This Week at the Herdic House
Woot! What a weird, wintry week it’s been! At the Herdic, the combination of chill, snow, ice, and lover’s trysts has us dreaming of something heartily seductive for this week’s Blue Plate. And what would better fit the bill than Beef Stroganoff, with seared tenderloin tips, button mushrooms, cream, dijon and a sprinkle of fresh dill? 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! P.S. Tonight’s soup will be a delicious shrimp and sweet corn bisque, finished with a frizzle of fresh basil… As for the rest of Valentine’s Week here at the Herdic, it’s fixing to be pretty shag-a-delic around here, as you might expect for a restaurant frequently voted the area’s most romantic. It’ll be couples upon couples in the Herdic dining rooms, with tables for Valentine’s Day already sold out, and Saturday night mostly booked to the rafters as well. We do still have plenty of tete-a-tete tables available on Thursday night, however—and we’ll be serving our aphrodisiac Valentine’s features on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights this week!
But, given our busy state, we’re not promoting our featured menu for this weekend—so we figured instead we’d tell you the down-and-dirty deets about a couple dishes on our menu that we’re currently head over heels for. (Please note, however, that these dishes won’t be on the menu this week, as we trim our offerings down to make the busy week a bit more manageable for our staff—but they’ll be back on our menu next week and with us through the cold season!)
The first dish we’re in love with right now has been on our menu the past few years, but, if you haven’t had the opportunity to try our pineapple salad, this is definitely the year to give it a try—a sweet and savory mix of grilled ripe pineapple and sweet onion, served with baby greens tossed in a cumin-coconut vinaigrette, and finished with toasted macadamia nuts, it’s somehow a near perfect winter salad, and it’s vegan to boot!
Our other current favorite dish features both a new recipe and lamb from a new farm we just started working with in December. We were heartbroken when John and Sukey at Jamison Farm retired a few years ago, and it’s taken us a few years to find another excellent lamb purveyor with enough supply for our needs—but we’re pleased to introduce the savory, unctuous lamb shank from Elysian Fields Farm out in Southwestern PA (pictured above), in the heart of PA lamb country.
We prepare these beautiful shanks simply, with just red wine, lots of garlic, rosemary and Ten Mile oyster mushrooms. They’re seared and then spend several hours braising in the oven before they’re ready to serve over creamy polenta with a fresh and tangy gremolata. Weighing in at approximately 20 oz. per shank, it’s a dish that could easily be shared—or leave enough leftovers for a delicious lunch the next day. And it’s getting accolades not just from us but also from our dining room, where a few people have already told us it’s the best lamb shank they’ve ever had. (And then there was the Brazilian man who told us he’d eaten lamb shank all over the world, and ours was the second best, after one prepared by a famed French chef—which is good enough praise for us, for sure…)
As we share the love this week, we thought it only appropriate that we share our love for our wonderful ingredients and our fantastic purveyors—we’re so lucky to work with a huge network of talented and committed growers from the state of PA! Sample their hard work next time you’re at the Herdic House…and, in the meantime, celebrate all the love that there is in the world this week—not just romantic love, but the love of your family, your friends and all the friends out there that you just haven’t met yet, many of them doing incredible things—whether that’s fighting hunger or curing cancer or raising lamb or raising great kids or…all the remarkable feats in between.