Without further ado, we present the long-awaited brunch recipes. Aaron and Eileen took charge of Sunday brunch, after Bill and Dorothea helped serve the early risers. A+E had a bunch of ideas, but in the end it seemed like one sweet dish and one savory dish would be best. Eileen sent me this recipe for the French toast.

Upside Down French Toast
(9×13 pan, serves 6-8)

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 4 oz butter
• 2 tablespoons corn syrup

Boil together in a pot (the corn syrup is not strictly necessary, but will help it all be non-crystallized), then pour into the bottom of a 9×13 pan. Tilt the pan around to make a nice caramel layer all over the bottom.

• 10 or 12 slices of bread

Layer the bread (probably only 2 slices deep). The sourdough stuff we used at camp was taste-tastic, but any nice bread will do.

• 8 eggs
• 2 cups milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix together, then pour over the top of the bread. Let it sit overnight in the fridge. The next morning, bake for 40-60 minutes @ 350F. Run a knife around the edge of the pan to loosen the baked on bits. Find a Spoonhower relative (Rachel helped me) and flip the pan over onto a serving platter (or cookie sheet, whatever). Cut into big wedges and serve! It’s best when it’s fresh and hot because the caramel layer is all crispy; over time the top will get soft and gooey (also delicious, but not the same).

For the breakfast burritos, Aaron writes:

We liked the burritos for being super easy! We just scrambled some eggs with some taco seasoning, chipotle, beans, and cheese. Then we served with salsa, sour cream, and tortillas. Tada! They would also be lovely with guacamole or your favorite burrito topping.

Astute tasters will also have noticed that the salsa served on Sunday bore a striking resemblance to the gazpacho served on Saturday night. This is purely coincidental.

That’s it for our food posts! As you can see, with a little bit of forethought from us and the other planners and a lot of help in the kitchen, it turned out great! Thanks to everyone who helped!

In Part 1 of the Feast, we told you about the 100 hungry folks sitting down to eat together for our big Saturday night dinner. The first courses were warming people up — gazpacho, beets and cheese, potatoes and cheese — did I mention that we like cheese?

For the next course, the beef Wellington was Fred’s idea, but lots of people worked hard to make it happen: Aaron and Eileen, Ben and Janine, and Jeff Solomon all helped with the preparation. Bill and Dorothea helped with the cooking and serving.

We bought the beef from a smaller, local producer — you know, the kind of woman who is happy to show you the cows that she keeps. We found just the place in Elizabeth, PA (just south of Pittsburgh). (She also explained a bit about the, ahem, mechanics of breeding her cattle. Those of you that have discussed similar topics with Brian Manning would not have been at all surprised.) Janice Palmer’s ranch is called “WH Cattle.” Our local food co-op sometimes gets beef from there, so when we asked about ordering meat at the co-op, they put us directly in touch with Janice. Buying directly from the farm has not only psychological benefits, but financial benefits as well — we were pleasantly surprised at the prices per pound for the beef after eliminating all those middlemen.

As you can see in the picture below, we had a real assembly line going putting the wellingtons together!

Individual Beef Wellington
by Fred Niell
(This makes 1/5 of what we prepared for the feast: enough for about 20 people.)

The recipe is 4 steps. 1) Marinade 2) Make Mushroom Duxelle 3) Assemble Wellingtons, and Bake 4) Make Marchand du Vin

Beef Marinade

• 1 cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoons thyme
• 2 tablespoons sage
• 12 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons cracked pepper
• 1 onion, in food processor to chop
• 3 cups shiraz, drier the better
• 5 lbs (20 x 4ish oz filets)

Combine ingredients in very large bowl or ziplocks. Refrigerate until needed, at least 4 hours.

Mushroom Duxelles

• 4 lbs mushrooms
• 1 stick butter
• 1 cup shallots
• 1 cup shiraz
• 1/2 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon pepper

Finely chop shallots in food processor. Set aside. Chop mushrooms in food processor. Sweat the shallots in the butter over medium to medium-high heat until golden. Add mushrooms, reduce heat to medium until mushrooms just begin rendering liquid. Add salt, pepper, and wine. Reduce until you have about 1/2 cup liquid. Pour off liquid and reserve, add liquid to marinading beef. Place mushrooms covered in a bowl or other container, refrigerate until time to assemble Wellingtons.

