Farm to Fork dinners at Chatham's Eden Hall star locally sourced food and creative menus

Nothing beats a gourmet meal under a setting sun.

Just ask patrons of the Farm to Fork dinner on June 12 at Chatham University’s Eden Hall campus in Richland.

Diners enjoyed freshly stir-fried vegetables, edamame salad, chili oil smashed potatoes, hibiscus and raspberry iced tea and more at the site’s scenic barn and tent.

Two more dinners remain in the summer series.

Anyone hankering for fresh food harvested from local farms and cooked by chefs from Parkhurst Dining can come down to the Eden Hall’s large barn from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month through Aug. 14.

Each dinner is themed and features a different menu consisting of food sourced from various local farms, including Eden Hall Farm. The theme for the June 12 dinner was stir-fry.

“The school does a great job of harvesting their own maple sauce. So even tonight, we incorporated that into the maple stir-fry,” sous chef Jason Reed said.

The Farm to Fork team bases the themed menus off what the Eden Hall Farm expects to harvest for the season, as well as what is traditionally available on farm menus and what is available at local farms. They then incorporate global inspirations wherever they can.

“We take a global concept, something like stir-fry, but we use a local accent by getting the vegetables from nearby but using their signature sauces or flavors from around the world,” Reed said.

Previous menu themes included a beet theme, featuring a cedar plank rockfish with a creamy beet velouté and beetroot risotto, and a coffee theme, showcasing a coffee-crusted pork tenderloin and mocha-glazed Brussels sprouts.

Reed works as the sous chef at the Eden Hall campus’ Esther Barazzone Center during the school year. During the summer, he works on the Farm to Fork Dinner Series.

“This is my third year doing it. We did it a few years ago after covid. It was in ’21, ’22 and then we took a season off, and we’re back. This is our second year doing it again,” Reed said. “The idea of Farm to Fork is to get as much from local farms as we can. If it’s not coming from here, we source it from Central Pennsylvania farms the best we can. So the freshest vegetables, within a day, go right onto the table.”

Stacey Kern, marketing coordinator for Parkhurst Dining at Chatham, said they started the series to welcome the local community to explore the campus and its hiking trails and to highlight the “produce and the work that the farmers here (at Eden Hall campus) are doing.”

“But it is a small farm so we do outsource from other local vendors, too,” Kern said. “We are highlighting even more local farms than we did last year.”

This year, the Farm to Fork series sourced ingredients from many local farms, including Maple Grove Farms in Alleghenyville, Turner Dairy Farms in Penn Hills, Mighty Small Farm in Pittsburgh and Rippling Brook Farm in Clarion.

Michael Logesky, general manager for Parkhurst Dining at Chatham, said Parkhurst uses Three Rivers Grown to help them source from small and family-run farms.

Brenda Psenick of Cranberry heard about the event through Chatham and Parkhurst’s Facebook pages and decided to go once they had a menu she liked. She said she and her husband “really enjoyed it,” and she especially liked the edamame salad and the raspberry and hibiscus iced tea.

For Kathy Szmyd of Shaler, being at the barn brought back good memories of when she and her friends used to visit Eden Hall while it was still a retreat site for working women between 1951 to 2007. Szmyd and her friends learned about the dinner series last year, and now they try to attend at least a couple of times each summer.

“My other two friends started coming up for dinner to see what it was like, and we liked it,” Szmyd said. “I haven’t had anything I didn’t like up here yet.”

Tina Csefalvay of Forward Township has so far attended about 10 Farm to Fork dinners over three years along with one or both of her daughters.

She said she has enjoyed every meal there, noting the food is always “very high quality, good taste, unique and fresh.” Her favorite item from the stir-fry dinner was the dessert: a white chocolate matcha brownie.

“It’s just such a nice thing to do in the summer. In the evening after work, it’s something that we look forward to doing. My daughters always come with me,” Csefalvay said. “It’s nice to walk around the campus, too.”