The art and appreciation of food…. That is what gastronomy means.
Slow Food… Food that is produced or prepared with local culinary traditions, using high-quality, locally sourced ingredients.
Put those together and you have EcoGastronomy. Throw “Live from Matt’s House” into the picture and you get Dan Winans, one of my best friends in life. Dan is the director of the Dual Major in EcoGastronomy at UNH and has taught me more about cooking than anyone else on the planet. I’ve had a great time learning from him over the past 20 years. It starting when we worked together at The New England Center in Durham, NH, and continues to this day when I send him a last minute text asking him a question about how to prepare something, or asking about menu choices for a dinner party that I’m planning.
I encourage anyone reading this to click on the hyperlinks above and learn more about what EcoGastronomy and Slow Food really are and what it means to all of us. I guarantee you will look at a farmers market differently, you will think about it when you see local food and local meats in the markets on the Seacoast, it will be healthier for you and best of all, it will taste so much better.
This weekend, the kids and I were invited to the Winans house for dinner. It was fantastic. As you can imagine from the comments above, everything was organic and local. Great care was taken with the menu, the preparation and the presentation.
The beef below was purchased at Tendercrop Farm, in Dover, NH (where Tuttle’s Red Barn used to be). At Tendercrop Farm, they raise their own hormone-free and antibiotic-free chickens, Black Angus beef, and turkeys, so their customers can be assured that they’re getting the very best quality products.
The meal that we had was phenomenal – local beef, salad from their garden, homemade salad dressing, pan fried corn (right off the cob) mixed with onion and basil, potatoes that were dug from his garden earlier that day – wedged and baked in the oven, and a wonderful dessert – hot fudge pie (see previous post for recipe). I don’t think there was one single thing left over…
Here’s a photo of all of us at the table, it was a blast. Everyone had a great time, ate lots of good food and played outside after dinner. You can’t ask for much more than that!
Matt Becker Portsmouth, NH
Live from Matt’s House