In the Kitchen with the Woodstock Inn | Weekends with Yankee

Filming our TV series, Weekends with Yankee, is a weather-dependent exercise, since we do much of it outside. For the most part, we’ve been lucky, capturing more blue-sky days than any New Englander should rightly expect. But when we visited Kelly Way Gardens in Woodstock, Vermont, last fall, gray clouds capped the hills, sending a steady drizzle down into the valley. 

We already knew we would be pushing our luck to shoot a farm in October, after the first frost. But we also knew this farm was the work of Benjamin Pauly, an architect and plant whisperer whose childhood on a Minnesota homestead trained him in the ways of cold-weather farming. And Pauly’s creation didn’t disappoint.

The highlight of our visit was a hoop tunnel over which Pauly had trained a menagerie of ornamental gourd vines, their exotic fruits hanging overhead like Seussian disco balls: dark green speckled swan gourds dangling alongside pale birdhouse gourds and mammoth five-foot-long Kikinda gourds that resembled mutant string beans. Just outside the hoop house, we picked up some less showy but more delicious red kuri squash for a recipe I’d be preparing later. Mercifully, the rain held back until just after we’d gotten the final shot.

The farm is a project of the Woodstock Inn & Resort, where Pauly came to work as a concierge after his Peace Corps stint in Togo, West Africa. He impressed his bosses at the inn, but he soon grew restless, eager to pivot back to agriculture. So in 2013 they made him an offer: Their parent organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, owned a former dairy and horse farm nearby. Would he like to take it over?

Pauly set about carving this new farm out of several acres of rocky hillside soil and turning it into a mini Eden, with more than 200 varieties of vegetables, a mushroom glen, beehives, and beds of herbs and edible and ornamental flowers. Then the inn took two long-neglected barns and turned them into an event space and a demonstration kitchen, where Pauly and executive chef Rhys Lewis host classes and parties.

In those warm confines we took refuge as the rain intensified, and Lewis and I cooked up a rich squash tart with herbs from the garden and cheddar from Woodstock’s Billings Farm, just up the road. Meat-free and fancy enough for company, it’s the perfect meal for a cool fall day.

Get the Recipe: The Woodstock Inn’s Herbed Winter Squash Tart