After unhappy homecoming, he develops a taste for the Berkshires
June 2011 was a big time for me. I had just graduated from college and I was off to the city where my dreams were sure to come true. Soon enough, I would be a star: the next Regis Philbin. Name up in lights, photographs in the tabloids, the whole nine yards. This college graduate, with my newly received diploma in hand, was ready to take on the real world and wasn’t looking back—or so I thought. The reality was that the only time I saw my name in anything close to bright lights was on the computer screen as I repaid the staggering amounts of college loans that showed up six months post-graduation without delay. I wasn’t looking back at college, but I also wasn’t looking forward to the city. I was looking to the Berkshires; I was moving home. And to add insult to injury, I was moving back in with my parents.
So I was returning to the Berkshires as a 22-year-old with an extremely sour taste for the area. Little did I know that, soon enough, that sour taste would macerate into one of the sweetest, most nostalgic flavors that one can imagine. The Berkshires was my home for 18 years, and it wasn’t until I took a four-year hiatus and returned home that I was able to truly grasp what the Berkshires represents to me.
My first summer out of school came and went with graduation parties and cookouts. Then autumn arrived with its glorious foliage, locally grown apples and freshly pressed cider. I revisited a place that I had seemingly overlooked for years. Just up the road from my house, Jaeschke’s Orchard, located at the base of the most breathtaking mountain in all of Massachusetts, Mt. Greylock, has been a staple to Adams natives for years.
As I browsed the different types of apples at Jaeschke’s, I was brought back in time to when I was a young boy. I would sit and watch my grandmother lovingly construct the perfect apple pie. As I pictured her delicate hands carefully rolling out her simple but spectacular homemade piecrust, meticulously peeling and cutting slices of apples and baking it to the exact point of doneness, I realized that places like Jaeschke’s aren’t just places to buy ingredients, they’re the places where memories of friends and family and time spent in the Berkshires begin. As that moment of nostalgia quickly came over me, I grabbed for a few beautiful Macintosh apples and was on my way to try my hand at Grandma’s famous apple pie.
Like anyone who has tried to recreate a dish that is so dear to their heart, I could never seem to get Grandma’s apple pie quite right. So having access to an excess of apples, I started using them in a variety of new ways. Beginning with the basics like homemade applesauce and Baked Chicken Stuffed with Apples and Cheddar Cheese, I began to see the Berkshires in a whole new way. As I tried my hand at recipes like apple and Butternut Squash Risotto and Panna Cotta with Warm Apple Chutney, memories of times spent in the Berkshires with good friends and family resurfaced. Surprisingly enough, each memory I had was surrounding a table of food or a home-cooked meal.
I was brought back to times of camping at South Pond in Savoy with my family and finding the simple joy in cooking a hot dog on a stick. I remembered comforting memories like coming in from delivering newspapers, in the middle of the winter, face beet-red and chilled to the bone, just to find my mom holding a warm bowl of soup or chili. I still laugh when I recall the time my brother and I stuffed grapes in our lips to look like baboons. And with every memory, inside of me grew a passion—which grew into a necessity: I needed to make more memories. So I began to make more meals.
As I cooked, I found myself wanting to share it all with my friends and family, so I regularly invited them over. Sunday night meals became our tradition. It started small and grew into a large event. Each Sunday I would wake up bright and early, enjoy the smell of fresh brewed coffee as I rolled out homemade baguettes. I made appetizers and main courses, desserts and cocktails for all.
And it evolved from there. Dinner parties for my friends and family followed until, soon enough, here it is a year and half later and my knife skills by far out perform my accounting and finance skills. Granted, along the way there have been broken glasses, cut fingers and even an oven fire, but those things only add to the experiences I continue to make in this beautiful area. The food has been wonderful, the journey has been crazy, but I’ve come to realize, you don’t need to be anywhere else in the world for your dreams to come true except where you are right now.
So yes, I’m still here and I’m enjoying all that the Berkshires has to offer. It may not be New York City and my face might not be on the big screen (yet!), but I couldn’t imagine anywhere else I would want to be. The Berkshires is my heart and my home. If I ever do leave this area, I will carry a part of it with me wherever I go.
I hope you will come to enjoy the Berkshires as much as I do and that you will also take fond memories of it wherever you go.
RECIPES
