Category: Past Months

Learn more about the delicious mushrooms and fruits from the DMV!

Welcome to The Sunday Roast! Thank you for your patience as I took a break from this newsletter. Last month, when this was supposed to send, I was celebrating my birthday, and the subject I originally had lined up got too busy. Then, the subject below swooped in and saved the day. I saved this send until now to make sure I gave him a proper TSR, in addition to a proper social media break that I desperately needed. I’m feeling refreshed and ready to dive back in! I hope you enjoy the different format below.

This month: Technically, this would be this past month, but I really wanted to try pawpaws. I saw the regional fruit all over my Instagram as people were buying the fruit to enjoy during its super limited season. So I searched and found one company a friend had bought her pawpaws from. They were kind enough to deliver the pawpaws to me within a few days before I had to head out of town, and even agreed to an interview! And let me tell you, these things were amazing. I’m so thrilled to feature a local business owner and truly local fruit in this October edition. 

Meet Iulian.

Iulian grew up in Northern Virginia and began his career taking culinary classes as part of his high school curriculum. While working at local restaurant Trummer’s on Main on his days off, he realized that cooking was his passion. He soon enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York, where he got the opportunity to work for four months at the acclaimed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark. Iulian says he acquired an in-depth knowledge of indigenous ingredients and unique methods of food preparation at Noma, influencing his later passion of exploring local produce and foods. 

During the last four months of his time at school, Iulian spent time at the Puglia Culinary Centre in southern Italy learning and preparing foods from every Italian region. He also undertook various educational trips throughout the Mediterranean to strengthen his culinary and foraging skills and worked at Ristorante Peppe Zullo, a biodynamic farm and restaurant in the mountains of Puglia. When he returned to D.C., he saw an opening in the market for local ingredients, and the rest is history. 

Discover Arcadia Venture’s Instagram and website.

A Q&A with the founder of Arcadia Venture.

Do you have any advice for anyone looking to get into foraging? Like, how do you determine the dangerous from harmless? 

For anyone looking to get into foraging, find someone experienced in your region and start learning from them. Books are a good way to start acquiring knowledge but more importantly it’s the hands-on experience that will teach you about the land. Start slowly and see what particular things interest you, whether it’s mushrooms, medicinal plants, or wild fruits. Start observing and learning the seasons for each product you want to work with; it changes slightly each year and even more so now with the large weather swings from climate change. As for knowing edible from poisonous, don’t eat everything you see! Learn the major deadly plants and mushrooms. There are not many things that could kill you, but there ARE many things that will make you incredibly sick. If in doubt, err on the side of caution.

I see you originally set off for a career in cooking with your degree from the Culinary Institute and your position at District Winery. What made you decide to take the leap to a food business owner and open Arcadia Ventures?

I have been fascinated with wild food ever since my internship at Noma in Denmark. In Scandinavia it is a very commonplace thing; most families go out into the woods or beaches and pick wild food. In fact it is a constitutional right over there, the “right to roam”. I decided to quit my job at District Winery to focus on building a business around this because I saw a real lack of locally foraged food in restaurants. Besides the random mushrooms here and there from various mushroom pickers there was no actual business that focused on wild food in the DMV. There is such a bounty of products in the mid-Atlantic region, some native and some established over time as a result of trade and commerce over hundreds of years. 

I know you supply ingredients for a lot of well-known restaurants in the area, what made you decide to also sell your product for delivery to home cooks? Do you aim to expand either of those parts of your business?

Well, necessity to be honest. In April of 2020 everything was shutting down. Restaurants were rapidly closing due to the pandemic and very limited to doing only basic food to survive. At that point the market for specialty ingredients practically vanished. It was also a time when everyone else was working from home and eager to start cooking. I used to do produce boxes with a mix of different vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms. The products were from a couple of farms I work with that specifically supplied only to restaurants and chefs: incredibly high quality and varieties of products not seen in grocery stores. Although they were really popular after a few months I stopped doing them because it took up so much time to package and deliver the boxes to each home. Now I still do some home deliveries of a la carte items, especially wild mushrooms. What I am hoping to start by the end of the year is to provide some products to local independent grocers and butchers. 

Why were you enticed to come back to the DMV area for a career in food? Why establish Arcadia Ventures here?

I returned to the DMV after school because I wanted to find a high-paying chef job and just save up a lot of money by living at home with parents. After I decided to start Arcadia Venture it made sense to do it here because I understand the products that grow here and I already had some connections in the restaurant world. If I moved to another part of the country I would have had to start from scratch and had a much higher learning curve for starting a new business, especially a foraging business! 