Wellington Assembly & Cooking

• 1 sheet of puff pastry will typically make 2 wellingtons, so 50 small sheets (plus another 10 or so for decoration)
• 6 eggs, beaten for egg wash
• beef from above
• mushrooms from above

Remove filets from marinade, pat dry. Reserve marinade. Remove remaining liquid from the mushroom mixture. Place the cut puff pastry on floured surface. Place one spoonful of mushroom duxelle in center, place filet on top of mushrooms, and top with one more spoonful of mushrooms. Carefully draw corners of pastry together, pinching seams. You can seal with eggwash, but this is not necessary. Flip over the wellington, seam-side down. Carefully smush so it sits flat. Apply decorative cutout puff pastry piece on top, eggwash the top. Place 4 rows of 4 wellingtons on cookie sheets for baking. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. If refrigerating longer than an hour or so, cover with plastic wrap. In this state, they can stay in the fridge for more than 24 hours. Preheat oven to 400. Bake for ~30 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown. Tent with foil and bake for another 20 minutes, using thermometer on one test piece to determine done-ness. The ones at the edge of the sheet are rarer, but not much. Serve on plate with a small lake of sauce around the wellington. Garnish with some green parsley or something — we used a single roasted carrot.

Marchand de Vin Sauce

• 1 cup beef stock
• 1 stick butter
• 4 tablespoons flour
• 1/2 cup green onion chopped
• 6 cloves garlic chopped
• 1/2 cup shallots chopped
• pepper, salt
• 1/2 cup shiraz
• reserved marinade

Mix up the reserved marinade. Each batch of sauce will be making a final 2+ cups of sauce, so choose pots accordingly. Sautee shallots and garlic in butter until fragrant, then add flour a little at a time to make nice golden roux. Slowly add 1 C of marinade and stock. Add bay leaf if desired. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, or until reduced to a little over 2 cups. Just before starting to serve, mix in remaining 1/2 C shiraz. Finished sauce will keep consistency for quite some time at very low heat.

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Portobello “Galoshes” (as the vegetarian/vegan version of the Wellingtons came to be known in the kitchen) were based on a recipe that Rose forwarded from a friend of hers. We added more nuts as we thought their roast-y flavor filled out the dish nicely. All the mushrooms used at Camp came from Creekside Mushrooms the world largest underground mushroom farm — found right here in southwestern PA!

Like the Beef Wellingtons, most of the preparation is done in a food processor. We definitely learned a lot about cooking for crowds over the weekend including shortcuts like this: when a recipe calls for quartering mushrooms before putting them in a food processor, skip the knife and just tear them into pieces with your fingers!

Portobello Wellington
(makes 2 servings)

• 1 small clove garlic
• 1 inch green onion
• 1 oz pecans
• 1 tablespoon olive oil plus some for brushing
• 4 oz button & crimini mushrooms, quartered
• 1 portobello mushroom (about 4 oz)
• puff pastry or phyllo dough

Add the garlic, onion, pecans, and oil to a food processor and blend to a coarse, mealy paste. Then add the small mushrooms and process them until they are chopped into relatively small pieces. Brush the portobello with oil and salt it. Stuff it with the nut-mushroom filling and then cut in it half. Wrap each half in pastry and bake at 425 for about 20 minutes. Top with Cashew Parsley sauce. Careful! These will be super hot for several minutes!

Cashew Parsley Sauce

• 2.5 oz cashews, toasted
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 tablespoon soy
• 1/2 tablespoons parsley
• (up to) 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• (up to) 1.5 cups water

Blend everything but the cornstarch and the water to a fine paste. Add the paste, half the water, and half the cornstarch and bring just to a boil. (Rose thought it tasted a little too cornstarch-y with the full tablespoon. We had also run out of soy sauce by Saturday night so we just used extra salt.)

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Both meat and veggies were nicely complimented by a red wine: Hoya de Cadenas Tempranillo from Spain.

Desserts were baked, of course, by several busy campers on Saturday afternoon. Dana, Alana, Aaron & Eileen, Sarah Kent, and my mom Cyndi all made pies for the glory of their various teams. The pies were judged to be quite excellent. My grandparents also planned ahead and added a cake to the dessert table for everyone to share. The ice cream served on Saturday (and Sunday morning) came courtesy of Brian, Dana, and Julia from Manning Farm Dairy. The milk came from them too! Hooray!

Saturday evening, there was a flurry of activity. As tasks were finished in the kitchen, items were crossed out on the many lists with Sharpie markers. At some point, Aaron asked when we were planning to get to the dining room, and spoons smiled and replied, “Have you been out there lately?” The long tables were already set for 100 people with mismatched tablecloths, plates and silverware, pitchers of water… counts were being called into the kitchen: “We need 6 more knives!” and the Camp Turner staff were shaking their heads at us in amusement.

Course 0: Chickpea Amuse Bouche

Campers started to gather and our Master of Ceremonies, Tom Rammer, announced the first course, a chickpea amuse bouche, A.K.A. “appetizer.” The idea for the dish came from some excellent deep-fried chickpeas I had at Tia Pol with Dan & Manely. We didn’t want to mess with deep-frying, so we just tossed some chickpeas in the oven with olive oil, good kosher salt, and spanish paprika.

