"SandraGluck" news and stories

Farmers Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Photo: Michael Hnatov.

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, gorgeous photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season. Here's how they got their start!

One evening last winter we sat down to dinner in a little pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: Beef roast braised with rosemary and onions; pureed celery root and parsnips; crackling-fresh sautéed green beans. For dessert it was goat milk cheesecake with elderberry coulis. We washed the whole thing down with bottles of hard apple cider.

Had we ordered in -- stereotypical Manhattanites -- from the overpriced local gourmet grocery? Nope. Everything we consumed we had raised, herded, grown, plucked, cultivated, canned and cooked all by ourselves.

Could any other of the millions of inhabitants of New York City make that same claim that night? How about anyone else in the United States? OK, probably a couple, but for us, this was a meal just about 40 years in the making.

A photo of the farm and the rest of the introduction, after the jump.