SIDEdishes

Serving Up Food News

BY MELISSA PASANEN • pasanen@sevendaysvt.com

Cloud 9 Caterers Absorbs Pop-Ups and Launches Murphy’s Doughnuts

Over the past 18 months, STEPHEN COGGIO has run two pop-up dinner series — RICO TAQUERÍA and MIMI’S ITALIAN EATS while also working as executive chef of CLOUD 9 CATERERS. Now Coggio plans to fold his pop-up concepts under the Cloud 9 umbrella to give customers more casual catering options — while adding a new series. On April 1, Coggio and Cloud 9 executive sous chef MITCHELL will host the inaugural pop-up of MURPHY’S DOUGHNUTS at the cater ing company’s headquarters at 142 Hegeman Avenue in Colchester.

Coggio became co-owner of Cloud 9 about six months ago in partnership with his mother, founder-owner

This winter, Coggio and his team have focused on Mimi’s, which the chef described as “a nod to traditional Italian cuisine that leans into Italian American bastardization.” Dishes such as rich pasta carbonara made with cream and cured pork jowl are “what you wanna eat here in the winter,” he said, while his taco menu is more popular in warm weather.

Mimi’s next event will be at in Burlington on April 25, followed by a collaborative dinner at STARRY NIGHT CAFÉ in Ferrisburgh with executive chef SMITH III on April 30. Information will be posted on Instagram @mimis_italian_eats.

Murphy’s Doughnuts was inspired by the Italian bomboloni that Mitchell has made for Mimi’s. Mitchell, who met Coggio when he and his wife took @mpasanen.

Raising Dough

Greek Orthodox church congregants bake for charity

BY MELISSA PASANEN • pasanen@sevendaysvt.com

In 1968, Theodora Contis left the Greek island of Chios to move to New Jersey, where her older sister had previously settled. Among the treasured possessions the then-21-year-old carried was a cookbook that still sits on a shelf in her Williston kitchen.

The book’s title translates to The New Cooking and Baking Book of the Greek Home, but Contis, 76, rarely refers to its pages. She long ago committed to memory the traditional recipes she makes for family, friends and semiannual bake sales at the Dormition of the Mother of God Greek Orthodox Church in Burlington.

On a recent morning, the retired physics teacher demonstrated one of those recipes as she made the Greek Easter bread called tsoureki. It's on the menu for the Easter bake sale; preorders are under way for pickup on April 8.

The benefit events are organized by the congregation’s chapter of the Greek Ladies Philoptochos Society, which Contis joined when she and her husband moved to Vermont in 1977 for his job at what was then IBM.

Proceeds, which average $7,000 per sale, are donated to a carefully chosen list of charities, according to Contis, who serves as the organization’s treasurer and bake sale chair. They range from Burlington’s Committee on Temporary Shelter to World Central Kitchen, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that provides freshly cooked meals to those dealing with natural or man-made crises around the globe. “Our job is to help the poor and needy,” Contis explained.

About 10 bakers contribute a variety of specialties, such as syrup-soaked baklava, savory spanakopita, custardy phyllotopped galaktoboureko, glossy loaves of tsoureki and kourambiethes butter cookies rolled in drifts of powdered sugar.

Like many culinary heirlooms, Contis’ bread recipe carries the unique flavor of her heritage. As she kneaded, braided, and brushed the loaves with egg wash sweetened with honey and a little orange blossom water, she explained that each Philoptochos member has her own approach. “Not one is the same as the other,” she said.

Enriched with eggs, butter and milk, the yeasted dough is often seasoned with mahleb, a bitter-edged floral spice ground from the seeds of a species of cherry. When Contis bakes tsoureki, she adds finely chopped candied orange peel, which she makes during annual trips to Greece.

She also uses a distinctive flavoring from her native Chios. The baker held up a bag of what appeared to be small, dusty white stones from a grade-schooler’s rock collection. They were nuggets of mastic, a piney, slightly bitter tree resin.

The tree grows best in the southern part of the island, Contis explained. Although her family lived in the north, “my grandmother had a few trees, enough for the family.”

Contis grinds mastic fresh for her bread, as she does the cherry seeds. “Sometimes people buy it pre-ground,” she observed, “but that’s not as good.”

A bite of the fresh bread was sweet and soft with a whisper of musky, floral woodsiness.

For her own Easter table, Contis will make a large round tsoureki with hardcooked, naturally dyed red eggs nestled in the center. (Bake sale loaves do not include hard-cooked eggs.)

“It would not be Easter without Easter bread,” Contis declared. ➆

Info

The Greek Ladies Philoptochos Society of the Dormition of the Mother of God Greek Orthodox Church in Burlington will take bake sale orders through March 30, or as supplies last, for pickup on April 8. Proceeds benefit local, national and international charities. Learn more at greekphiloptochosvt.org.

