Cs Community Journals V3
Image by Jasmine Senaveratna
Spring is coming through those freshly cracked windows and birds are singing and flowers are in full bloom in my neighborhood and this week’s CS JOURNALS is, again, exactly what I need to be reading. New ideas to cook and riff off of, a playlist to keep me sane, healthy escapism through wine and travel, longings for foods we once ate without a second thought. Dig in to this one, y’all.
A reminder that these journals are all donated by the authors and artist. If you have it in you, donate $3-$5 to the authors in this newsletter. The easiest way is to send a venmo to Josh Hamlet and @Josh-Hamlet (he has a pink shirt on in the photo); we’ll also be setting up a donation button shortly. Stay tuned.
Love you all, and come let your mind wander for a minute.
Oyster Withdrawal
You like this wine? You may also like…
What’s cookinG
20.
It’s been a week
Calm Insanity
Oyster Withdrawal
Words and Images by LindsAy Howard
I haven’t eaten an oyster in 32 days. That would probably be the average for most people except my job as the Boston Sales Rep for Island Creek Oysters had me eating oysters almost every hour. For the past 14 months, I have obsessed over shucking events, oyster tasting notes and shellfish farmers for most waking hours of the day. On March 20th, I was officially furloughed from the farm with sincere hopes that one day the job would still be there for me. I feel like the ship of Island Creek dropped me off on the nice little island of unemployment and said ‘Hey! We love you and we will be back in a few months to pick you up! But we gotta ride out this pandemic right now, without you.’ There might not be a ship in a few months, but we all have to hope that some sense of normal will reappear in our lives in the near future.
This is one of many transitions I have experienced in my life. After ten years in the front of house hospitality and wine world, moving into sales was not easy. My passion behind the product and eagerness to learn came naturally, but going to bed at 9:30pm did not. Eating at normal hours did not (3:30pm was family meal). Being productive at 6:15am did not. I used to wake up around 6am and check my text messages to see what my morning had in store for me. At 7am, I would talk to Jon (who always said ‘Good Morning!’ with wild enthusiasm) at the warehouse to confirm order and discuss what chefs called our orders line.
Post AM orders, I found myself bouncing between the monotony of order entry and the hospitality aspect of my job. I loved spending time with chefs and restaurant staffs educating them about aquaculture farms and how fucking awesome oysters are. I loved the community I could create from being obsessed with one product and its story. After my first year as the Boston Sales rep, I started to develop better habits like consistent exercise (I wasn’t walking miles on a restaurant floor anymore), drinking less alcohol (oysters and wine and gin and beer just go well together, okay?) and crafting better boundaries when everyone wanted me to do an oyster event. I finally developed the tools to make my new normal my own, to struggle less on a day to day basis and ease into the drama of my everyday.
As I take this necessary pause in my sales job, I remember why I was always so fascinated by bivalves. Growing up in coastal North Carolina, I saw oysters as a culinary tradition and a solution to polluted waterways. The summer before college I was an intern for the North Carolina Coastal Federation where I preached the good word of coastline preservation. I attended local fairs where I brought wild oysters in a saltwater tank, dumped a ton of silt in, and brought to people’s attention the gift of oysters - their ability to filter 50 gallons of water a day!
In late October and November, oyster roasts in my parents' garage were neighborhood events. We used copious amounts of jarred horseradish to spike Heinz ketchup. Cornbread and chili were inside in the kitchen but the action was in the garage, outfitted with a custom oyster shucking table that my dad threw together with plywood and trash cans. Once cooked, the oysters looked like shriveled, gray nuggets with little to no aesthetic appeal, but with enough saltines, cocktail sauce and Tabasco, they were the punch in the face you wanted. I realized after moving to Boston that a New England oyster is an entirely different animal.
A beautifully shucked New England oyster in its purest form needs no sauce. It should not be ice cold so you can taste the complexity of flavors, closer to room temp the better, as with any good white wine. All the oyster needs is to be thoughtfully chewed and followed by a beverage of your choice. Oyster flavors change with the season and often with the tide. Ichabod Flats from Plymouth can taste like pork fat, roasted parsnips and nori. Mount Desert Islands from Maine can pop you in the face with shiitake mushroom broth and a tangy tin finish. An Island Creek from Duxbury can (and usually does) have an intense seagrass blast followed by mid-palate buttery richness and nonstop briney finish.
My obsession with oysters has hit a pause for now. I am still paging through oyster books, staying in touch with industry friends and cooking a lot. I am taking a major life change like unemployment to breathe deeper, to not feel rushed, to not have a calendar or a schedule for that matter. I am easing into a new normal again and trying not to resist it so hard. I could always order a few dozen online if I feel the absolute need (plus oysters are packed full of zinc and are great for your immune system!). The withdrawal is real but I feel at ease in a new way of being for the meantime, where I lean into the discomfort of not having much to do and not knowing what the future holds.