Course 1: Gazpacho

While people were snacking on hot chickpeas and bringing out the first bottles of wine, we also brought out a pitcher of gazpacho for each table. The gazpacho recipe was a mixture of inspiration from the ingredients at hand, a recipe of Fred’s, and the excellent French Laundry gazpacho recipe.

Nearly all the vegetables (including tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, garlic, potatoes, beets, carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, cilantro, and parsley) came from from Mark Printz at Canticle Farm in Olean, NY and from Mark Shindlebeck in Franklinville, NY. We originally learned about consumer-supported agriculture while living in Pittsburgh — you must have heard us talking about our “veggie box” during the last few summers. When we were thinking about fresh produce for the camp weekend, we realized there must be some similar farms providing local vegetables near the park. We looked online and found lots of places! (Want to find one close to you?)

The first wine served with dinner was C. Mendes Vinho Verde from Portugal. It was slightly bubbly, recommended to go with the very acidic gazpacho — I thought it worked well!

Course 2: Potato Galette

The potato galette comes from one of our favorite cooking magazines, Fine Cooking. It was super easy (once spoons’s siblings and Janine cleaned all 25 pounds of potatoes): no need to peel Yukon golds, just slice them in the food processor and layer them with cheese. Good cheese!

Course 3: If you think you don’t like beets, you’re probably wrong.

We picked up salad greens in Allegany, NY on Thursday. We were a little worried about how to clean and dry greens for 100 people, but Stephen and Laura got it done using a remarkable technique suggested by Rose: soak, rinse, then put a couple of heads in a clean pillowcase and spin rapidly over your head. The spinning part is best performed outside, but it worked great!

That wonderful chevre came from Vermont Butter & Cheese Co. (via Aaron and Eileen). (Vermont Cheese and Butter also supplied a lot of the butter we used during the weekend, especially for the corn bread and at the table. Their cultured, lightly salted butter is the best! 86% butterfat!) The dressing was a simple vinaigrette based on Agrodolce vinegar (via Zingerman’s and Bill and Dorothea), olive oil, salt, pepper, and (at Fred’s insistence) a touch of fresh ginger.

The beets in the salad came from Canticle Farms. Cooking beets in the oven is easy and tasty — once they are roasted you can toss them in salads or heat them up as a veggie side dish, or combine them with some garlic and yogurt to make a delicious indian dish. To roast beets, prepare whole beets by scrubbing them and cutting off the beet greens, if attached. Wrap them individually in aluminum foil or put a bunch in a pan and cover tightly with foil. Before covering them, toss them with some olive oil and salt. Roast beets for 1-2 hours at 375 depending on their sizes. A knife should slide easily into the beet, through the foil, when it is done. We got a LOT of beets in our Pittsburgh veggie box from Kretschmann’s and we learned to love them. We were happy to see so many other people enjoy them on Saturday night.

In the sequel: recipes for beef and portobello Wellingtons!

I have to say that lunch is not my favorite meal of the day. Somehow, for me, it just doesn’t live up to breakfast or to dinner. Regardless of my feelings about it, though, Fred was all excited about making muffalettas for lunch, so who was I to stop him? The recipes below for the olive salad (which will last you for many, many sandwiches) and the sandwich itself are both from Fred, who also writes:

Muffaletta sandwiches are a staple in New Orleans. They were “invented” by uncle “Sal” at the Central Grocery at the turn of the century, according to legend. The bread for the sandwich is a classic Sicilian large, medium-dense round sour dough loaf called a muffaletta. Of course, I can’t do justice to the sandwich, so here’s the Wikipedia page about it.

Olive Salad
(makes 1 gallon, keeps in fridge for weeks/month)

• 8 jars 7.5oz dry weight Manzanilla Olives (with pimientos)
• 5 14oz cans black olives
• 2 22oz jars Giardiniera
• 1 3oz jar balsamic capers
• 5 tablespoons minced garlic (1 head, more or less)
• about 1 cup Extra Virgin Olive oil, very good quality
• 3 tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar
• 3 tablespoons celery seeds
• 3 tablespoons oregano
• 1 tablespoons basil
• 1.5 tablespoons salt
• 1 tablespoons cayenne pepper
• 1 tablespoons ground pepper

Drain and lightly rinse all canned/jarred veggies up to garlic. Toss in batches into the Cuisineart. Chop all to fine consistency, not too fine - maybe 1/16″ to 1/8″ chunks. Put all veggies into plastic container large enough for more than 1 gallon of stuff. Add in 1/2 cup olive oil, mix well. Add garlic in spoonfuls, mixing well with large spoon until it is clearly strong garlic-smelling (about 3-4 tablespoons). Add in rest of olive oil and rest of herbs and salt to taste, mixing very well. Let stand refrigerated for 1-2 hours, then add rest of garlic if you think it needs it (it always needs it). Mix thoroughly and top off with a little more olive oil if it looks dry. Keep refrigerated. It will keep for weeks and up to 1 month. [I am still eating the leftovers from camp –ed.] Don’t use a cherished plastic dish, because you’ll never be able to use it for anything else again.

