There’s going to be a

New Menu At the Farmhouse

(If you ain’t from around these parts, that’s not just some farm house, but the Farmhouse Restaurant next to the River Market) And you heard about the new menu here first!  (Unless you heard it somewhere else first, I guess.  It’s not exactly hush-hush since it’s on the front page of their web site.)  But I did hear it on good authority…Chef Michael himself!  (That’s gotta count for something.)

Not only did I hear about the new menu, but I got to sample one of the new menu items.  That’s it right over there.  What is it you ask?  It’s the Farmhouse’s take on a Scotch egg. 

What Chef Michael did, by his own explanation, was to soft boil a duck egg (yes, that’s right, a duck egg) and poach it in red wine.  (You can see the egg now has a very pleasant purple color in the image above.)  He then halved it, liberally packed it with homemade ham salad, coated it in panko, and fried it.

It’s then served on a bed of hollandaise sauce.

I don’t know if you have ever had a Scotch egg before.  The Scotch eggs at the Ren Fest are chicken eggs (rather than the much more exotic duck), buried in sausage and sauted or baked.  They’re kind of insipid.

Not so Chef Michael’s.  His take on Scotch eggs were light (for fried food anyway) and delicious, combining the earthy flavors of egg and red wine with the saltiness and sweet from the ham salad.   Then, of course, it was fried in panko.  So it was, by definition, good.

I am really excited about the new menu.  I will certainly miss all those croque madames that I had, but I am sure that somehow Chef Michael will find a few ways to ensure I don’t miss them too much.  Maybe it will be the Scotch eggs, maybe the daily quiche (enter real man joke here), perhaps the crepes.  I don’t know, but I sure am looking forward to finding out.

(Oh, per FTC disclosure rules, I have no idea if I paid for those Scotch eggs or not.  Whether I did or not didn’t affect my opinion that they were marvelous.)