24 March, 2020: This picture is from a couple years ago, when we were filming a soup video at Ayr’s house – don’t worry, I’m not actually there right now! #socialdistancing If this is the first time you’re hearing about Ayr’s new Youtube channel, go back and read this post I wrote yesterday. It explains a little bit more about… Read More
23 March, 2020: With many restaurants temporarily closing, and with stockpiles of food/raw ingredients at home, a lot of folks are going to be cooking at home during this “hunker down” period. But what the heck do you even do with dried beans? How do you make soup? Or bread? How do you recover from recipe errors, how do you… Read More
19 March, 2020: This post isn’t about food. But it’s about some of the (very boring) stuff we need to be doing to protect our ability to make great food in the future. I’ve been spending the majority of the past 2 days contacting vendors and suppliers and service providers. My pitch is consistent: we want to use your service… Read More
30 June, 2009: Back in the fall, when the truck’s gas pedal first had a problem, I was shocked to find everything except chewing gum connecting the linkage. Check out this picture: zip ties, strung, key loop. I fixed the first failure back then, but never got around to cleaning up the rest. I’m not proud to say that I… Read More
18 March, 2020: Those were the words Chris texted me this afternoon. Pictured above is our “cooling” walk-in. It’s a relatively small walk-in fridge with oversized cooling and a series of glass doors. In normal operations it’s in and out. We pack it from the door side and empty it from behind. Sometimes we turn it 3 times a day.… Read More
17 March, 2020: I’m hours and hours into painstakingly reaching out to the HUGE number of services Clover uses to operate. For all it’s the same thing. (1) We want to use these services as soon as we re-open, (2) we DON’T want to lose all our data and set-up all over again, (3) We CAN’T pay while we have… Read More
16 March, 2020: We all spend so much energy figuring out how to get from where we are to the next place. And at Clover that feels like such an imperative. Clover is trying each day to solve this existential challenge we face: Global warming. But now we’re facing a different more immediate challenge in COVID-19. We’re going to be… Read More
15 March, 2020: Hi all. Just learned of Massachusetts declaring all restaurants to be closed by Tuesday, except for delivery and take-out. Sometime soon we’re all going to stop feeling surprised by these changes. I don’t know about you but I’m not there yet. We are learning what this means for us. In the meantime all Clover restaurants are open… Read More
25 March, 2009: We’ve been sort of quiet about our muffins, and I know some but not all of you have tried them. We wanted to get them just right before talking too much. They’ve arrived. I don’t even know how to describe them. They are way tastier than they deserve to be. Vegan, 100% whole wheat (except for the… Read More
13 March, 2020: My kids picked up chicks today. They are 1 day old! This is Octavia. She is an Easter Egger. That’s a kind of chicken. Octavia and these other fluffy balls will join our mature chickens in our backyard. She’s not even going to know what this COVID thing is when she grows up ; ) Read More
11 March, 2020: “Do you think we could pull off a jerk sandwich?” Chris wondered aloud in the car ride back from New York. This was back in September I think. Chris loves the flavors of jerk rubs—the Jamaican spice mixes that are used to rub meat before smoking them. And we’ve never played around with the wide and delicious… Read More
10 March, 2020: I feel scared people I love might get sick. I feel scared I might get sick. I feel scared I don’t know how to get Clover through this Covid-19 outbreak. I’m taking more deep breaths than usual. You might be feeling some of these same things. Well, maybe not the last one about Clover’s future. But I… Read More
9 March, 2020: Queen’s Green Farm in Amherst called us a few weeks ago about a bumper crop of rainbow carrots. These carrots are beautiful – red, purple, orange, yellow, even white. We’ve been using them wherever we can. Carrot salads at lunch. Carrot marmalade at breakfast. Rainbows in your crudité cups. One other obvious place to put carrots? The… Read More
2 August, 2008: (painting is by Vilhelm Hammershoi, a danish painter from the early 1900s) So this is where the visual identity for Clover begins: a puddle of sunlight. A place you want to move towards/ sit under. When people think of it they want to take a deep breath through their nose, the creases around their eyes relax a… Read More
6 March, 2020: What is a farmshare? A farmshare is a box of veggies, or fruit, or mushrooms, or FOREST edibles (more on that in a future post). But it’s far more than that. A farmshare is a partnership between you and a farmer. You pay money in the spring, they use that money to grow food, you get a… Read More