Living off the land…

I love garden tomatoes, blackberry ice cream, cold cucumber soup, maybe a glass of Riesling.

You know, summer food.

But I’m getting in the mood for morning frost and clothes made of wool and root vegetables at dinner.

So I asked Tim Cocheo, the chef/owner of Number 9 Restaurant in Millerton, NY, for a vegetable dish.   

Beets, he said.

Good. I love beets, and he gave me detailed instructions on his restaurant’s beet salad: how to cook the beets (must be roasted), how to plate the dish (diagram included), and how to put it all together. That’s the tricky, cheffy part. Ingredients include quenelles — you know, using two spoons to make perfect ovals, in this case of horseradish, puréed beets and crème fraîche — sherry vinegar and, because this is a farm-to-table restaurant, a flourish of micro greens from Moon in the Pond Farm in Sheffield.

Cocheo grew up admiring his great-grandmother’s food: middle-European, stick-to-the-ribs fare like pot roast with lots of vegetables and chicken paprikash and dumplings (his mother made this last dish, too, but it was never quite the same, he said). 

Number 9’s menu reflects some of this culinary heritage with wienerschnitzel first on the list of main courses and pork belly and bratwurst with mustard greens further down.

But when Cocheo quit college in his third year to attend culinary school, he turned to the French Culinary Institute in New York, which may account for the wild mushrooms and bordelaise sauce accompanying the New York strip steak and the dried cherries and black pepper gastrique with the foie gras.

The Sol Flower Farm Beet Salad, though, just looks like pure Hudson Valley to me.

Begin by placing beets, minus their greens, in a casserole with a little water. Season with salt and pepper, a splash of oil and cover tightly with perforated foil to let steam escape. Bake at 375 degrees until a knife slips into the beets easily.

When the beets are cool enough to handle, rub the skins off with a damp cloth, cut off the tops and bottoms and shape each beet into cylinder with a biscuit cutter. That way, all the slices will be the same size. Set the cut away beet leavings aside.

Marinate the slices for an hour in a vinaigrette of one part sherry vinegar, two parts extra virgin olive oil, finely chopped shallots, tarragon and chives.

Now purée the beet leavings and mix in freshly grated horseradish to taste and enough crème fraîche to bring it all together. You can make quenelles from this mixture or just neat spoonfulls on either side of the overlapping beet slices on the plate.

Now here’s another cheffy touch. Cocheo spoons a little of the vinaigrette over the beets , adds slivers of smoked trout, and, naturally, micro greens.

I just want to warn you, though, if you do not know already, grating fresh horseradish is not fun. I tried it once and it drove my dog out of the kitchen. So I used readymade. Yes, it adds a vinegar taste, which Cocheo dislikes. But I can live with it. Also, for fun, I used fresh goat cheese instead of crème fraîche. So I finessed the trout.

As for micro greens, a rabbit ate the radish sprouts my husband had planted in the backyard. Finely chopped chives worked fine.