If you like this wine, you might like…
Wines and words by Sarah Boisjoli, Locations and Images by Josh Hamlet
Sarah and I are obviously a little obsessed with “pairings”, there’s no getting around it. We’ve paired wines clothes and music and art with food, and the other way around. Sitting inside with the occasional stroll around the block or quick jaunt, and more wine than normal, it has gotten our minds wandering to other places, to all of the beaches and countries and cities we’ve been so lucky to visit. So, with glass in hand, over FaceTime, Sarah proposed “What if we did a wine-travel pairing?” After some back and forth and a lot of affirmations on my end, we decided to try something out: Choosing your Next Dream Vacation Spot based off the type of wine you like. Think of it like the Amazon suggestions, “If you like this you might also like…”
Have some fun, don’t @ me, but definitely if you think you’ve got the BEST place to pair with these wines, let me know so I can fake-plan a trip there ASAP.
The Wine
Nicolas Mariotti Bindi Cantina di Torra Patrimonio Blanc 2018
Juicy Corsican island wine. Really an ideal wine for quarantine season as it offers a heavy dose of escapism. It literally tastes and feels like a warm coastal breeze somewhere between the south of France and Italy. Drink on your balcony while daydreaming, or with grilled fish and artichoke.
Fine Print: 100% Vermentinu organically farmed in Corsica on clay and limestone. Bottle early to capture a more fruit driven style.
Tasting Notes: Lemon curd and tropical fruits, a bit of acacia. Lightly astringent with nice warmth.
The Place
This sounds like Capri meets Pantelleria meets Santorini with its brush-stroked breeze gliding over sun-worn colorful mountains and trees and tanned bodies. The grilled fish in on a rustic barbecue with salt-air basting you and your fish. ALAS I haven’t been to any of those places, yet, so I must steal a photo from the beloved Lauren Gerrie to give you that visual.
Photograph by Lauren Gerrie
Photograph by Lauren Gerrie
The Wine
Dolores Cabrera La Araucaria Rosado2018
This wine checks really all of the boxes- fragrant and deeply flavorful, but not too extracted or concentrated with a deeply felt mineral imprint that balances the aromatics and renders this wine extremely thirst quenching and compelling.
Fine Print: 100% Listan Negro from 100 year old vines organically farmed in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on volcanic soil.
Tasting Notes: Warm pink and light red fruit, dried pink and red flowers, earthy bass tones balanced with a persistent and almost dense minerality.
The Place
Cahors, The Lot, Saint-Cirq Lapopie, Limogne-En-Quercy
These fields and rolling hills and dense forests and winding rivers give me that underlying mineral imprint that gives foundation to this incredible region in France. Structures that seem to be frozen in time, cliffs giving natural drama, florals dotting the country side, earthly tones, this area is magic.
THE wine
I Vigneri di Salvo Foti 'Vinupetra' Etna Rosso 2016
The vines this wine is made from are situated at high elevation on the northern side of Mount Etna and you can almost taste the scorch of the sun in the day cooled and tempered by high elevation in the evening. There's an incredible resulting tension in this wine ranging from blindingly clear and ethereal to then ripe, moody and concentrated all bound together by its mineral structure.
Fine Print: Nerello Capuccio and Nerello Mascalese biodynamically farmed on Mount Etna in Sicily on ashy, volcanic soil.
Tasting Notes: Dark, concentrated, sometimes herbal, sometimes bloody and other times impossibly fresh red and purple fruit held together by fine acidity and persistent volcanic minerality.
The Place
This volcanic, sun scorched, ripe, moody mineral wine has been torn between St. Lucia and Nevis. The volcanic islands are wildly lush with every green on the spectrum, obscuring those sharp cliffs, piercing blue skies, lingering streams. These two islands cradle you in with their hospitality and warmth, and give you natural drama, adventure and insanely delicious cocktails (I see you sunshine bar). The juxtaposition of the tranquil and the rugged is everything.
What’s Cooking
Images by Gabriela Acero
When you get to cooking 3 meals a day, 6-7 days a week… sometimes you fall into the same ruts. Save Cookbooks and what chefs are putting up on instagram, I start to run out of steam in the creativity department.
This week we asked Gabriela Acero what she’s been cooking, to see if we could steal any of her ideas. Little did we know that her secret ingredient for perfect quarantine meals is her partner, Derek Richard, a professional chef. I guess we’ll be using these as aspirational directions for know.
