Category: Food

Tradition!

Manchester’s downtown celebrates another restaurant week

At least once each year, the Palace Theatre in Manchester works with local restaurants to promote dining and the theater in a Restaurant Week. The restaurants and bars offer food and drink specials that are themed around a show playing at the Palace, and the theater promotes those restaurants.

“People have the reaction, ‘Hey! Dinner and a show!,’” said the Palace Theatre’s Katie Lovell. “This year there will be one Restaurant Week in the fall, so that’s coming up. Then we’ll do one in the winter as well, like we usually do. So this year we have two, and this one in the fall is tied to Fiddler on the Roof.”

Lovell said this production of Fiddler on the Roof will be a tribute to outgoing CEO and president of the Palace Theatre Peter Ramsey.

“He’s retiring in January, after 30 years,” she said. “Fiddler on the Roof is a show that he’s always wanted to do. [The Leadership Team] let him pick the whole season. And this was the one show that he said, ‘We have to do that. It will fit perfectly in the fall, and let’s tie it to Restaurant Week.’ So the theme is ‘Tradition and Taste.’ Restaurants are encouraged to come up with menus with that theme, whatever their interpretation of it is.”

Because of the change in seasons, most of the food and drink specials are more substantial, Lovell said, which is a good match for Fiddler on the Roof’s setting in a Jewish community in turn-of-the-last-century Russia.

“So the menus are coming in,” she said, “and it’s really, really exciting. We’re seeing a lot of braised short ribs, some people doing some latkes, I just saw fried feta. A lot of really interesting dishes that are going along with the ‘Tradition and Taste’ theme.”

Many of the participating bars and restaurants are within walking distance of the Palace, Lovell said. “Most are downtown. We have about 27 restaurants on board. We have a few in Bedford this year. And a few [in different parts of] Manchester, but mostly downtown.” One of the participating restaurants that is particularly exciting for her, Lovell said, is the Ash Street Inn. “Nick Provencher is the executive chef over there,” she said. “It’s a 12-person communal table. And every week they come up with a new menu, a new thing. So for these weeks they have the fall Tradition and Taste menu. So it’s a surprise — they won’t even tell me [what they’re serving]. But it’s going to be very, very elevated and special over there. It’s different from anything else you’ll get in the area. So I’m excited for that one. Clyde’s Cupcakes is doing a fun dessert and wine pairing. [They are] in the Queen City Center near Harpoon. So not everyone is doing a three-course menu. [It will vary], depending on the type of restaurant they are. At Industry East and 815 they’re each going to make a fun specialty cocktail with a dish with it.”

Nick Provencher, the chef at Ash Street Inn, said he has taken inspiration from the musical number from Fiddler on the Roof “If I Were a Rich Man.”

“We’re going to take that theme and run with it,” he said, “and kind of do some different stuff around Russian cuisine, which, especially around here, I’ve never even seen explored in any manner. We’re looking at [serving] an elevated version of Russian peasant food. So, you know, you’ve got a lot of root vegetables and stuff like that, but along with like some of those ideas and the classic cooking and the way they used to cook back introduced probably some more what they would define as like luxurious items alongside those kind of like peasant-dish ideas, in a fun little mix of the two.”

Restaurant Week
When: Thursday, Oct. 22, through Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Restaurants in Manchester as well as one in Bedford
More info: palacetheatre.org/restaurant-week, where you can see the menu offerings of participating restaurants.
Participating restaurants: Thirsty Moose Taphouse ($38 menu); Diz’s Cafe (a two-entree $58 menu); Bravo ($28 lunch option; $58 three-course option); Fratello’s ($58 option); The Current ($58 menu); Evolution ($38 & $58 menu); Ben & Jerry’s; 815; Ash Street Inn; Industry East ($28 menu); Stark Brewing Co.; Hooked on Ignite; Harpoon (with a $38 menu); Campo Enoteca; Clyde’s Dessert & Wine Bar; Giorgio’s; 900 Degrees; Stash Box ($58 menu); Without ($38 menu); Piccola Italia Ristorante ($38 menu), and Evvivia Trattoria in Bedford (which has $28, $38 and $58 menu options). Some of the restaurants also have specialty offerings.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 26/10/08

• Where to park when dining out: Looking for a parking spot in downtown Manchester so you can visit a restaurant? As reported in the Manchester Economic Development Office’s MEDO Minute newsletter (manchesternh.gov/Departments/Economic-Development/MEDO-Minute-Newsletter), the City of Manchester has a partially interactive parking map online to show where parking is generally available downtown, and the rates for parking there. There is real-time information for some parking garages that shows how full they are. Visit manchesternh.gov/Departments/Parking.

