Twenty good weeks, put away for later

Golden Fork started with a chest freezer and an argument.

The argument was about February. Ontario gives a cook about twenty good weeks — the corn arrives, the stone fruit arrives, everything arrives at once, and then it is over and the ground is hard until May. Most kitchens solve February by shopping somewhere else. Flying in a tomato is not difficult. It is just an admission that the menu was never really about here.

We wanted to solve it the way the province always has, which is to spend the summer putting things away. So the freezer became a cellar, and the cellar became the back wall you can see from the dining room: jars of last year’s fruit, fish curing, vinegars we started before we opened and have not finished arguing about either.

It means our August menu is almost embarrassingly easy — everything is good in August. It means our February menu is the one we are actually proud of.

The menu is short because the growing season is short. Most of what you eat here was grown, caught or raised within a few hours’ drive — not as a principle, but because that is what we can get and it is better.