Monday is rounds day. Ana drives the valley with a list that is mostly blank, because the point of the rounds is not to order — the orders were placed weeks ago, when things went into the ground. The point is to look: at the squash sizing up, at the hens, at what the frost did and did not take.
We buy from a short list of farms we can drive to before lunch, on purpose. A short list means the same hands every week; it means when a crop fails we hear about it standing in the field, not on an invoice. It also means our menu is a valley menu whether we call it that or not.
What comes back on Monday decides Tuesday’s writing. A glut becomes a course. A shortage becomes a substitution made early, while it is still a choice. Twice a year, a farmer talks us into planting something odd for the kitchen — those experiments have produced some of the best weeks we have had, and one memorable week of sorrel.
If you eat here and something tastes like it grew twenty minutes away, it did. That is not a philosophy we printed on anything. It is just what happens when the person who writes the menu also does the driving.
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