Harvest

A fresh, seasonal feast with friends

by

The best meals begin with bread. The best bread is handmade dough baked in a blazing hot wood-fired oven. On a recent spring weekend, four loaves made with fresh-milled flour from Louisiana’s Bellegarde Bakery perked overnight in my fridge before their half-hour bake in Chris and Canette Liddy’s backyard pizza oven, two doors down. We neighbors were gathering for a dinner party, with a menu confined—almost entirely—to local, fresh ingredients. Furthermore, we fashioned the harvest into dishes that complement good bread. Simple ingredients of the moment, crafted and shared with friends ... is there anything better?

I was raised on fresh fish and farm stands on the east coast of Florida, learning early the value of “shaking the hand that feeds you.” Homemade bread was also the norm. I got my hands in the dough from my perch on the kitchen counter. In the ‘70s, my mother’s kitchen bible was a tiny mail-order book called Living off the Land by Marian Van Atta. A compilation of the author’s newspaper columns, the book spreads the gospel of eating local. We bought honey by the gallon straight from the hive and loaded brown sacks full of oranges into the back of the wood-paneled station wagon every Sunday during citrus season. I can still see the farmer in his overalls and hear the hum of the juicer in our kitchen. My hunger for real food started young. 

When Baton Rouge beckoned, it was love at first taste. My husband had been traveling here for work and each time he returned to our home in Charleston, West Virginia, there were tales of everything fun and delicious: crawfish boils, LSU baseball, paddle boarding at the lakes, and festivals with unpronounceable names. The engraved invitation to relocate to this utopia arrived and before I considered the move, I had one simple question: Is there a farmer’s market?

We gathered at the table, nestled between the wood oven and swimming pool, hoping the sun would never set or that we could freeze this frame. “It’s good to be us right now,” said Canette, raising her glass.

My first flavorful visit to Louisiana’s capital city must have been sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, serving up the kind of weather you want to capture in a bottle to save for later. We strolled through the Red Stick Farmer’s Market on that delightful Saturday in 2016, snacking on just-picked strawberries from Ponchatoula. We navigated through the tunnel of vendors along 5th Street, all senses engaged. The moving van followed.

When you uproot and relocate 1,000 miles from your comfort zone, what are the chances of landing in the bullseye? We chose a neighborhood so close to LSU you can hear the marching band warming up for game day. What we didn’t expect was to instantly bond with the neighbors as if we’d been friends forever. That Louisiana hospitality is borderline bewitching. As the work week winds down, the group messages begin to chime for our unofficial six-top supper club: The Liddys, the Hamiltons, and Michael and Rachel DiResto. The host house often brings additional friends to the mix and usually decides what’s for dinner.

A recent supper was sparked by the Liddys’ first-of-the-season farm share from Baton Rouge’s Fullness Organic Farm. The colorful bag overflowed with just-harvested spring produce. “Help yourself to anything for the bread breaking,” Canette told me. I selected the blend of salad greens, the pea shoots, and some carrots, and mentally concocted a citrus dressing to accompany. My ritual Saturday spree through the farmer’s market finalized the details. No list in hand, I peeked at the bounty at each vendor’s display. Goat cheese from Belle Ecorce Farm blended with Creole cream cheese from Feliciana’s Best Creamery would be a perfect spread for bread. I hoped for asparagus from Mr. Buddy’s Plantation Pecan booth and found the earliest shoppers beat me to it. I clutched a bag of his famous pecans (PIE!) and went in search of something else for soup. A broccoli bouquet from Fullness Organic Farm paired with micro greens from Westdome Nursery would be perfect. On the way home, I stopped at Iverstine’s butcher shop on Perkins Road for the meat course, choosing the seasonal sausage from the display case. For my piecrust, I got some fresh-rendered lard from their freezer and a selection of local beers.

[Read this: Why you should use native Louisiana plants in your garden.]

Let’s eat! Back home, I made my mom’s traditional pecan pie, subbing Louisiana cane syrup for the corn syrup. The rich caramel filling crowned with burnished pecans begged to be tasted right from the oven, but we had to wait. I simmered and pureed the green velvet broccoli soup and blended the last of the local citrus with green onions and perhaps the only non-Louisiana ingredient, extra virgin olive oil from the west coast, for the salad dressing. We marched it all over to the Liddys’ backyard, tempted by the fragrant smoke from the wood oven.

With the mastery of a seasoned baker, Chris slid the bread dough into the eye-level oven, sealed the door with a wet towel to create steam, and sipped a cold one from an ice bucket of regional craft brews while waiting. The DiRestos arrived and Michael got busy spooning his secret spiced blend of butter, olive oil, and handfuls of hand-chopped garlic onto shucked Louisiana oysters that would receive a sizzle in the oven once the bread came out. Rachel mixed up a fresh strawberry cocktail, a tweak on the French 75, with Seven Three Distilling Co.’s Gentilly gin and some bubbly. The Liddys’ special guests, Fahui and Lei Wang, joined the fête just as the crusty bread emerged from the oven.

We gathered at the table, nestled between the wood oven and swimming pool, hoping the sun would never set or that we could freeze this frame. “It’s good to be us right now,” said Canette, raising her glass. Fahui added, “If you don’t have an interest in food, how can you have an interest in life?”

A feast among candles, curious dogs, and laughter … we are now old friends and new with kids in college, bubbling about our blessings, and thanking our farmers for feeding us. We celebrate the local bounty and the new tradition of baking and breaking bread in the backyard.  

Follow April Hamilton’s local-lovin’ lead with a trip to the Red Stick Farmers Market: Tuesdays at Goodwood Library, Thursdays at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and Saturdays at Main Street Market. 8 am–noon each day. breada.org.

Get April's recipe for Cream of Broccoli Soup here and for Harvest Salad with Citrus Vinaigrette, here.