Elder/Cauli/Flower

Once we get past the first few weeks of asparagus and rhubarb at the market, it’s a race to see how we can use each ingredient at the peak of its season. And some seasons are shorter than others, like elderflowers, which will only be available for a few more weeks. We’ve been readying this elderflower vinaigrette over the past few days to pair with cauliflower.

Look for the elder/cauli/flower pairing on the first course of tonight's Farm Dinner:

#BestOfChi

Thank you to all the Chicago Reader readers who voted in this year's #BestOfChi reader's poll!

Best Brunch

Best Neighborhood Restaurant

Best Waitstaff

Best Looking Waitstaff

Country/Morning

Listen to Lula Cafe's co-founder Amalea Tschilds sing some country songs with Nora O'Connor on the Morning Shift:

Lula's Walls: Claire Ashley

The art at Lula is curated by two friends who used to work here when we had just the old single storefront.  Like me, they were young artists at the beginning of their careers who for lack of better options ended up working as a server and cook.   Now grown up, Marianne Fairbanks and Anders Nilsen have enviable careers in the art world but continue to curate the walls of Lula's to exceptional ends.  I still cook.  

Having a "cafe" in our name might take the expectations down a notch in art-cred terms, but Lula considers itself a gallery on equal terms to others in the city.   In fact the SAIC President once said to an incoming freshman class that Lula was one of the best places to see new art in Chicago.   Anders and Marianne search the city for exciting talent, do studio tours, map out a design for the space, price work fairly, and hang the art with the intent of creating conversations-- between the work and the space, between us employees, between our guests.

I try to let the curatorial team do their thing without interruption, closing my eyes to early images and press materials.  On those four Tuesdays a month, when the shows change and a new artist hangs her work, I find excuses to stay away until late that night when everyone is gone.  (I'm not sure Marianne or Anders knows this; up till now it was my secret.) Then I'll walk back over to the restaurant, turn on all the lights at once, and let the work reveal itself in a sudden flash of bright light. This moment of surprise is one of the great joys of my job at Lula, of seeing what (and who) Anders and Marianne have discovered, of giving myself time to experience the work in a personal and private way, of letting go.  

I hope you'll come by to see the amazing work of Claire Ashley.  And please come to the opening party.  It's Tuesday night, 7-9pm, with a complimentary hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar, and the space will be open for you to experience the same thing that I get to do, on those late nights, since I have the key, when I sneak back in for a private viewing of what our Lula has next in store for me.  

- Jason Hammel

Farm Dinner: Green Strawberries + Chamomile

Sometimes we seem to write a menu based on the sound of the words alone. Their tone. The beat of them. You say "green strawberry, chamomile" out loud once or twice and suddenly the combination seems to sing. Strawberries are not green, of course, and the words kind of prick up in your ears -- they sound strange and compelling. Yet chamomile is the softest of words, a sedative, and it kind of just drifts in and steeps. It's in the meter, yes, the anapest of chamomile, three unstressed syllables in a row. Taking it easy.

This week we are pairing tart unripe green strawberries with the fresh flowers of chamomile we grew on our own roof top garden. This isn't a classic combo, but it's not experimental either. Really it's just a marriage of bright-sour-green-fresh with floral-wispy-sweet-grassy. If it makes sense on the palate remains to be seen, as we are just now clipping the chamomile from the stems and just now pickling the green strawberries in a little honey and white vinegar.

We take the risk because that's what farm dinner is about. The chance to listen to the sounds around us, to steal the flowers of the moment, and combine.

Mark your calendar...

We're having a summer bazaar!

Farm Dinner: Loveliest of trees

A few years ago there was an early spring in March that you might remember fondly. A stretch of weeks of hauntingly warm weather, as if a spell cast by a mysterious friend had let us skip a season and jump headlong into summer. For the fruit farmers of Michigan that warmth was no robin, but rather a bitter harbinger of a 100 year disaster; a total crop failure of cherries, apples, apricots, and plums. The trees had been tricked into blossoming before the last frost had passed. Once the cold came they would fall and die and leave an unproductive orchard.

Abby from Klug Farm came into the restaurant with buckets of blossoms trimmed from a cherry tree that would surely bear no fruit at all, once the spell had been broken and the early mornings turned cold again. She was cutting these before they fell. Maybe we could do something with the flowers? They were gorgeous - maybe more beautiful in dying - but an errant brush of your hand would send them all scattering to the ground.  

We made a batch of cherry blossom vinegar that was fragrant and sweet, yet still ripe and tender, and we used it to splash on raw fish for an appetizer.  I don't recall the dish or the recipes, but I remember the buckets of blossoms and what I had learned about the dark side of a really sunny set of days.

Ever since then I ask Abby about cherry blossoms and whether we can have some to make vinegar.  She's reluctant to trim the trees because the fruit they will bear has a value that the flowers do not.  (Seedling Farm, on the other hand, saves a few trees just for the purpose and you can buy a tender branch from Peter and force the blossoms yourself.  Makes for a beautiful centerpiece.) I was able to get a few branches from Abby for a dinner we did last week for Kinfolk Magazine down in Hyde Park's Plein Air Cafe, and the leftover branches got my sous chef Sarah thinking...

What can we do with cherry wood? Since the sweet fragrant flavor is often preferred for smoking, would it work for us in other applications? We loved the vinegar we had made with the blossoms - could we do something more robust, earthy, heartier, with the bark and the wood itself?  

This morning we have a pot of cream on the stove with the trimmings of that blossoming branch wrapped in cheesecloth as though it were a sprig of thyme. We hope it will infuse flavor into this neutral palate and then, when thickened into creme fraiche, transform into something uniquely subtle, spring-like, beautiful.

Using a peeler we will scrape and shave the branches into a jar of moscatel vinegar, apply a little heat, and let it steep for a few days. And lastly, we will throw the remaining branches, doused with water, on a set of well-tended coals and gently smoke some marrow.

Come see what we make with these things at Monday night's Farm Dinner. We are cooking with the seasons, whether spring comes in April or in late May, whether it snows like it did last week, like it did one night, for Housman, too, sometime long ago:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

- Jason Hammel