Home, Fertile Home
Homesteading places importance on the life arts, the land, the seasons and mindful stewardship. To an increasing number of practitioners, it also means educating community.
Growing and Gardening
Brittney Portes is digging in to a career in farming at an angle all her own. Paramus-raised and now heading up a community garden at Montclair State University, she aims to share passion and knowledge with those looking to grow with her.
Catch to Kitchen
Amanda Axelsson and Brady Lybarger champion the scallop, that free-living species in the bivalve family capable of swimming like an Olympian and realizing the fantasies of seafood-centric chefs from Japan and China to the Iberian Peninsula to the Jersey Shore.
Keeper of the Flame
South Jersey Smoke House is revered pitmaster Dan Greenberg’s new enterprise and it’s making the scene at markets in Margate, Collingswood and Ocean City. For starters.
Gluten-free and Glorious
Carla Jones-Harris is renaming her bakeshop Flour-ish, a word play that better reflects her mission and method. Given the high quality of her distinctive and delicious pastries and baked goods, it’s a name that also forecasts her future.
Czig Meister Brewing
What the family behind the esteemed brewery did for Hackettstown is exactly what local officials wanted them to do: help create a culinary hub. However, state laws are holding them, and others, back – and it’s state officials who will be to blame when more New Jersey breweries shutter.
Michel Gras, Chez Michel
In the latest installment of TPW’s monthly column featuring Martha Rabello talking shop with a fellow practitioner of the pastry and baking arts, she visits with the legendary Michel Gras, a transplanted Parisian whose confections have made exclamations of “ooh la la!” common in the Cape May environs.
Jen Carson, LiLLiPiES
In the latest installment of TPW’s monthly column featuring Martha Rabello talking shop with a fellow practitioner of the pastry and baking arts, she visits with Jen Carson, whose destination in Princeton lures and lassos lovers of much more than the little pies that started it all.
Allen Perchonok, Umai
He doesn’t look like your average suburban sushi chef and he doesn’t act like one, either. He’s a former haute couture furrier whose passion for high-style omakase prompted a 180 and shaped the most individualistic and exciting new Japanese restaurant in the Garden State. TPW’s Mike Peters spent a day with Allen Perchonok and made images of how it all happens.
Erica Leahy, Three Daughters Bakery
In the latest installment of TPW’s monthly column featuring Martha Rabello talking shop with a fellow practitioner of the pastry and baking arts, she visits with Erica Leahy, whose just-opened bakery in South Orange is the showcase her extraordinary talents deserve.
Queen of Cacao
Carol Freedman is a purist devout in her use of only single-origin chocolate, a magician who brandishes a well-honed knowledge of her subject in formidable fashion, a technician whose artistry needs no flash to prove its stature. A wonk? So much, much more. A visit to her shop in Somerville is the golden ticket to chocolate paradise.
Luisania Moronta, Pastry Lu
In the latest installment of TPW’s monthly column featuring Martha Rabello talking shop with a fellow practitioner of the pastry and baking arts, she visits with Lu Moronta … who now never fails to mash the bananas when making banana bread at her much-loved Pastry Lu in Metuchen.