What is Chris eating? When we toured the field at Siena, the crew was planting dahlia tubers. They get planted in warm soil, will grow all summer and will be ready for harvest in the fall. They reminded us of sunchokes, so we got to talking about whether the tubers are edible and it turns out they are! Are they delicious?
Do you want a beautiful box of produce for a fraction of what you’d pay in the grocery store? Do you want to invest in a farm’s success and be with them throughout the harvest season? Do you think you hate eggplants but you’ve just never had a good one? It might be time to look into a CSA (or farmshare).
I remember exactly the moment we started celebrating May the 4th (“May the Force” be with you). We were on a planning call about meal boxes and we were talking about how we were going to launch our Taco Tuesday program on Cinco de Mayo (May the 5th). Chris accidentally said “May the 4th” and Ayr said, “May the 4th! We should do a Star Wars Box!”
Each year, early spring is a busy time at the Clover kitchen because we have 2 of our tastiest boxes, usually back-to-back. For the Passover box, a lot of care goes into the kashering of the kitchen, with Rabbi Dolinger coming in to ensure the box is totally Kosher for Passover via Lighthouse Kosher.
That photo is corn fritters drizzled with maple syrup. We just started frying them up for a 2pm special – and they’re an element of our Maple Meal Box. If you head away from the city this time of year, you’ll see signs for sugar shacks, where maple sap gets boiled down into syrup and little restaurants pop up to serve pancakes, corn fritters, cider donuts, and dill pickles (to cut through the sweetness of the fresh syrup).
You’ve been asking! And finally we can announce: sunchokes are here, starting tomorrow, 3/1. Thanks to Pete’s Greens in VT for getting us local sunchokes.
At breakfast we’ll be making The Sunchoke Truffle: fluffy house-baked pita, creamy truffled butter, caramelized onions, a 6.5 minute egg, and thin, crispy sunchoke slices. At lunch and dinner: The Sunchoke Mushroom: scallion-black-pepper mayo, fresh arugula, roasted crimini mushrooms, fried brined onions, and roasted sunchokes. But what IS a sunchoke?
Oh no – 2 of our favorite items are leaving the menu on Wednesday! Stop by today and tomorrow to get your last Bridgewater (lunch/dinner) and Carrot Lox (breakfast). These were both blockbuster items but the good news is they’re leaving to make room for a very special ingredient that only comes into season in ~deep winter.~ Any guesses what that could be? It starts with the letter S…
Join us this Friday for pizza (and excitement) at the HUB! If you’ve been reading for a while, you know Enzo. He worked at Clover for 9 years and is responsible for some of our best innovations (like the Japanese Sweet Potato Sandwich, or the thing we do with ninth-pans to hold up our fry timers). Enzo has always been really passionate about pizza. For the past few years he’s been working on a new kind of dough. It’s sort of foccaccia, sort of Sicilian, baked in a deep Lloyd pan.
Remember when Pushpir came into the kitchen at CloverHSQ and schooled Ayr on Northern Indian cooking? That was 2013. A different CloverHSQ than the one you visit today. But I still remember the smell of the cilantro, mint, jalapeños, and orange juice in the blender. We hadn’t smelled that exact combo before. It was so cool to see one of my culinary heroes in our kitchen.
Have you had the Medlar Sandwich yet? The star of the sandwich is a jam we make from medlars. A medlar is a fruit that grows on a tree and comes into season in the winter. You can’t eat medlars right from the tree – they have to be fermented (or “bletted” – definitely in the running for worst word ever!) in order to become delicious. We undertake that deliciousness-process at the HUB in East Cambridge. But this year there was a little mishap…