The family hoped to find a buyer for the land “who would continue to honor my grandparents’ values: love of land and appreciation for family, traditions and history,” Lemay said. As they brainstormed possible buyers, her mom mentioned that there might be enough sugar maples on the property to support a syrup business.

“I never had an unhappy moment to do with maple syrup,” Lemay said. “Just like that, April’s Maple was born.”

The property has its fair share of gravel pits and a relatively low percentage of maples per acre. But a consultant assured Lemay that there were enough to support at least one person. She bought the land in 2012 and hired her parents, Donna and Serge Lemay, as her first two employees. They built a sugarhouse with a small store and a kitchen for cooking maple products.

Lemay thought that would be the extent of the business: a seasonal operation selling syrup and a few other basic confections. As she spent more time back in Canaan, she reconnected with a high school classmate, Sage D’Aiello.

“We started dating, then got married,” Lemay said. “I didn’t want to be in two places at the same time.”

The sugarhouse business was picking up, too, so Lemay approached the head of her department at Deloitte to talk about her “little project” in Vermont and to let him know she was thinking of leaving the firm. Instead, he offered her a yearlong leave of absence.

“That made it safer for me,” she said. “I knew if I got in trouble, I could go back and have a paycheck. But I had an inclination that this was my destiny, so I took the leap.”

She never went back to that job. Now, April’s Maple employs 10 people in the café and product sides of the business and another four each winter in the sugar bush, where D’Aiello manages the tree tapping and line maintenance. It’s considered a midsize farm, with more than 300 miles of tubing connecting 14,000 trees and an average production of 3,800 gallons per year.

This time of year, when she’s not snowshoeing into the woods or busy boiling, Lemay is in the café’s kitchen making vats of soup and experimenting with maple as an ingredient. The extensive breakfast and lunch menu features expected sugar-shack fare, such as stacks of pancakes sprinkled with maple sugar; maple corn bread; and a Vermonter sandwich with cheddar cheese, maple cream and apples.

Everything is homemade, and almost everything has maple in it — even the salad dressing, the chili, the butter and the rolls. Lemay once had a customer who was allergic to maple; it took some finagling to make a breakfast sandwich she could eat.

“Maple is so much more than a breakfast treat,” Lemay said. “We’ve found all these ways to incorporate it, sometimes more subtly than others.”

Word of the maple-coated menu got me in the car on a recent bluebird day, with a GPS estimate of three hours and 13 minutes to Canaan. The drive provided views of New Hampshire’s White Mountains and took my husband and me close enough to Canada that my phone threatened roaming charges.

When we pulled across the bridge into the parking lot, it was clear we’d taken the wrong form of transportation. The lot was full of snowmobiles.

For years — since the hot dog days — trail groomers in the local club have maintained the runs down to the sugarhouse. As of this year, April’s Maple is an official trail on the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers system.

Inside the shop, metal racks labeled “Snowmobile Gear Here” were loaded with diners’ helmets. The café was packed, so we put in our name for a table and browsed shelves full of syrup jugs, chocolate-maple truffles, butterfly-shaped maple candies, scone mixes and souvenirs.

After a short wait, we sat down in the cozy dining room. We already knew our order: a breakfast-lunch hybrid of maple sugar pancakes ($6 for two), a maple hot dog with maple mustard ($3), a maplebarbecue pulled pork sandwich ($8) and a side of maple-apple coleslaw ($3).

Lemay comes from a long line of cooks on both sides of her family, and many of the dishes are based on recipes that have been passed down through generations. diners and the Maple Ladies’ friendly service, the sweet feast felt like a perfect celebration of sugaring season. After all, if you’re going to eat a meal full of maple, why not do it at the source?

“The menu leans towards what I like to cook and what I like to eat,” Lemay said. The pancakes are an exception: Her husband urged her to offer them, but she pushed back at first. For many years, the kitchen didn’t have a grill; to make stacks of pancakes, she hooked up two-by-three electric griddles from Walmart. The pancakes took forever to cook, which prompted Lemay to add an “allow 10+ min” warning to the menu.

There’s a real grill in the kitchen now, and our pancakes came out well before 10 minutes, steaming hot, fluffy and glistening with maple sugar. Honoring some sort of proper meal order, we dove into them first.

The only thing sweeter was dessert, which we couldn’t resist. I ordered a piece of double-crust, custardy maple syrup pie ($5) for the road, a maple-chocolate milkshake ($6) for my husband and a maple creemee in an April’s Maple cone for myself ($3.50 for a small).

