This Week at the Herdic House
We promised a brief treatise on Copenhagen, now that we’ve had time to get back in the swing of things, and we’ll keep this treatise as brief as our whirlwind trip there—but first off, to state the obvious, Copenhagen is a positively delightful city. Full to the brim with arts and culture, plentifully supplied with more Michelin stars than any other city in the world, and the only city we’ve ever been to that has more designated bike parking than car parking, this is a cosmopolitan place with deep history in a country that still boasts a king and queen, despite all that tragic activity in Hamlet. (Try explaining that to your royalty-obsessed children.)
And Liz and Glory, with their friends Sally and Stacey, spent a wonderful four days exploring the curious differences between America and Denmark, while drinking ample cocktails and eating copious quantities of…everything: smorrebrød, cardamom buns, folded eggs with ‘nduja, shiso leaves filled with shrimp and encased in tempura, curious little mushrooms in rich mushroom broth, vanilla ice cream topped with caviar, panna cotta topped with caviar, gooseberries, strawberries, tiny mirabelle plums that looked like berries and copious quantities of a brand new (to us) berry called sea buckthorn. Check out Glory at the Nyhavn Farmers’ Market, enjoying some strawberry sorbet and rhubarb tea with camelina seed—oh, didn’t we wish we could bring home some of the ingredients we found there…
But maybe even more interesting that the fascinating and delicious food culture was the bike and pedestrian culture: cars in Copenhagen take a definite last place in importance, after pedestrians, bikes, trains, buses, boats and possibly some other transportation methods we’re forgetting. Cyclists and pedestrians have dedicated paths on practically every street (and even on major highways, reports Liz, who cycled 37 kilometers up the coast to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art). And not only are there dedicated lanes, there are entire dedicated bridges—in a city with canals running through it like veins (and supplying its literal lifeblood), Copenhagen boasts dozens of bike and ped bridges, some with their own drawbridges to allow sailboats through. What a fascinating way to flip the American car culture on its head, and help us see the world differently! Copenhagen is also home to the weirdest little self-governing community called Christiania, staked out by a group of squatters in the 70s, and still doing its own thing (despite clashes with municipal government) more than 50 years later, and to a truly brave bunch of sunbathers and swimmers, who lounge on wooden docks lining the canals, all over the city, and periodically brave the plunge into the slightly chilly ocean waters, even when the air temps are…not exactly sweltering.
And that comes nowhere near summing up what we discovered on our brief Copenhagen adventure…but ’twill serve (if we may lift a phrase from another ghastly Shakespearean tragedy). Wednesday morning is coming on apace, and we need to encourage everyone to get their lobster orders for Friday in by 8 pm tonight! And then get on to the business of exactly what there is doing at the Herdic this week…
And this week, it’s time to get a little meat back into our Wednesday evenings around the Herd. While this is definitely the best time of year to be a vegetarian in Central PA, we nonetheless think a bit of beef augments the veggiess in a delightful way. Tonight’s Blue Plate will be a slight spin on a classic taco salad, made with the best of the best ingredients (because it’s high farm season, and this is as good as food tastes all year!): Misty Mountain beef, Tarsa Farms oyster mushrooms, Fossil Springs black beans, Beech Grove baby greens, fresh tomato and corn pico de gallo and queso crema with feta from Belle Springs…plus crispy tortilla strips, of course. The Blue Plate, as always, is $18 at our House and $20 to go, and you can reach us at 570-322-0165 to book a table! Plus, we’ll have crab and corn bisque, fried green tomatoes as an appetizer and peach-blueberry cobbler for dessert…
Come join us for our Thursday happy hours at the bar, from 5-7 pm, with $1 off all beers and $2 off wines by the glass. In the kitchen, we’ll be making lump crabcake sandwiches with remoulade and an herb and sweet pepper slaw, served with Hunter’s increasingly excellent potato chips (did we already mention how good all the veggies are right now?)…
But lobster is the real word of the week around these parts—the Herdic House has hosted our annual lobster boil every August for years, but we’ve been fortunate to find a great supplier out of Harrisburg these last couple years, and we’ve been very pleased with the quality and flavor of our lobsters. This week, they’ll be arriving on Friday morning, feisty and flavorful, and doubtless concerned about their fate…and Liz will take up her annual role as lobster executioner in the basement. But please remember that lobsters are available on a preorder basis only for Friday night! If you’d like to make arrangements to enjoy one of our fine hardshell Maine lobsters, please call down to the restaurant no later than 8 pm tonight (Wednesday) to reserve your crustacean. And we should mention some other fine features we’ll be serving on Friday evening…
- Manhattan clam chowder, with fresh clams, local tomato and savory herbs
- Crispy calamari served over a lemony roasted tomato aioli with seared hungarian peppers and pea shoots
- Live, pound and a half Maine lobsters, steamed and served in the shell, with an ear of Snyder’s corn and a warm potato and green bean salad
- Hannah’s favorite peach custard pie (because the gods of peaches smiled on us this week), served with a generous dollop of whipped cream