Well, “Flavor of the Week” has slowed down quite a bit over the last several weeks — busy with all that cooking, gardening and other good summer activities.  The rooftop herb garden here at the restaurant has been going just great this year.  Like everybody else, we’ve survived the dry spell in June (and had to resort to a little garden hose use this year!), and now are enjoying timely periodic showers.

I expanded the garden this year quite a bit, and now have 55 crates of herbs and a few small vegetables.  In order to make this work, I built a 50-foot long PVC pipeline to bring water over from another rooftop air conditioning unit.  It’s a little “Willy Wonka”, but it works!  Amazingly, the 3 rooftop units combined produce over 60 gallons of condensed water per day here, and we only occupy a single story 3000 sq ft space — the extended math on larger buildings around town and the world over is just mind-boggling!

Many of the mainstays of the garden have flourished so well this summer season: rosemary, mint, chives, thyme, lovage.  Spring crops, such as chervil which made such a nice imprint on our Sunday Menus in May, have given way to summer crops like purslane, marjoram and fresh bay leaf which are being used on current menus.  I have so much mint and rosemary that I should probably apply for a vendor’s stall at the Central Square Farmers’ Market!  But we keep finding ways to use it all here, partially thanks to Scott, our bar manager, as he continues to concoct refreshing summer drinks for our guests.

I plant a new crate of french breakfast radishes each week, and since they take 25-30 days to mature from seed I always have five successive weeks in process so that we never run out of these beautiful little gems for use on our vegetable antipasto.  Whenever I see guests pass on the radish, I chase the busboy down into the galley and tell him to take it back out there to that table, or it’s “No Dessert!”.  The hot chilies are going nuts these days, too, and these we use for ceviche on Sunday Menus and on Monday Night Tapas, as well as for making salsa verde.

The rooftop garden also serves as a nursery for restaurant decorations.  I have a couple of crates of dwarf sunflowers growing up there that I will bring down to brighten up the vestibule, and and sometimes do the same with a particularly lively looking crate of  mint to greet the guests with its fresh aroma as they enter the restaurant.  During June, I regularly snipped beautiful lavender blossoms to decorate the front desk for Nicole and Bob.

Mixed Berry Shortcakes on how2heros!

Rendezvous chef/owner Steve Johnson won us over with these individual shortcakes. Topped with cream and sugar just before baking, these little wonders come out golden brown with an incredibly flaky texture and crispy top. Fresh berries gently tossed with sugar create their own delicious syrup. And Steve gives a shout-out to his Ohio roots with his easy sweet cream idea. Get creative with seasonal fruits and even though the biscuit dough should yield about 12-15 INDIVIDUAL portions, we defy you to eat just one.

Follow this link….

Mixed Berry Shortcakes

by Tess | Thursday, June 17th, 2010 @ how2heros ! Eat. Cook. Be Merry.

With the how2heroes table positioned close to bundles of farm-fresh strawberries at the Cambridge Center Farmers’ Market, one could say we’ve had strawberries heavy on our mind. Vibrant in taste and color, we needed a true hero to curb our craving with the perfect dessert. That hero came in the form of Steve Johnson, chef/owner of Rendezvous in Cambridge, MA.

Steve joined us at the market to make a classic with a twist: Strawberry-Rhubarb Shortcake. If you’ve never tasted rhubarb before, this recipe is a good introduction, adding a nice tartness and even richer color than the strawberries alone. To cut the tang, Steve poured a home-made sweet cream over his grandmother’s biscuit recipe and paired that with the fruit. He then garnished with fragrant fresh mint. Whether you were or weren’t there, you can remake the magic with this recipe. Soon to come is the full-length how-to video featuring Steve and his signature dessert!

As usual, we were selling a sweet treat to help raise money for the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers’ Markets.

From the Blog “Food for Thought”

Written by Heather Atwood on July 2nd, 2010

Steve Johnson is the chef and owner at Rendezvous, the bistro-style restaurant in Central Square, Cambridge I’ve written about in The Gloucester Times.  (Steve came to my house last winter to make a video – toasted orrechiete with pork and veal meatballs, a dish my family and I devoured in one long mmmmmm that night.)

The number one fact about Rendezvous is the food:  it’s great. – Southern France-hearty, North African-interesting, and American-hip without ever striking a flat note, or being empty-trendy.  Serious food with roots and integrity.

A second interesting fact, and it’s old news but we all love to mention it:  Rendezvous is housed in an old Burger King.  I’ve said it before but will point out the pure Cambridgian moment here:  A bistro-inspired restaurant succeeds where a fast food joint can’t.  Fast-schmast.

The irony goes on:  On top of that ole’ Burger King now grows one of the lushest roof-top gardens I’ve ever seen, irrigated with nothing but the restaurant’s dripping air-conditioner unit.