—JH
Fresh squeezed orange juice and a frittata with dereks sourdough (Maine grains 💯)
Zingy tuna salad on sourdough (no mayo, just acid and salt and veg)
Perfect Egg Sando. English muffin made by my friend Keil. Eggs from chickens that my friends Jillian and Jared raise (Fat Beaver Farm) and cheese made by my friend Rachel at Smiling Hill Farm.
LEFT: Chicken and refried kidney bean enchiladas with homemade sauce from hatch chili powder and dried chilies we bought in CDMX. Made a little mezcal and fresh orange juice sipper to go with. Topped with raw cabbage and yogurt from smiling hill farm and lime juice.
MIDDLE: Hatch chili flourless chocolate cake with cinnamon whipped cream.
RIGHT: Cast iron lamb ragu lasagna
20.
Words and Illustration by Jasmine Senaveratna
Alive, unfurling
coolness lands, descends the tongue.
Black peppers dance.
Dark spices. Clove, anise,
rosemary, bruised violets
waft, hover. Then swill,
breathe deeply, recall
toes, sandals, sun, dirt paths, worms.
Red dusk, lightning bugs.
Stillness of night; blue
sapphire, eggshell moon, playful
reflections below.
Dear CS Journal
Words by Mary Casella
04.03.20
This week has been a hell of a week.
Mentally, I’m at the point where just about anything will make me laugh or want to cry, and when I looked in the mirror at work I wondered if my hairline had started to recede. Physically, my back and neck are sore, and my hands are dry, red and scaly from the constant washing and changing of gloves.
The only reason I even have time to write to you this morning is that after three, 12-hr days and a personal 15-hr one yesterday, my boss made the call for us to recoup today and we’ll get back into it tomorrow.
We scaled up too quickly. We didn’t have the logistics/infrastructure or man power in place. But I get it. My boss had to pivot quickly, just like so many others. He built this company, he has six employees whose livelihoods depend on it, producers who depend on it, and he and his wife just had their first baby. While I’ve questioned some of his decisions, I can sense how appreciative he is; he’s right there in the trenches with us and is doing what he can to keep up moral and make sure we’re staying healthy. He said when this is all done and over we’re all going to France or Italy to meet some cheese makers and drink wine--that sure sounds nice.
The first week of the shut down was a trickle and we weren’t sure if this new direction was even going to work. But we’re in the weeds now. Yesterday we temporarily dismantled our website and had hundreds of unanswered emails and orders in the pipeline. Nobody was ready for this.
I’ve pulled my fair share of 12-hour days before, but not under quite so strenuous conditions. I never knew having to wear a mask all the time could be so uncomfortable and so draining. I miss the old hard days; when the biggest strain was receiving two imports in the same day, unloading two pallets of parmigiano, and getting 40+ wholesale orders out the door on a Friday.
On the bright side, I love my coworkers and am thankful for them every day. We’re doing the best we can to support each other and keep ourselves sane.
A couple of them mentioned how their girlfriends were asking when they'd be home and what they wanted for dinner. I felt a twinge of sadness, wishing I had someone to ask when I’d be home, or have a meal waiting for me. But on the other hand, I’m glad I don’t have someone waiting--I don’t think I could handle anyone being upset with me right now. A hug would be nice though, or someone to rub my back. And I would love nothing more than to snuggle with my dog, but for now he’s better off in the country with my mom.
When I headed out for the last round of deliveries at 7pm I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to keep myself together and get it done so I could go home. One of my stops was to my friend Crystal, she just had a baby a few months ago--both are happy and healthy. These past few weeks I’ve been wondering if we really are all that essential, but knowing that she and other friends and strangers are thankful for our work offers some justification for the long days.
I got home shortly after 10PM. My building manager was outside taking care of the garbage and we had a little chat--she asked where my dog had been. When I finally got into bed I caught up on a stream of messages from two of my best friends on “Marco Polo”; it was comforting to see their faces and hear what their day was like. My energy was failing, but I messaged them back just to feel like I was talking to them, and finally a few tears came out at the end.
I didn’t sleep very well, my body was aching so much that I couldn’t get comfortable, and my internal clock never lets me sleep in. I think I’ll take a salt bath this afternoon. It would be nice to do some cooking today, but I don’t really feel like doing any dishes--I do need to assess some greens that might be on the verge…
These days aren’t easy for anyone, and some are working much harder than me. I continue to remind myself that I am lucky to have my health and a well-paying job, when so many have neither. And I hate to feel like I’m complaining, because I know this feeling and these hard days are not going to be forever, but it’s all so very overwhelming right now.
Thanks for listening, it feels good to share.
M
*For some context: Prior to the city shutdown, my company supplied domestic and imported cheeses and charcuterie to some of NYC’s best restaurants (a few of our accounts are still operating, doing take away) We have since gone public and do contactless home delivery of groceries, which includes the majority of our warehouse selection and we now offer produce and meats.