I may have been supremely sugared up, but the creemee was among the best I’ve ever had. The creemee itself is made with a 10 percent butterfat base and nothing but April’s Maple — no extract for extra color or flavor. The special cone takes it to the next level: a cake cone with maple cream around

I slathered the slightly sweet maple dog in maple mustard and took a bite before handing it over. It tasted like the hot dogs we traditionally boil in sap during a backyard DIY boil, without all the work.

The pulled pork was a perfect combo of savory and slightly sweet, topped with melty cheddar on a nicely griddled homemade bun. I snuck a bit of the coleslaw onto the sandwich for extra tang.

Between the café’s rustic wooden décor, the shuffle of our snow pants-clad fellow the upper edge and down the inside, rolled in big granules of maple crunch.

“It’s decadent beyond decadence,” Lemay said. It’s no surprise the creemees are in demand year-round.

I missed out on one of Lemay’s favorite maple-season treats: a Monte Cristo sandwich (French toast with ham and cheddar cheese) dipped in hot syrup fresh off the draw. But there’s still time, Lemay reassured me. It’s early in the sugaring season in the NEK; March 14 was only the second boil day this year, and given the wintry weather, she didn’t expect to boil again for a week.

“Every year, you’re just waiting to see what happens, but I try not to worry about it,” she said. “I know that we will make maple syrup because spring has always come in the past.” ➆

April’s Maple, 6507 Route 114, Canaan, 2669624, aprilsmaple.com. Want to check out a sugarhouse near you? Vermont’s Maple Open House Weekend runs March 25 to 26 and April 1 to 2. Learn more at vermontmaple.org/ mohw.

Salad Days

Dreaming of the beach with Tiny Thai’s som tam

BY MELISSA PASANEN • pasanen@sevendaysvt.com

I have been entranced by the green papaya salad called som tam ever since my first visit to Tiny Thai Restaurant, in fall 2004, shortly after it opened in what is now the Essex Experience.

The classic Thai street food hits all my culinary buttons; each bite delivers crunch, sourness, salt and funk in kaleidoscopic spades.

Eighteen and a half years and two restaurant locations ago, the salad cost $3.95. Today, it’s a still-reasonable $6 and continues to delight with the same refreshingly punchy, bright combination of flavors and textures that I have called “addictive” in print several times.

Tiny Thai moved to its current Winooski home at 293 Main Street after 15 years in the center of town. When I went earlier this month, I tried to remain open-minded about which dish might earn the spotlight for our monthlong series of “forever faves” at enduring local restaurants.

Friends and I ordered several dishes to share, including the soothing, sweet coconut milk massaman curry ($15 with chicken) and the bracingly spicy pad krapow moo grob stir-fry with bacon-y chunks of pork belly, fried basil leaves and crisp green beans ($18). The latter dish appears on the “genuine” Thai menu that co-owner Paul Ciosek and his wife, Pui, who grew up just outside Bangkok, added more than a decade ago.

Those choices are good, as are the pad kee maow, also called drunken noodles ($14 to $16 depending on protein); and the nam tok waterfall beef ($16), grilled flank steak tossed with tomatoes, bell peppers, fish sauce, lime juice and sugar, then sprinkled with ground roasted rice and served with sticky rice.

But if I had to choose only one dish at Tiny Thai, who am I kidding?

Som tam wins hands down.

Som means sour, and tam is the act of pounding, which is key to the recipe, the Cioseks explained during a chat last week. Tiny Thai kitchen staff use a special vegetable peeler with a ridged blade to julienne long strips of green papaya.

In a mortar, they bruise garlic and chiles, then tomato chunks and raw green beans, and, at the end, the papaya — just enough to get the juices going, Paul explained: “You don’t want to turn it to mush.” Finally, cooks add the dressing of lime juice, fish sauce and palm sugar and shower the salad with peanuts.

Paul, who lived for several years in Bangkok after meeting Pui at the University of Colorado Boulder, loves cooking, but he mostly manages the front of the house while his wife stewards the kitchen. With their latest restaurant move, the Cioseks finally own their building, which has about 30 indoor seats and more outdoors during warm weather.

They are looking forward to celebrating Tiny Thai’s 20th anniversary next year, although they said looking back makes them feel “old” (Pui) and “tired” (Paul). Despite that, Pui added, “We both still enjoy being here.”

When they get away to Thailand, where Pui’s elderly mother lives, Paul looks forward to eating som tam on the beach.

“Ladies come by with a mortar and pestle and a yoke over their shoulders holding all the ingredients,” he described. “They make it right there and serve it with sticky rice.” For a full meal, Paul said, he might buy charcoal-grilled chicken from another beach vendor.

New life goal: Eat som tam and grilled chicken on a beach in Thailand. ➆

Info

Tiny Thai Restaurant, 293 Main St., Winooski, 655-4888, tinythairestaurant.net