Steve grows serious produce – not just a couple of pots of thyme – for his restaurant while keeping his customers cool – an interesting deviation from the water cycle:  Hot customers enter restaurant.  Air conditioner cools them, producing a water run-off in the process.  Run-off irrigates food which customers have come in to eat.

Steve plants everything in cardboard boxes set in flimsy wooden packing crates.   He brings in soil, but also has a composter up on the roof for restaurant scraps.  He fills the cardboard boxes with soil, and they fit perfectly into the wooden crate.  The boxes sit on the roof around the air-conditioning unit which is constantly dripping water, so the boxes are sitting in about a 1/2 inch of puddled water all the time.  The soft cardboard wicks up the water, while the wooden crate holds everything together, because the cardboard will gradually decompose.  I tucked my finger down into the soil of one of the crates and it was perfectly cool and moist five inches down.

With fifty-five of these boxes on the roof, a composter and a hand-built cold frame in which he winters-over plants, Steve grows mint, chives, purslane, sage, cutting celery, arugula, beautiful French radishes, potatoes, and the most vibrantly healthy rosemary I’ve ever seen.  These rosemary plants are small trees.  They couldn’t be healthier or happier in a Provencal potager.

Maybe the aroma of all that “garbure” being served below is being vented over the rosemary, and they think they are in Provence? Or maybe this chunk of Central Square just has some Languedoc karma, but, as the bistro thrives, so does the rosemary.  – and everything else.

Still a good song; still a good place to be – when this ole’ world starts getting you down…

Every Monday afternoon from Memorial Day to Thanksgiving week, the Central Square Farmers’ Market operates in the parking lot on the corner of Norfolk Street and Bishop Allen Drive directly behind the Blockbuster Video on Mass Ave.  The market is open from noon until 6pm, and is a regular part of my weekly routine.  Since this market is barely a block away from the restaurant, it couldn’t be any more convenient for me.  Also, this time slot fills a gap in our schedule of  farm deliveries, and after a busy weekend here we always have a few needs to fill.  The market is small (about 12 vendors), but the quality is very high, and I’m always thrilled by the displays and find great inspiration for our menus — it is particularly good timing for our Monday Night Tapas Bar.

This market really serves the needs of the community, and a quick glance around the crowds on any given Monday confirms this point.   Regular shoppers there include residents from the surrounding neighborhoods,  employees from the nearby city offices and numerous other businesses in the Square, students and professors, etc. –  the demographic mix is very broad indeed, just like Central Square itself, and you will see familiar faces from the community, foodies, restaurant chefs, parents and kids — all of whom share a desire for fresh, local, nutritious food.  The strategic location makes it accessible to all; most people who shop there come from within walking distance, and it’s also within a block of the subway and bus stops.  In general, the prices for all this superb fresh produce are very reasonable, and many vendors accept food stamps.

It’s true here too what people appreciate about their local markets everywhere: regularly seeing your friends and neighbors in this wonderfully colorful, fragrant and positive setting is a real plus for those of us who live here.  A trip around the market always includes greetings and conversations, catching up on the news, occasional surprise encounters, and sharing excitement and cooking ideas about discoveries in this week’s produce.  Knowing your grower and building a relationship with that person throughout the course of weekly visits builds trust in this system of food distribution, and I really like hearing from them what new items will be coming in next week — a case where insider trading tips can actually contribute to the greater good of society!

This weekend marks the beginning of summer in the garden; tonight’s full moon is an important milestone on the planting calendar.  15 more crates of herbs have been added in the last month, among them dandelion greens, sylvetta arugula, cutting celery, purslane, french breakfast radishes . . .   All of these have started sprouting up and growing, and I’ve been harvesting the radishes already for two weeks, with successive plantings timed for continuous harvesting.  These beautiful little gems are used on our vegetable antipasto appetizer.

Just for fun as well, I’ve planted about 25 Red Gold potato plants — more for entertainment and educational purposes really rather than for any notion of bulk consumption.  The cooks and service staff have been fascinated by their beauty and their progress over the last few weeks.  Between the re-planting and subdividing of perennials and the recent seeding of new crops, the garden is now up to 50 containers and still growing.

In these photos you can see that the rosemary bushes have made a successful transition from their winter home inside the cold frame to living outdoors again.  The enormous lavender bush in bloom is also a veteran from last year’s garden, as well as the thyme, mint, chives, lovage, horseradish and lots of volunteer purslane, too!

Before the weather gets too hot to turn on our restaurant AC units, I have relied upon captured rainwater and a few short sprays of the garden hose in the early evening.  But now that summer is upon us, the condensed water produced by the AC units will provide enough drip irrigation for the entire season.

Spring is now in full swing around here, and with it now we are loving the arrival of the early green vegetables: peas, pea tips, spinach, fava beans, asparagus . . .

