Essex Farm

I spent the last week up at Essex Farm on Lake Champlain in New York. it's gotten totally under my skin and i'm heading up there to work in February. This past week I have run like crazy after a heifer on a lead rope (somehow managed to hold onto her. Matt wasn't as lucky: his cow Fox freaked out and started to run, pulling him until he wiped out on ice. she dragged him along as if he were waterskiing until he hit the end of the ice patch, at which point he popped back up and kept running until he faceplanted and lost her). I have never eaten as many pork chops in one week, never cooked as many pork chops (spontaneous dinner we cooked after the bonfire for 14 middlebury rugby players), and haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

Essex is an amazing farm because they make just about everything themselves. they raise pigs, cows and chickens like caretaker - but they do all the slaughtering and butchering themselves. they milk 6 cows for their CSA, render the fatback into lard and make soap. They use draft horses - huge belgians - to work the vegetable land. They're on about 500 acres, and if you walk up to the top of the hill you can look down and see lake champlain.

Saturday I was planning to head down to Hawthorne Valley for a workshop but they got loads of ice and lost electricity, so they cancelled the workshop. that was fine by me - i headed over the Dogwood Cafe in Wadhams (also a "rustic style bakery", somewhat reminiscent of Canto). Susie, one of the girls who works on the farm walked in so we went on a quest to find the town of Lake Placid with her new puppy Oliver. Alas, two missed turns and about an hour later, we decided our mission would be left unaccomplished and we settled for buying beer and smore supplies in Elizabethtown. Sam and Matt had spent the morning building up the bonfire with a bunch of the Middlebury rugby team, so we went to the bonfire for a bit and then made our spontaneous dinner at Susie's - pork chops from the 3 pigs Sam slaughtered this week (3 pigs = a boatload of porkchops), leek-y mashed potatoes, celeriac, green beans, hard boiled eggs, olive bread from Dogwood cafe, and of course plenty of red wine and dark beer to round it out.