The Pig Roast is right now. Come up to the Yale Farm for slow-roasted pork, homemade barbecue sauce, and mess of vegetarian sides, plus live music, good conversation, and plenty of sunshine.
We often talk about the challenges of finding good local food during long, hard winters here in the northeast, but for all its beauty spring can be a tougher season: preserves run out, root cellars empty and fields come into slow maturity. For this reason, sourcing food for our late April Pig Roast is always a challenge, one we’re still figuring out how to manage.
This year, in addition to slow-smoked pork, homemade barbecue sauce, beans and cornbread, we’ve got carrots that over-wintered in the fields at Massaro Farm CSA, which we’ll pickle; when we came to the Farm to start that process this afternoon, we were thrilled to see the first spring radishes coming out of the ground. The radishes may not make it to the Pig Roast, but we’ll definitely have them at our first May market! The two kinds of roots were both getting washed in the prop house this afternoon, and it was sort of wonderful to see them side by side: the last harvest of the old season, and the first pink-and-white signs of the new.
& if you’re looking to get involved this week, we’ve got three workdays:
Bulldog Days Welcome Event: Farm Work & Pizza
Monday, 4/16, 2:00-5:00 pm
Come get your hands dirty from 2:00-3:00 pm, with pizza from our woo-fired oven served starting at 3:00 pm. Harvest leaders will be at Phelps Gate every half hour starting at 1:30 pm to walk groups up to the Farm.
Open Volunteer Work Hours
Wednesday, 4/18, 1:00-5:00 pm
Join our regular Wednesday workday and help get the Farm prepped and ready for spring planting. No experience in necessary and everyone is invited!
Pig Roast
Friday, 4/20, 1:00-5:00 pm
Welcome spring, roast a pig, dance to music and celebrate the end of another school year. It’s an experience you’ll always remember. Everyone is invited. We’ll have regular open volunteer work hours on the Farm from 1:00-3:00pm, with pig served and live music from 3:00-5:00 pm.
Bringing Barbecue to Manhattan
Mark Maynard-Parisi on opening Blue Smoke with Danny Meyer. In just a few short weeks the YSFP will bring barbecue back to the Elm City with our Fifth Annual Last Day of Classes Jack Hitt Pig Roast, which happens April 20th from 1:00-5:00 pm.
We've done an annual pig roast for the last few years, usually in November. A good friend of mine, the writer Jack Hitt, is from South Carolina and his passion is cooking whole animals. Every year at Yale there's a Jack Hitt Memorial Pig Roast—though he's nowhere near dead—that he supervises.
In case you missed it: here’s Michael Pollan giving our Pig Roast a shout out in the Wall Street Journal! Though we should note that he doesn’t have the name quite right— this year we’re looking forward to the Fifth Annual Last Day of Classes Jack Hitt Pig Roast, named in honor of the man who’s been guiding us through the long, slow-cooking night for as long as we’ve been having them.
