From verdant rows in Delco, chef Mitch Prensky harvests the ripe raw materials of the veggie creations he serves nightly at Supper on South Street

Philadelphia Inquirer
By Rick Nichols

It is an enchanting spread, Blue Elephant Farm, 75 sloping acres, dappled with stone stables, a barn-red barn or two, the occasional sculpted elephant rising in the fields.

This is where – on the outskirts of Newtown Square, Delaware County – the urban-farmhouse restaurant called Supper, at 10th and South, procures its “daily [vegetarian] harvest menu.”

What Supper’s chef Mitch Prensky picks that morning (well, he may skip a day or two), is what you get that night: See those waxy Romanian peppers? Seven hours from now they’ll be on your plate, stuffed and braised in paprika-spiced tomato confit.

So it’s not exactly farm-to-table. More like chef-to-farm-to-kitchen-to-table. Prensky, who grew up delivering his mother’s quiches to Zabar’s in Manhattan, claws red bliss potatoes out of the loose, compost-rich earth – down on his knees, hands gloved, a city kid on a scavenger hunt.

A learning curve was involved: “We had to teach him to thin,” says Mary Butler, the British expat who manages the impeccable horse farm and vegetable gardens (now accounting for more than an acre of the spread): The object, she says, is to pluck beets or radishes randomly down a row, creating space for the others to grow and flourish.

This could all seem merely trendy; Jose Garces, of Amada, et al., recently bought a small farm in Bucks County; Nectar’s Patrick Fuery has herbs and squash sprouting on the flanks of his Berwyn dining room. Chefs stalk the weekly farm markets. They get summer berries at the back door, fresh from Lancaster County.

But the Blue Elephant-Supper link may be the deepest connection yet. It’s literally hands-on, for one thing. It’s also a formal partnership between Blue Elephant’s gentleman-farmer owner, Calvin Schmidt, and Prensky. (The imposing stone elephant statues are mementos from Schmidt’s time in Thailand.)

Finally, it is far more than seasonally ambitious. Raised-bed greenhouses will soon yield winter lettuce. A tiny breeding herd of Lowline cattle (the smaller, less-grain-inflated genetic forebears of Black Angus) is in the barn, heralding grass-fed beef. Chicken coops are rising alongside the robust gardens.

It’s organic, too: The Guinea hens are pest control.

Days from now, a line of canning equipment is due in the South Philadelphia commissary for Global Dish, the catering outfit Prensky also runs with his wife, Jennifer.

When the daily harvest overwhelms daily need (which the last heat wave assured), it will be diverted to the makeshift cannery, exiting as bottles of pickled chard stem and French radish, lightly dilled cucumber, and sweet bread-and-butter zucchini chips.

Prensky sees them on the shelves at DiBruno Bros., at boutique grocers, and, if his vision is borne out, in the Whole Foods right across South Street from his Supper.

Mitch Prensky could be found in shorts and a sweat-stained T-shirt one morning last week, patrolling the Blue Elephant’s rows not far from the light traffic on Goshen Road.

This is as gentle and green as country gets in the far suburbs; the 123-acre estate of M. Night Shyamalan, the director, is just a ways up the hill.

Among other things, Prensky hand-dug red potatoes – eaten that day their sugars have not yet changed to starch. He pulled onions and cut the mustard greens. Checked out the Clara eggplant and Black Beauty eggplant. Picked handfuls of tender cherry tomatoes.

All manner of peppers (Gourmet, Chocolate, King Arthur) were getting traction. The chestnut domes of cippolini onions crested above the soil. But the parsnips were looking wimpy; not a good season for parsnips.

Last year, the tidy gardens were a third this size, their bounty serving the family Schmidt and staff, with the surplus heading to Philabundance, the city food bank.

This year, Mary Butler and Prensky leafed through seed catalogs before planting season, hunting for quirky or heirloom varieties for the new partnership – and greatly expanding the orderly plot.

Prensky filled broad trays of Red Malabar spinach, and colorful chard, bulbous EightBall squash and tight, cupcake-size heads of broccoli to shove in the trunk of his car.

Then, with the sun bearing down, he stood straight up, arms outstretched, head cocked back, and let the arcing spray from the irrigation gun give him a good soaking.

In the raw-beamed dining room at Supper that evening, customers opting for the three-course daily harvest menu ($29) awaited the morning’s haul.

The Romanian peppers were indeed stuffed with cream cheese, and the sweet, leafy chard came with chewy barley risotto with capers, raisins, and olive-oil-poached garlic.

Then on a square, sectioned plate came the “vegetable quartet,” arranged in the manner of a bento box.

The potatoes Prensky had dug had been roasted in a parchment bag with brined hay from Blue Elephant’s fields, giving them a vaguely nutty cast, though the potatoes alone would have been entirely sufficient.

A meaty slice of eggplant had been livened with Moroccan spices and tahini. There was a corn (from elsewhere) and cherry tomato saute; a mildly peppery zucchini stuffed with the toothsome baby broccoli and patty pan squash.

There were texture and color, variety and thoughtful seasoning, not the monochromatic mush that can spoil the pleasures of vegetarian dining.

And of course, if were you of a mind, there was pork belly at the ready, to layer on Blue Elephant greens with barbecued cherries, and a farmer’s cheese raviolo with the farm’s summer squash, and a block of grilled halibut with the day-picked chard, and blistered cherry tomatoes.

The next day’s menu? Hard to tell, exactly. The harvest was hours away. But there were rumors that fresh corn was on its way; Silver Princess quietly tiptoeing to Blue Elephant.

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