This Week at the Herdic House
Here at the Herdic, Nittany Valley Creamery just made our weekly delivery, and their dripping wet deliveryman offered up his opinion that today’s weather is more like fall than spring…and we had to concur. Where yesterday’s rain had the sprightly feeling of blooming possibilities, today’s drizzle harkens more toward grey endings, somehow. And yet, tomorrow promises to be lovely, full of the spring blossoms that May is famous for! Fortunately, however, we designed tonight’s Blue Plate with this wet weather in mind: our last Landis Farm chicken and biscuits for a while, tonight served with garlic mashed and spring peas—the perfect antidote to a grey spring-fall day. It’s $18 at our House, and $20 to go, like always—but, per usual, our number of to-go orders will be very limited. We’ll hope to see you out tonight! And our soup this evening will be a cream of asparagus and Ten Mile shiitakes, finished with fresh asparagus bits and basil.
And a heads up! We’ll need to move our next Blue Plate night to Thursday, May 22, because of an excess of large parties on Wednesday, May 21. And we’ll have limited space even Thursday, depending on the weather, so please call for reservations! 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. Plus we’ll be serving our Thursday night feature that pretends to be healthy, all while loaded with the tangy umami of ranch dressing: house favorite Herdic Pittsburgh salad, this week served with grilled spicy shrimp, fresh-cut fries, grated cheddar and parmesan ranch. Plus, Hannah will be shaking up spiked lilac lemonade at the bar… Don’t let today’s dreary deluge fool you, however. It truly is all happening this week, and not just at the Herdic, but everywhere you look—from gaggles of graduates festooning campuses and city streets, to flowers of all hues cropping up in fields, forests and front yards, to farms suddenly pierced with spears of fat asparagus, drooping with cucumber vines and fairly overflowing with leafy greens of all varieties. Our walk-in cooler is surprisingly crammed, for the month of May, with everything from kale, to mizuna, to arugula and every tasty green in between, not to mention the rosy stems of rhubarb peeking out from behind the leggy scallions, and the delicious broccoli rabe from Fossil Springs Farm, stashed on top of the mountain of asparagus our fabulous friend Bob Esposito has secured for us.
Make no mistake—it’s surprisingly crowded not just in our dining rooms in May, but also in our coolers, and we’ll be featuring all that awesome produce all week long as we cook for what seems to be everyone and their grandma…but we’ve still got tables left for our friends and readers of our email blast! Stop in tomorrow evening (Thursday) to sample fresh softshell crabs with arugula and tarragon, or Friday for some local herb-inflected crab and scallion bisque. But that all’s we can say about our features at the moment—when it gets to be busy May at the Herdic House, we’re just trying to keep up and hold on.
PS As you can see from our photo above, we’re scarcely pausing to even take pictures around here. The best Liz and Hannah could dredge up, between the two of them, is (above) a sweet but backlit picture of the twins giving Payton face tattoos on Mother’s Day with their new invisible ink pens. Hope all the mothers out there enjoyed their unusual gifts as well…