• Eat around the fire: From Thursday, Oct. 8, Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) will offer Come Over October, an outdoor wine and food experience for up to eight guests around a fire table in the vineyard’s gazebo. Each ticket provides two adults and a child under 12 with a tasting of four wines, a wine slushy, or nonalcoholic beverages, and a charcuterie board for up to two adults (which can be expanded upon request). The price per ticket is $79. Check available time slots through the Averill House website.

• Sample and buy chocolate: The Chocolate Expo will take place Sunday, Oct. 11, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the DoubleTree Expo Center in downtown Manchester featuring tastings and sales of chocolates and other specialty foods as well as craft beverages, according to thechocolateexpo.com, where you can purchase tickets.

• Thoughtful dining at Arts Alley: Tuesday, Oct. 13, Arts Alley (20 S. Main St., Concord, 406-5666, artsalleyconcordnh.com) will host an Art of Dining fall dining experience from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Guests will be guided through a curated selection of pairings, each chosen to complement the menu and enhance the progression of the dining experience. Each course will be introduced, giving guests a closer look at the creativity and thought that goes into every plate. Tickets are $81.88 through artsalleyconcordnh.com/events.

• Grapes you’ve never heard of: On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host a wine class on Unusual Grapes and Where to Find Them from 6:30 to 8 p.m. There are approximately 10,000 named grape varietals in the world, but relatively few are drunk in the United States. Many of them are consumed locally and not exported while others don’t yield enough wine to see the mainstream market. This class will discuss tracking down some of these less often seen grape varietals. Tickets are $35 through the Wine on Main website and include six wines, education and light snacks.

Fall Fruit Crumble

You’ve got your crisps, your crumbles, your slumps (yes, I know, but they are delicious), your brown bettys, your cobblers and even your pandowdies. And while there are, of course, differences, and enthusiasts who take them Very Seriously, when you get right down to it you have to admit that they are all variations on Baked Fruit with a Topping.

Crisps and crumbles are almost unnervingly easy to pull off. They can be made by a drunken koala bear. They call for fruit and butter and brown sugar and flour. Did you spend an overly ambitious afternoon apple-picking? Did a neighbor leave a shopping bag full of pears on your front step in the middle of the night, ring the doorbell and run away? Did you find some forgotten rhubarb hiding behind a bag of peas in the back of your freezer?

Boom! A crumble has your back.

Fruit

  • 4 cups (roughly 575 g) of chopped fall fruit – I’ve made this with pears, apples, rhubarb, cranberries, and even mangos. This past week I used two large stalks of rhubarb and a couple of Honeycrisp apples.
  • ½ cup (100 g) brown sugar
  • A splash (probably two teaspoons) vanilla

Topping

  • 1 cup (120 g) flour
  • ¼ cup (50 g) more brown sugar
  • Large pinch of coarse sea salt or kosher salt
  • 1/3 cup (2/3 stick) cold butter
  • ¼ cup chopped nuts – purists use chopped walnuts, but though I can’t prove it, I feel like walnuts are part of a secret-but-evil conspiracy. I use chopped pecans.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

If you’ve already peeled and chopped your fruit, this might be the simplest, most straightforward thing you’ve done this week. Put a small baking dish — I use a soufflé dish — on your scale. Dump your fruit into the dish. Tare (zero out) the scale, and spoon or sprinkle the brown sugar over the top, then add a splash of vanilla. Stir it all together, and set it aside.

Add the flour, salt, brown sugar and chopped nuts to a mixing bowl and stir to combine. If you want to use the same spoon you just used for the fruit, nobody will narc you out to the Crumble Cops.

Chop the butter into chunks, then add it to the flour mixture.

This is the part that will make you feel like you know what you’re doing:

Wash and dry your hands, then stir the butter chunks around with your fingers. Pinch the butter pieces with floury hands, and rub your fingers and thumbs together. Keep doing this until the butter is in what bakers describe as “pea-sized pieces.” That doesn’t seem very specific; peas come in a lot of different sizes. Crumbles are really forgiving, though, and as long as the butter is in small pieces it will work well.

Dump the topping on top of the fruit in the baking dish and spread it out more or less evenly. You can use your friend the Fruit Spoon for this, but your fingers will work just as well.

Put your proto-crumble in the oven and bake it for 45 to 50 minutes. When the topping is lightly browned and develops cracks with fruit lava showing through, it’s ready. Set it aside to cool enough to not destroy your mouth, then serve it warm with ice cream, or room temperature the next morning for breakfast.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

When life gives you cucumbers

Pickles are the point at Provocative Pickle Co.