What’s your most popular product versus your favorite?

My most popular product is actually Paw Paws! Last year was a terrible paw paw year because a late frost killed off a lot of the blossoms. I had much more demand than I had supply. This year though it is much better and I can offer them to more people for them to try this unique fruit. My favorite item has to be Hen of the Woods mushrooms. They are also known as “maitake”. Although you can grow them, the wild variety is a lot stronger in flavor. It grows in large clusters that can weigh 20-30 lb even! 

When it comes to pawpaws, how popular are they among your customers? Why did you decide to forage and sell them?

Paw paws are very popular. A lot of my restaurant customers eagerly await the season, which only lasts a few weeks, to stock up on it. What I really like is when a customer tries paw paws for the first time. A lot of times they never imagined that a “tropical” fruit grows in the wild here. I decided to forage and sell them because they show a particular time and place of where we are. The end of summer ripens the paw paws until they fall from the tree and the tropical aroma fills the air. They are something quite special. 

Can you talk to me a little bit about pawpaws, like your knowledge of the fruit and what recommendations you usually give to customers for eating, storage, use, etc.?

Paw paws are the largest native fruit in North America. They grow east of the Mississippi and north up into Ontario. They are a very finnicky fruit and start to turn black when fully ripe (like bananas). If you want to save them for later you have to freeze the pulp. For cleaning them, take the skin off by hand in a small bowl, mash the pulp with your hands, and take out the seeds. Do not let the pulp sit in a container in the fridge. It will go bad very very quickly unless you freeze it. Afterwards you can use the pulp by thawing out as needed. 

Paw paws are a difficult tree to grow for fruit. Although the trees themselves are easy to grow, they take 7 years to start producing flowers and around 3 more years after that to do fruit. If you plant just one tree you will never get fruits. There needs to be a lot of diversity for cross pollination. In the wild they usually grow in “colonies” where most trees are shoots of the parent tree, therefore genetically the same. Another tree from a different colony (like a seedling) has to be introduced for them to start making fruits. So imagine around 15 years from start to finish to get a productive group of trees!

What is your favorite way to eat or use pawpaw? 

My favorite way to use paw paws is for ice cream. It really preserves as much of the flavor as possible and showcases the “custardy” texture of the paw paws.

Looking to make ice cream? Try this recipe.

Iulian sent me this recipe and recommended it! You essentially make a custard with mashed pawpaw and then freeze into an ice cream.

A note from me: I don’t have an ice cream maker so I ended up using the old fashion method of shaking the bagged custard in another bag filled with salt and ice. Then I froze it for the rest of the time. Still tastes delicious and creamy!

Snag delicious, classic Italian goodies right in the heart of D.C., or learn one of the recipes in my February edition.

Welcome back and happy Black History Month/Valentine’s Day/Mardi Gras! It’s been a long month so far, but I’ve managed to fill it with lots of delicious meals, snacks and goodies. I even tried out a protein cheesecake recipe, which sounds like it may not taste indulgent, but I promise it was. And now, despite all the brownies, ice cream and King cake I have in my kitchen, I’ve decided to continue to bake, since that’s my happy place. 

This month: I decided to stay close to home and reached out to a local bakery about a 5 min. walk away from my apartment. The welcoming storefront with an adorable bright yellow dog decal drew my eye, and turned out to be a unique bakeshop offering traditional Italian pastries, which I include a recipe of below. Also, I’ve decided to dedicate myself to crafting more content for you guys as well, especially on my Instagram, so please feel free to send me or comment any feedback you may have — and please like, share, save and comment so I know if you like it! My first reel of the baked feta pasta trend went pretty well so I’ll keep experimenting with those. Finally, I would still love to hear from every one of you on what you expect to see in the new year.

Some background: In a monthly newsletter, I combine a DC local’s story behind their favorite recipe(s), or ones that whip up some nostalgia, with photos and prose of my attempt at replication. These recipes vary in difficulty, but they are always ones close to the heart. This newsletter is sent on the third Sunday of each month as the name suggests.

A fun note: Make sure to mark this email as NOT spam, move it to your inbox or add my sending address  to your address book to avoid the newsletter regularly ending up in the abyss. Sometimes Mailchimp email campaigns go straight to spam.

Meet Miranda.

