Cooking for the Community at Large
By Tara Kelly
Photos by Sabrina Eberhard
Sun streams in the large multi-paned windows of Stonewood Farm’s cookhouse. The warm wood siding of the rebuilt barn and the bunches of herbs and flowers hanging from the chairs to dry add to the ambiance. The large airy room is a kitchen, workspace, and ideal setting for Stonewood’s charity dinners. For Kristen Essig, Stonewood Farm’s new culinary director, it’s an oasis of calm, in stark contrast to the usual restaurant kitchen with a phalanx of chefs, and sous-chefs, the clatter of pots and pans, and waitstaff picking up their orders.
Essig has serious kitchen credentials and decades of experience in restaurant kitchens. She was recruited by Chef Emeril Lagasse, while at culinary school in Charleston, South Carolina, to work at Emeril’s in New Orleans. There she met Anne Kearney, the chef/owner of Peristyle, who became her mentor. “There’s not a single day that I don’t think of her—her recipes, her ethos, her practices,” she says. That ethos starts with regional and local food sourcing, and it’s come to define Essig’s style of cooking. From New Orleans she took on the role as head chef at Dauphine, a New Orleans inspired restaurant, in Washington DC.
Why go from a highly rated, in-demand, urban restaurant to a small organic farm in New York’s Hudson Valley, with a primary focus on serving the community? “Daily restaurant work is exhausting,” she says. “I was looking for something different. Maybe opening a small grocery.” During the pandemic Essig stayed connected to the food world through Instagram. There she discovered Stonewood Farm. “Two weeks later I saw a posting for a culinary director and applied. A couple of Zoom calls, and a couple of visits to the farm, and it all worked out.” And Dauphine enticed her to stay on as executive chef, which she can do remotely.
Essig did have one concern about her new job. On the face of it, Millbrook is an affluent community.
“So who are we helping here?” she asked. Peel back the layers and the need becomes immediately evident. “There is a large, underserved immigrant community,” she says. And a significant homebound senior population.” Stonewood Farm’s community outreach is significant.“We run the First Harvest Food Pantry at Lyall Church, we partner with the Cardinal Hayes Home for children with disabilities, and we cook and co-host the annual Christmas dinner at Lyall Church. Sometimes, starting in a small community you get to see the impact you have. It’s about keeping the wheels spinning. It’s not always about starting something new.”
As winter sets in, and the gardens lie dormant, with the pop-up markets on hiatus until May, what will Essig’s focus be? “We’ll be keeping the home fires burning,” she says. “We’ll continue our food recovery work with North East Dutchess Immigrant Services, and throughout the winter and early spring we’ll offer cooking classes focused on a single ingredient, and baking workshops.” Plus, there’s the new Saturday Supper Series—another Stonewood initiative to bring people together around a common table. It’s hard to imagine that with all this going on Essig will miss the bright lights of a big city restaurant. —stonewoodny.org