The story of how Whitney Leyland started The Provocative Pickle Co. is one as old as time: There was a woman, and a man, and too many cucumbers.

“It was kind of one of those Bob Ross, happy accident type of deals,” Leyland said. Through a string of overlapping unexpected circumstances, she found herself with a constant flood of fresh cucumbers. “And you know,” she said, “there is honestly only a certain amount of cucumbers you can rationally eat. We had massive bowls full — at one point we had three giant bowls of cucumbers in our kitchen. And I was staring at my partner Dave [business and life-partner David Bennett], and I said, ‘What am I going to do with all these?’”

“He was like, ‘I just can’t. I can’t eat any more cucumbers.’ And we just sat there, kind of laughing about it for a minute, until it dawned on me — how do you preserve a cucumber?” One thing led to another, Leyland said, and now they own a pickle company, based in Salem.

By the end of October, Leyland said, there will be two varieties of Provocative Pickles. “Currently approved, we have our Dirty Dillies, which is a spicy garlic dill pickle. We have also finished the approval process for our Honey Mustard Pickles. In my opinion, you can have a great bread and butter pickle, but I’m very picky. That’s why we do a honey mustard [pickle]. It’s my take on the bread and butter [and] still gives you that sweetness, but honey-mustard is actually a New England-based flavor, so I thought it was very fitting for us as a New England-based company to do our own take on the honey mustard pickle. We also just did a test batch for a [third] pickle that will be our jalapeño-lime pickle.” Leyland and Bennett anticipate that will be available for sale by the end of the year.

Provocative Pickles are crisp, refrigerated, sliced pickles, Leyland said.

“I’m constantly test-batching and seeing what I can do. We’re hoping to expand from just having the pickle chips — kind of having those circle cuts — to being able to do spears. Any time I change the cut of the pickle, though, I actually have to send it back out for testing. It changes the ratios of things when they’re testing it. So that’s going to be a winter project for us as well, because I personally love a spear pickle when I’m eating a sandwich in the summer.” Crispness was another important consideration when developing the recipe, she said. “They are extra-crispy. There has to be a little acidity in there, a nice, balanced bite, and you need that texture. A floppy, soggy pickle doesn’t work for anyone.”

So far Leyland and Bennett have sold all their pickles at farmers markets and festivals, Leyland said. “Currently we’re doing all in-person sales. In order to do store sales, there’s one additional course that I need to take as a manager who oversees all the processes. So that’s in my winter to-do list, once our market season wraps up. We just finished applying for a lot of our winter markets, which we’ll be doing on an every-other-week schedule. That way folks can still find us in person while I’m still working on, you know, getting my certifications; that way we can start our sales in stores.”

Leyland described her perfect sandwich-and-pickle combination: “I like to keep it nice and classic,” she said. “I like a nice turkey and cheese with our signature Dirty Dilly Spicy Garlic Dill Pickles in the sandwich and on the side. There should be yellow mustard on my bun, and then on the side I’ll have a spear of my Dirty Dillys once those are approved, and some salt and vinegar chips, which have to be very crunchy — kettle chips.”

The Provocative Pickle Co. is online at theprovocativepickleco.com.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Grab your cloak and head to the brewery

Oktoberfest Ren Faire returns to Sunstone

Because it is a Viking-themed brewpub, Sunstone Brewing in Londonderry threw a combination renaissance faire and Oktoberfest last fall. Sunstone’s Jessica Cotto said it went extremely well, so they’re doing it again.

“We just want people to come and enjoy themselves,” Cotto said. “It was a great time last year … so we’re hoping to make this annual Oktoberfest just grow and grow and become a much bigger thing.”

Co-owners Camaron Carter and Bryan Link are excited, too, especially about the beer.

“For the special, we’ll have our Oktoberfest Ale on draft,” Link said, “and we’ll have our pumpkin ale back on draft as well. Our Oktoberfest is a traditional Marzen [a medium-bodied amber lager], so it’s got those nice little bits of malty notes.”

“There’s some nice Vienna malt in there, too.” Carter added. “You get a little bit of caramel flavor to it, but there’s no caramel malt, so it’s got some nice little biscuit flavor. It’s one of our favorite beers. That takes a month to brew. We monitor that one pretty closely when that one comes out. The Pumpkin Ale is considerably faster; that takes about two weeks. So that one’s got cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger and vanilla. And of course pumpkin. Yeah. But it’s got the warm fall flavors. It’s got a nice caramel maltiness to it that pairs perfectly with all of those spices and the pumpkin flavor. We use a pumpkin puree.”

