This Week at the Herdic House
Finally, a healthy dose of forecasted rain actually fell this week, bringing some much needed vitality to the gardens of Wilpo. The basil looks positively luminous, folks, and the tomatoes are lush, the cucumbers revived and the zucchini…well, nothing seems to stop the zucchini. Which brings us to the identity of our Blue Plate this week, which makes the most of the plethora of zucchini in the world right now: roasted zucchini stuffed with Misty Mountain pork and beef, then served over organic fettuccine tossed in a tomato, basil and butter sauce 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! We’ll have chicken corn chowder for our soup and fried green tomatoes as an appetizer, but be forewarned those tomatoes sold out in a flash last week…
…and now’s a good time to mention that actually, there will be a Blue Plate next Wednesday, July 29. Not every party pans out—and :surprise!: the group we had next Wednesday just cancelled and left us with ample space for our Blue Plate crowd…
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’re making Asian-inflected crabcake sandwiches as our Thursday feature, served on Kaiser rolls with sriracha aioli, miso glaze and crisp veggie slaw…
But this week’s biggest surprise was a delightful one indeed. Let us quickly recap a decade or so of Herdic history: several years ago, Ben, Liz’s ex-partner, gifted her not two, but five plum trees (an abundance of plum trees, one might argue), two of which wound up getting planted at the Herdic Inn (because who has space for five plum trees in their city yard?) We spent years cultivating the plum trees, pruning them, expecting to be gifted plums any season now, but every year instead, while they’re loaded with blossoms in the spring and then set bunches of fruit, every single plum falls to the ground while it’s still deep green and bitter.
Last year, we resigned ourselves to never getting fruit from these lovely little trees, and this year, when they blossomed, we willy-nilly harvested blossoms for cocktails, garnishes, what have you—since it wasn’t like they’d ever turn into plums! Nonetheless, the tree was fair drooping with plums by late spring, and, by early June, we were stepping on underripe fruit when we walked out the brick path by the garage. Same old story. But yesterday, when Liz and the kids were hunting other garden treasures, like the snails that routinely turn up around our yard, they were shocked to discover that, despite all the plums underfoot, the trees are still loaded with plums, and, lo and behold, most of them are just shy of ripe.
That’s right: in a year when most of the fruit in the county got frosted, the Peter Herdic House is fairly swimming in plums this week. We’d say we don’t know what to make of it, but the truth is, we can think of several things to make. So this Friday, we’re putting together a stone fruit menu, replete with our plum windfall, and the few peaches we’ve gleaned from our farmer friends. We’ll hope to see you down at the Herd to enjoy these long-awaited fruits!
- Plummy kir royale with fresh shiro plums, housemade cassis and sparkling wine
- Roasted beet and plum soup, finished with creamy yogurt and chili-toasted almonds
- Caramelized plum and peach salad, with chevre and toasted pistachio, in a blueberry vinaigrette
- Plum glazed red snapper, served over coconut rice with a shiro plum and sweet corn salsa
- Crisp plum cake with whipped cinnamon cream and brown sugar peaches