We were lucky to have an unseasonably warm sunny October afternoon for our first slow food event at the Garden of Eve Organic Farm, on the North Fork of Long Island. My boyfriend, Alfred Vrang, and I have a business called 'Local Faire'. We cook local organic food, from scratch, for dinner parties and small gatherings. Alfred is a french trained chef and I am a health food connoisseur. We spent my birthday, this July, volunteering at the farm, picking flowers and hanging them up in the barn. This big red hay barn also serves as a market for the produce grown there and it was a wonderful place to throw a luncheon inspired by the local flora and fauna.

We spent the early morning at the farm picking vegetables and gathering eggs. The whole experience was very romantic and idyllic: The old farm house, surrounded by vineyards and Halloween pumpkins, the old sheep baahhing into the wind coming across the Long Island sound, cooking with love, in love and with farm fresh ingredients which had never been in the fridge. It is a dream for any chef. We were so happy to be there, joined by a convivial group of city and country folk. Each guest brought a bottle of New York wine to share, which was really great as there are are so many wonderful wines from this region.

Harvesting a cart full of vegetables for 35 people was a bunch of work. It’s incredible that Garden of Eve farm seeds and harvests over 70 varieties of vegetables and herbs! Each species requires its own particular care, pest control and maintenance, one reason why most farms focus on mono-culture crops. It was beautiful to see the long rows of purple peppers, a dozen or so varieties of tomatoes, flowering broccoli, patches of chard, kale and collards, and a volunteer row of pea shoots all together like a gigantic composed salad. (It had the feeling of a family garden, but amazingly the Garden of Eve supplies all the Brooklyn CSA's, as well as selling at farmer's markets all over the city).

For the main course we served rose-crusted, grilled duck breast over purple cabbage salad, and braised duck legs with chestnuts over arugula. The ducks were from Crescent Duck Farm in Riverhead, one of the last remaining duck farms on LI. (My mother remembers eating Long Island duck as a young girl. They were a delicacy then, and they still are.) When Alfred likes something sincerely his eyes literally twinkle, as they did when he carved up the ducks, chopping down the bones for sauce, separating giblets for stuffing and fat to cook with.

We made three different stuffed vegetables, or petit farsi, “little parcels”: Rainbow chard stuffed with a "risotto" of celery root, potato, and turnips; mini pumpkins stuffed with fennel, orange, and pea shoots; and poached kohlrabi stuffed with duck giblets and broccoli flowers.

After everyone was served I passed around the scallops we had grilled and brushed with a garlic parsley persillade. For years, phytoplankton has destroyed the commercial scallop catch in the nearby Shinnecock and Mauritius bays, but they're now making a comeback, and we were able to buy them, hours out of the water, from Danowski's Fish Market. We could smell the nearby Atlantic and the special briny tinge of fresh scallops (not sterilized, as they often are) as we washed out the sand and prepared them for the grill.

Our homemade sourdough bread was sprinkled with wild fennel seeds, from a nearby meadow, and baked in the farm’s cast iron range. Alfred loved that stove. It had guts, history, force, and “seasoning”.

It was such a pleasure to cook at Garden of Eve farm, saving all the scraps for the goats and chickens, composting the rest, nothing going to waste. This is a working farm, and the chickens have their job too. They eat fresh vegetable scraps everyday and get moved around in their own special mobile coop which spreads their droppings to different parts of the farm, fertilizing the crops as they go. Then there are the nocturnal italian dogs, whose job it is to watch over the chickens. Life on a farm is a constant cycle. As we ate, giant hawks circled the farm. I think they smelled the duck gizzard stuffing.

I tried to imagine what life on the farm would have been like, before access to many outside ingredients. There are no olive trees, and no lemons... but plenty of grapes. We would have made our own vinegar, and other nice things from fermented grapes. I think we would survive just fine.

Written by Linda Serbu