How far will you travel for a meal? I’m not sure I can definitively answer that question — but I can now say I’ve driven four hours, round trip, for an open-faced roast pork sandwich and a beer.
I’ve been wanting for a long time to visit Pen Druid Fermentation and Sumac, the restaurant the brewery operates out of a small trailer on its property in Sperryville, Va. Sumac does a tasting menu on weekends, and making a reservation involves a level of advance planning that sometimes eludes me. But not this weekend! This weekend, the tasting menu was suspended, and Pen Druid and Sumac put on an “end of Octoberfest” pig roast. No reservations were required, so when I saw an Instagram post about it on Friday, I turned to my husband and announced we were taking a road trip.
Traffic sucked getting there, but the weather was balmy and the sun was out and the pork was transcendent. We each had a sandwich, which was really just a massive heap of pork and caramelized onions on top of a piece of hearty, buttery toast. It was impossible to stop eating, even as I felt the button on my jeans strain.
We spent about twice as much time in transit as we did at the actual brewery. I’d do it all over again tomorrow.
… easy, not particularly terrible for you dinners. That was all I wanted this week: to cook, to not spend that much time cooking, and to ingest a few vegetables. I found two New York Times recipes that really did the trick:
I made the chicken in the slow cooker on Sunday while I edited NFL stories all afternoon, and it was pretty magical to emerge from a newspaper deadline and have dinner waiting for me. (Is this what it’s like to be a man?!) I added some frozen corn at the end, which I highly recommend. A bonus: With just two of us eating, there was enough left over to make quesadillas the next night.
That was not the case with the mushroom galbi. The recipe serves four … and two of us polished off every single crispy, salty vegetable within about 20 minutes of the sheet pan coming out of the oven. Alas.
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