charlottesville and courses
And I drive with friends out to the country. On Saturday night, we drove to Will’s place to cook together in his apartment inside the post office.
In the sleepy town of Esmont, we toasted to Ben’s new job in California (his work is brilliant) over a celebratory meal of duxelles (I pronounce this incorrectly in the video below) inside tenderloin that Will cooked perfectly.
I sautéed baby kale so tiny it can be eaten raw from Roundabout Farm (if you live in the area, consider their CSA), roasted new red potatoes, and puréed an improvised soup with leeks and jerusalem artichokes for the first course.
Like me, Will enjoys converting friends to a particular food—his arugula salad with lemon dressing, pecans, and Parmesan curls swayed Ben into liking the included fennel for the first time.
In a rhythm sharing his kitchen, the crickets hummed outside the screen door as Will poured a custard filling over the apple slices I arranged in his pâte brisée. Will moves lightly in his kitchen, but is a serious cook, as the tart attests.
After the tart, yoga postures, and wine, we sat picking favorites of four cheeses—Will favored the local Grayson cheese from Meadow Creek that Charlottesville’s Feast stocks, Ben liked a raw milk goat tomme, Tricia the St. André triple crème, and I’ll look for the Stoneyman hard cheese from Everona Dairy again to grate over homemade pasta. Jeremy remained much more interested in the tart (smart guy), working on a second slice.
We took the winding roads back to Charlottesville under a sky dark enough to see stars, and I went to sleep (my friend Helen graciously let me borrow her house while she traveled this weekend) planning another visit to these people I miss and place I still dream about…
Related posts:
- the great snowpocalypse of charlottesville
- America Day II: Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through
- kthread cooks: aligot
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Posted Sunday, March 8th, 2009, 11:55 pm * Filed in Entertaining, Food, Travel. * Tags: charlottesville, esmont, Food, kristen, kthread, local, taylor, virginia. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 9th, 2009 at 6:57 am
This post made my heart hurt for Charlottesville! (Though not for its hills.)
I hadn’t heard that Ben got a job in California. Where will he be?
That custard tart makes my mouth-water, even at 7am as I write this.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Ben will be in L.A., which is fabulous, as I plan to visit him there frequently.
And I’m still thinking about the tart too (and the banana doughnuts you made on your blog, M!)–