Farmer and chef shares insights with home cooks
It was the first deep freeze of the season in Colorado, snow thick underfoot and the temperature in the single digits, when Eric Skokan accidentally left a 35-pound bag of onions in the car.
The chef wasn't about to give up on the red onions he'd grown himself on his sprawling 130 acres in the Rocky Mountain foothills near Longmont. So instead of storing the onions, as he'd planned, Skokan and his wife Jill thawed them and started a monster batch of French onion soup, the scent turning their small farmhouse into a warm, fragrant respite from the chill.
"We'll have some now and freeze the rest," Skokan said, shrugging off the mouthwatering accident bubbling away on his stove.
Skokan's intrepid approach to food and ability to turn misfortune into a delicious dish help explain why his integrated farm-and-restaurant operation is one of the nation's largest.
He has gone well beyond the small vanity gardens some restaurateurs grow in order to claim a farm-to-table ethos. He raises thousands of animals - steers, pigs, chickens and geese among them - and grows vegetables by the ton to supply his two acclaimed restaurants, Black Cat Bistro and Bramble & Hare.
Even through Colorado's frigid winters, more than 90 percent of what Skokan serves comes from his farm. And that often means working with misfortune, as in the year he ended up with thousands of pounds of unusable turnips. Rather than discard them, he bought pigs to eat them. And so pork, not turnips, ended up on the menu.
But you don't need quite that level of agricultural ingenuity to appreciate Skokan's just-released first cookbook, "Farm, Fork, Food," a work inspired by his other job - selling produce and meat at a farmers market.
"The book I envisioned writing a while ago was a polished, technical cookbook geared toward chefs," Skokan said. "But over the last seven years, selling produce at the farmers market, we've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of customers who have had more basic questions - 'How do I make a great vinaigrette to go with this arugula?' Or, 'I made pot roast last night and it was miserable, can you help me figure out what went wrong?'
"So I came around to wanting to do a book that was inspired by those conversations, to bridge that gap between the enthusiasm people feel about food they're seeing at the farmers market and success in the kitchen."
The book includes a section on basic building blocks for that success, including how to make homemade vinegar, garlic oil and curry powder, along with six kinds of stock. "I share lots of little tricks along the way, the building blocks of good cooking," Skokan said. "That's ultimately what the book is about. It's a toolbox."
Throughout the book, Skokan also holds forth on his favorite topic whether he's at the farm, restaurant or farmers market - introducing diners and gardeners to new foods.
Skokan shows off products even some savvy foodies may never have heard of. He explains what to do with green coriander berries or lamb's quarters, a weedy plant with leaves that can be used like baby spinach. He talks about the superiority of Hailstone white radishes in Colorado gardens, and why gardeners shouldn't throw out pea tendrils.
Cooking, he said, can be an exploration just as risky and exciting as planting a new type of vegetable, not knowing how it will turn out, or picking up a strange new item from a farmers market.
"It's a slippery slope," he said with a grin.