Moon Roots Winter CSA, you’ve been getting some delicious carrots. We know this is true, because we’re also buying them for the Clover menu. So we wanted to share our recipe for pickled carrots. This is one of the first recipes I developed at Clover. You may have seen it on top of the chickpea fritter.
Ayr mentioned these pickled vegetables he had at L’As du Fallafel in Paris. Early on, we learned, the thickness/thinness of the shredded carrots were of paramount importance. We started out with a cheese grater, then moved to the food processor attachments, but we were striking out on the size of the carrot pieces. Then we learned about some different shredder attachments that were sized using millimeters. We tried a couple of sizes and landed on the 1.5 mm size. Apparently the metric based shredders have some in between sizes that standard based shredders don’t have.
I then, based the brine recipe Continue Reading →
To accompany this week’s CSA, I thought it would be a good idea to share the first soup Clover ever made. Here is a collection of posts about this soup. Take a look at the dates. The first one is dated, the first week we opened back in early Nov 2008. That’s neat. Clover soup kits are a bit larger these days.
Minnie made this soup today at the HUB and she did a great job. Click the following link for recipe. Continue Reading →
These are probably the best-tasting root vegetables in New England right now, and I’m taking them all home.
Some of you know our aspirations to bring CSAs to fast food. The idea is pretty simple. Customers come to Clover, read about CSAs, sign up for one online, and return to Clover to pick up their share. We try to make it as painless as possible. Those of you who are getting a share today should let us know if we succeeded.
This is our first time doing a Winter CSA. We’re really honored to be working with Michael Docter. He’s been farming in Western Mass for the past 20 years. He bumped into the MIT truck 2 years ago, and said he wanted to grow for us one day. It took a year to get to a place where we could buy from him, and support CSA pickups too. We took sign-ups for the past 3 weeks and signed up 42 customers. And now everyone’s coming into the restaurant to get their shares. It’s really exciting for me to see it all come together. Rolando’s going to share one recipe for each pickup. Read on for the recipe for spiced carrot soup. Disclaimer: we are scaling these down from recipes that feed 100 people, so if you make it at home, let us know how it turned out. Continue Reading →
We’re here to make food you love, the kind you talk about and look forward to eating. The Clover Food Lab is serving up a new type of fast food. This food is local, it’s just-cut, when we can it is organic.
You can learn more about
our origins,
our food,
our mistakes,
and everything else about us at this website.
Ayr Muir
Founder and CEO
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