Your weekly pig…

You’ll notice that our menu says, of the pork dish, “Fleisher’s pastured pork, ask about our daily preparation.” You might wonder why this one item on our menu is left open-ended in this way.The reason is that every Wednesday morning, our friends at Fleisher’s Grass-Fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, NY, deliver one side of a whole pig to us. These animals are pasture-raised in Columbia County, and simply butchered and delivered to customers by Fleishers. From there, it’s up to us to decide how to serve the different parts of the animal.

Nathan (co-owner and chef) usually starts by serving loin steaks at the end of the week, brined and grilled. He seasons and stuffs the shoulder, slow-roasting it for a porchetta which is served typically for weekend dinners. The leg meat is made into breakfast sausage for the brunch menu and into meatballs that appear throughout the week as a special. The belly gets slow-roasted with a maple glaze for a pork-belly entree or appetizer early in the week. The shank and feet are braised, de-boned, stuffed and rolled up for trotters, which are then breaded and pan-fried on Monday or Tuesday. Lastly, the head…well, that’s frequently made into headcheese, called pork terrine on our menu and known in Italy as coppa di testa. This dish is frequently on our menu and we encourage you to try it, because it’s delicate and divine and is a rare old-world craft. That’s pretty much the whole hog, as the saying goes. Come the following Wednesday, we’ve usually run through the entire animal and are ready for another delivery from Fleisher’s. So drop in and try our nightly pork preparation any day of the week. It’s sure to be delicious and you know that it’s made fresh from a locally-raised pasture-fed pig.