During this month of May we try to offer several different preparations of asparagus each week:  on our regular menu, a shaved raw asparagus salad with bittergreens, manchego cheese and anchovy vinaigrette; on our Sunday Night menu, roasted asparagus in a warm salad with an olive oil-poached Aracauna egg and black truffle vinaigrette; as a vegetable accompaniment to the skillet-roasted skate on our current menu we use sautéed asparagus tips;  on our Monday Night Tapas Bar menu, grilled asparagus spears drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and sprinkled with grated piave cheese.

These four menu offerings display the versatility of asparagus and three different methods for preparing this wonderful spring treat.  Anyone who has seen asparagus growing in the field understands even better from that experience the exuberant and urgent nature of its freshness and appreciates the tender green and pleasant mildly bitter quality of brand-new spears.  Whenever possible, we try to avoid pre-cooking it in salted water, and as you can see none of these three presentations use that step.

Freshness is a must with this vegetable, and thanks to our farmer friends I usually prefer to serve it raw to give the diners a clean, true impression of this vegetable — not the watered-down version.  Similar to our (somewhat unusual) approach also with shaved artichokes or brussels sprouts leaves, a little salt and lemon juice will bring out the unique flavor qualities inherent in this vegetable.  So, I recommend that you try using fresh, raw asparagus the next time you plan to use it in a salad, and that you avoid pre-cooking it before grilling.

A fantastic month of April weather here has helped things move along nicely on the roof.  Much time spent up there in the last few weeks replanting containers of perennial herbs that survived the cold of winter — chives, lovage, thyme, mint, rosemary, lavender — now all in new crates with fresh compost and already showing lots of new growth.  Two weeks ago, I did my first complete harvest of the chive crop, providing enough for our kitchen use for 4 consecutive days, and then divided all of these plants into 2 and replanted, thereby doubling our crop for 2010 — now totaling 30 separate plants!

Also recently started new seeds and seedlings of annuals  including parsley, chervil, sage, sorrel, dandelion greens and micro-greens.  First little crop of French breakfast radishes went in this week, too.  Now up to 35 crates of herbs, with a plan for 15 more in the next 6 weeks as the weather continues to warm up.

The herbs from the rooftop garden are already making a big impact on the menu here this month.  I am especially fond of the beautiful dish on our Sunday menu of sautéed halibut with a white wine butter sauce flavored with lovage and chervil.  Trimming and re-growth provide just enough of these two herbs to flavor 2 dozen orders for each week’s special Sunday menu during this spring season.

The first time I visited la Boquería, Barcelona’s famous covered market, I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.  All the hams hanging overhead, the amazing fish and shellfish counters, the fresh mushrooms, those beautiful figs, . . . !!!  But you might be surprised when I say that the display that impressed me the most was the salt cod stand.  Do I remember correctly when I counted 47 different cuts/grades/presentations — is that possible, or just a mild exaggeration to make my point when telling this story?  After all, salt cod is salt cod is salt cod, right?

Like the potato in Peru, the closer you get to the source the more variety you witness.  In Spain, they have come up with a staggering number of ways to preserve and use salted cod in their cooking.  At that market, I was in line behind a few women, each of whom purchased several different cuts and qualities of it for use in different dishes to be cooked at home that week.  Some of it resembled the finest halibut fillet, immaculate, pearly-white thick slabs, moist and only very lightly-salted, that looked good enough to slice and eat right on the spot — the likes of which I certainly had never seen before!

These are moments of inspiration for a cook.

And one of my best resulted in a fish stew using salt cod as the base.  Adapting a recipe from Galicia (on the Atlantic coast of Spain, ground zero for salt cod!), I combine minced salt cod with onion, garlic, potato, lots of leeks, escarole, white wine, water and olive oil in a stock pot.  Unique in my repertoire of soup-making, this is the only soup recipe I have that doesn’t follow the typical progression of sautéing vegetables first, adding seasonings then other ingredients and liquids — all of the ingredients go into the pot together cold and at the same time, then the pot goes on the flame to simmer for 90 minutes.   No need for fish stock; in fact I’m making one as the soup cooks.  No need for long soaking of the salt cod; in fact a light rinse is all that I want because its special salty aged flavor helps to season the soup as the vegetables cook and the wine works its magic.  The result is a flavorful liquid tasting of all those vegetables, with a pervasive underpinning of white umami — subtle, light and completely invigorating.

In the restaurant, I use this soup to simmer chunks of fresh cod and littlenecks.  The soup flavors these latter ingredients, and in the case of the littlenecks they return their flavor favor back to the soup.  I was very flattered when Corby Kummer selected this recipe for inclusion in “The Pleasures of Slow Food”, published by Chronicle Books (2002).