The Kitchen is Now Open

There's a new sandwich in town. The Kitchen is an airy cafe that opened at Billings Forge at the beginning of May. They serve curry chicken salad on pecan bread alongside freshly made soup (long live gazpacho!). There's also locally roasted coffee and Hosmer Mountain soda. 

Opening a cafe "was not the master plan," according to head baker Carrie Morrical. "The master plan was catering and wholesale bread. We're set up for wholesale baking." The huge ovens in the back of the little brick building make in clear that Morrical and chef Julie Carrion cater in addition to running the cafe. 

As the business grew, however, there was enough food to carry out the catering orders as well as support a cafe. "I hate to waste anything," Morrical said, describing turning imperfect buns into crustini and breadcrumbs. 

The pair use as little bread and as little carbon as possible; Their produce comes largely from local farms. 

"We contract with urban oaks in the winter," Morrical said. "And we get produce from Starlight farms in the summer. And we have a co-op with a farm, so they deliver whatever they have that's fresh." 

The lavender for the lavender-infused truffle cakes, which Morrical was topping with a chocolate ganache, is grown in the community garden just around the corner from the cafe.

We walked over and Morrical showed me how to pick out a rhubarb, a main ingredient in her favorite dessert: sugar crusted rhubarb cake. Apparently, rhubarb needs to be firm above all else. "It shouldn't be limp at all," Morrical said. She recommended cooking it with a little honey and a liquid, like rum, and serving it over ice cream. 

The rhubarb isn't the only thing that's bartered. There's give and take throughout Billings Forge. The Melville Charitable Trust, which bought  and converted the complex of buildings into mixed income housing, serves as the ideological force behind the entire interconnected enterprise. Residents who have gone through training work at both the Kitchen and the Firebox. And children from the local Boys and Girls Club not only plant veg in the garden, they take cooking classes at the Kitchen. 

"I would not have planted them in this way" said Master Gardener Rita Decker motioning toward the kids' handiwork in one of her twenty-four beds, "but gardens are meant to be happy. You can't have everything perfect or you take the joy out of gardening." 

The residents can take as much produce as they'd like and this year courageous residents can have their own beds. The beds, which were built by an Eagle scout and painted by kids who live in the neighborhood, house everything from strawberries to snapdragons to sage. The produce is also used throughout the Firebox's menu.  

Adjacent to the garden is the farmer's market. It's open on Thursdays from 11-2 and is one of five in the city. 

"People are becoming more aware of how unreliable a global food source is," said Decker, "And supermarkets are taking the seasonality out of cooking...And this is a true food desert---there isn't a supermarket within a mile." It's no wonder that the Kitchen's motto is "food for good." 

The Kitchen, located at 559 Broad Street, is currently open from 7am-3pm weekdays. It will be open on weekends soon. Visit thekitchencatering.org The second annual Billings Forge Community Works fundraiser, Hog and Grog, is Tuesday, June 15th at 6pm. RSVP by June 8 by calling the Firebox at 860.246.1222.