When you first spot Nino’s Bakery on L Street NW, the first thing you spy is the giant yellow dachshund decal. The namesake of that decal and the bakery itself is Miranda’s 16-year-old dog, Nino, who she says is blind but has quite the sniffer. Miranda adopted Nino when he was 6 in Italy, and they lived together in Milan nearby loads of bakeries and cafes. While Nino couldn’t see, he sure could smell, and he would insist that the two of them stop into each bakery wafting out scents of pastry. Miranda said Nino has definitely also taste tested pastries throughout his years, so one could say he’s an expert worthy of a bakery after his name. Miranda had lived in Italy for her final tour in the Foreign Service, in which she served for nine years. Prior to that, she was stationed in Afghanistan, which led her to decide to get a dog for company. She took Nino everywhere with her, and then she decided to move back to the U.S. and settle out of the service with a new career path. 

Before she did, she decided to study the pastries she and Nino so loved in cafes. She took a pastry course on Saturdays, which required a competency test at the end administered by the Italian government, and she learned how to make old-fashioned European pastries. Once she arrived back in the U.S., she went to Chicago for a nine-month course at The French Pastry School. The school, she says, is run by two French chefs who make students learn the fundamentals of making a perfect pastry, with no shortcuts. She credits the two methods that she now blends at her shop for her ability to make an amazing pastry that she can then experiment with flavors.

When she moved back to D.C., Miranda found there weren’t many traditional bakeries offering the types of pastries she had mastered, so she opened Nino’s! The bakery may not churn out thousands of pastries each day, but Miranda assures you that each croissant is freshly homemade with only the best ingredients since she focuses on quality over quantity. She’s the sole owner still up to arms in butter and flour in the kitchen. The bakery first offered everything traditional Italian, but then Miranda realized most customers loved her croissants, so she pivoted to focusing on those. Her buttery croissants have unique flavor offerings, such as her favorite, chocolate hazelnut, or the customers’ favorite, almond, and they take three full days to make. That process includes a dough made with flour, salt, sugar, water and yeast layered meticulously with European butter using a sheeter that turns the pastry properly. Miranda credits a proofing machine for helping craft the ideal environment before she bakes her croissants. The end result? A perfectly flaky croissant.

Discover her website.

And her Instagram.

The story behind the recipe.

But Nino’s isn’t all croissants, as delicious as they may be. Miranda does still bake plenty of French desserts, such as macaroons, and Italian desserts, like these classic Baci Di dama cookies. These types of desserts are better after lunch snacks for workers headed back to their job who may need to satisfy a sweet tooth in the simplest way.

Miranda chose to feature these cookies, she says, because she grew up eating them in an Italian American household, so they’re a bit nostalgic for he

The cookies are a traditional Italian dessert known throughout the country, and they’re made with simple yet quality ingredients to create a quality cookie. Each ingredient is actually the same measurement (except the chocolate). The easy recipe is well worth your time, with the end product of a delicious, addicting cookie that is the perfect size — not too big, but not too small. 

One of those ingredients is a bit hard to find, however. Hazelnut flour is not typically widely sold in grocery stories, and I didn’t have the time to wait for it from Amazon.

I ended up going the old-fashioned route and roasting, peeling and grinding up hazelnuts in a food processor until I got a meal I could use. It was honestly a very rewarding process, resulting in what I think is a crunchier cookie made with more love, and I even got a chance to make a little bit of homemade Nutella. The process didn’t add much time on, so I highly recommend making your own hazelnut meal as well. This recipe linked here is what I loosely followed to make my own.

Miranda says that her customers at Nino’s used to be loads of those office workers taking a break from their job nearby since the bakery does have a location downtown, where there aren’t as many residences (except for me).

With the pandemic switching that customer base to at-home workers that now may live nowhere near the pastry shop, Miranda has had to adjust a bit, like most businesses and restaurants in D.C. Nino’s used to just be open 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday for those downtown Washingtonians, but now it’s harder to trek across the city during typical work hours while in your home office, so Miranda expanded to Saturdays. She says that’s now their busiest day of the week!

And since the bakery is a smaller storefront, there’s no seating inside to help keep the staff healthy and safe and still slinging out fresh pastries.

That means Miranda expanded to more delivery and online ordering for customers to have less contact and allow the bakery to prepare and stagger out orders. Since the croissants and other pastries do take a few days prep time, the online ordering does also help Miranda better plan how much to bake, whereas sometimes it can be a guessing game for how many they’d need in their cases throughout the day.

It’s hard to say what Nino’s and other businesses will look like after the pandemic, she says, because workers may continue to stay home and dependent on delivery services, but those same services do charge the businesses an arm and a leg. On the other hand, Miranda thinks people may be very excited to, finally, safely go outside.