Cotto said the pumpkin provides a bridge to some of the food at the event. Candia Homecraft from Candia will be one of the vendors, she said. “They [make] jams and they actually make bread with a lot of our spent grain. Hopefully she’ll be able to have some pumpkin from our spent grain, like a pumpkin bread, which would be really nice. We work together with her a lot.”

“We’ll have our pumpkin Danishes that everyone really loves,” Link said. “It’s really good. It’s almost like a pumpkin pie filling. One of the [other] food items will obviously be brats [grilled bratwurst sausages] with either sauerkraut [or] some peppers and onions on a bun. Last year people loved it, so we’ll do that again. We’re trying to figure out another snacky item, but we haven’t landed on that one yet.”

In addition to the beer and food, Cotto said, there will be activities both days of the festival, as well as fun vendors; she mentioned the stein-holding competition to be held both days on the stage.

“We … do a mystery grab bag, too,” she said, “so there will be small bags filled with different gems and you can win a sunstone in some of those.” Sunstone is a glittery type of pink feldspar that was valued by the Norse people, who believed it had mystical properties, including helping them navigate. It’s what the name Sunstone Brewing refers to.

“On Saturday there will be around 13 different local vendors,” Cotto said. “We’ll have Bookish Bliss, which is a mobile book bus that’s going to be stopping by. We have The Knights Hall coming. They’re out of Nashua, and they’ll be doing full-on, full-armor sword fighting at 2 p.m. on Saturday. And then we have Earthly Enchantments, which [deals in] lots of cottage-core kinds of stuff. We’ll have Jan Andrea Handmade; [that vendor] makes chain mail earrings and necklaces and jewelry. And then we’ll have a hair braider and a face painter. We have someone who does glow-in-the-dark resin art, and also a tarot reader.”

“We always encourage people to come in costume or dress up as if you’re going to a renaissance fair,” Cotto said. “We’ll all surely be dressed up ourselves, and we’ll have photo op areas, and it’ll be really fun. Dogs are always allowed and invited. And yeah, it’ll be a really good time.”

Oktoberfest Renaissance Faire Weekend
Where: Sunstone Brewing Co., 298 Rockingham Road, Londonderry, 216-1808, sunstonebrewing.com
When: Saturday, Oct. 10, and Sunday, Oct. 11, from 1 to 9 p.m.
More: Admission is free. Visit sunstonebrewing.com/events.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 26/10/08

• Where to park when dining out: Looking for a parking spot in downtown Manchester so you can visit a restaurant? As reported in the Manchester Economic Development Office’s MEDO Minute newsletter (manchesternh.gov/Departments/Economic-Development/MEDO-Minute-Newsletter), the City of Manchester has a partially interactive parking map online to show where parking is generally available downtown, and the rates for parking there. There is real-time information for some parking garages that shows how full they are. Visit manchesternh.gov/Departments/Parking.

• Eat around the fire: From Thursday, Oct. 8, Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) will offer Come Over October, an outdoor wine and food experience for up to eight guests around a fire table in the vineyard’s gazebo. Each ticket provides two adults and a child under 12 with a tasting of four wines, a wine slushy, or nonalcoholic beverages, and a charcuterie board for up to two adults (which can be expanded upon request). The price per ticket is $79. Check available time slots through the Averill House website.

• Sample and buy chocolate: The Chocolate Expo will take place Sunday, Oct. 11, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the DoubleTree Expo Center in downtown Manchester featuring tastings and sales of chocolates and other specialty foods as well as craft beverages, according to thechocolateexpo.com, where you can purchase tickets.

• Thoughtful dining at Arts Alley: Tuesday, Oct. 13, Arts Alley (20 S. Main St., Concord, 406-5666, artsalleyconcordnh.com) will host an Art of Dining fall dining experience from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Guests will be guided through a curated selection of pairings, each chosen to complement the menu and enhance the progression of the dining experience. Each course will be introduced, giving guests a closer look at the creativity and thought that goes into every plate. Tickets are $81.88 through artsalleyconcordnh.com/events.

• Grapes you’ve never heard of: On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host a wine class on Unusual Grapes and Where to Find Them from 6:30 to 8 p.m. There are approximately 10,000 named grape varietals in the world, but relatively few are drunk in the United States. Many of them are consumed locally and not exported while others don’t yield enough wine to see the mainstream market. This class will discuss tracking down some of these less often seen grape varietals. Tickets are $35 through the Wine on Main website and include six wines, education and light snacks.

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