Muffaletta Sandwich
(serves about 8 people)

• 1 ciabatta loaf (or a muffaletta if you can find it)
• 1/4 pound mortadella, thinly sliced
• 1/4 pound capicolo, thinly sliced
• 1/4 pound hard Genoa salami, thinly sliced
• 1/4 pound Mozzarella cheese, sliced
• 1/4 pound Provolone cheese,sliced
• 1 cup olive salad

Put olive salad on bottom. Don’t be shy about the oil, it makes the bread taste divine. Layer meats, then cheese, then a little more olive salad on top. Put the top on the sandwich, then press the bread to absorb juices from the olive salad. At Central Grocery (the epicenter of Muffaletta goodness), they weigh down the sandwiches in high stacks and let them sit at room temp for hours wrapped in butcher paper so the juices really absorb in the bread. This is more important to the final taste than you might think.

Bread for everything at Camp Spoonhowopic, including the sandwiches and french toast, came from Mediterra Bakehouse in Pittsburgh. This is easily our favorite bakery in Pittsburgh. Here’s short story for you: When I called the bakehouse to order 30 loaves of bread, the first question I got was “Is this a restaurant order?” Ha! When I said that someone would stop by the bakehouse to pick up our order first thing in the morning, she said, “Well, we get here at 2 a.m. so anytime after that is fine.” OK, first thing in the morning for ordinary, non-baker people.

In addition to muffaletta¸ campers could also choose from a variety of other lunch meats and grilled vegetables, as well as this yummy salad:

White Bean Salad

We also served Kettle-brand potato chips which, along with a lot of Santa Cruz lemon juice for making lemonade, we bought by the case from the East End Food Co-op, our local co-operative grocery store.

Lemonade

• 1/2 cup lemon juice, preferably Santa Cruz brand or similar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• water to fill 2 quart pitcher

Directions: mix and refrigerate!

And last, but not least, we tapped a keg of East End Witte from East End Brewing Co., another fine establishment just down the street from our Pittsburgh apartment. We managed to finish off a half barrel before dinner (in addition to the leftovers from the barbecue: two bottled beers recommended by Vicki at the Grovewood Tavern, Karlovačko and Sierra Nevada Porter). Good job, Spoonhowopians!

(KAC in brown. DJS in orange.)

KAC: Looking out at all the amused and giggling faces of our friends and family at Camp Spoonhowopic, spoons and I were wondering if people recognized pieces of their own events and weddings in our Camp plans. We have been thanking many people who helped at the Camp weekend, but there are others who taught us something much longer ago.

Brian and Dana Manning’s wedding was probably the first wedding spoons and I went to together. The entire thing was traditional but also personally hand-crafted. The vows were so specific (”Here, on this beautiful farm…”) and the Manning milk bottle centerpieces and ice cream cake were homemade. I remember sitting down before the ceremony with a bunch of college friends and just reading the vows in the program was making us cry. The officiant of the ceremony also did an excellent job making it clear why all the guests were in attendance, something I hadn’t really thought about before. She explained that it wasn’t just Brian and Dana that were involved in the ceremony, but all of us who were there. All of us are a part of their lives, important to them as they are important to each other. They passed the wedding rings around the whole group in attendance so that each of us could touch them and be a part of the ceremony. Our friend J made them a wedding video, and I got a copy of it on my laptop. I must have showed it to everyone I knew, because both the wedding and the video were so well done. One of my favorite scenes takes place after the ceremony when J asks Brian, “So, you’re married! What are you gonna do now?” Brian grins in his tux and said, “Stay the same!”

We really enjoyed all these things that Brian and Dana emphasized in their ceremony: involving their whole community of beloved family and friends, their personality and do-it-yourself-ness, and the fact that the wedding (while a big, fun, important thing) wasn’t changing their day-to-day relationship much. In the following years, a lot of other people we knew shared similar ideas in their events.

Involving a whole community means getting everyone in the same room. Getting them to feel comfortable enough to get to know each other and have fun is another challenge. Ann Arbor friends Sara & Brian had some skeptics when they announced that they were having a karaoke reception, but after they had the guts to sing the first duet (”Don’t go breaking my heart!”) how could we refuse? Next up was a little