The Copper Oven and Cayuga Ridge Estate Winery thanks the scientists and professors who joined us for dinner on Wednesday July 14, 2010. Here are a a couple of pictures from the evening:

In addition to regular hours on Saturdays and Sundays, The Copper Oven takes on a limited number of private events each season. Please contact us for more information.

Here are a few pictures of Mary Jane’s dad (Tom Challen) prepping this year’s garden. Check out the crazy light in this first shot…

Tom Prepping The Garden (2010)

Furrowing The Final Row

Garden Ready For Disking

Talk about local ingredients. The majority of our tomatoes and greens will come from this exactly this spot (which is less than a 5 minute walk to where the oven is regularly parked at Cayuga Ridge Estate Winery).

We have a lot to be thankful for on this Memorial Day. Without Mary Jane’s parents (Tom and Susie Challen) The Copper Oven and many of the tasty ingredients on our wood fired pizzas simply would not be.

If you are celebrating Memorial Day on the Cayuga Wine Trail stop by for some (om nom nom) wood fired pizza and a glass of wine.

Got cheese from the Finger Lakes Cheese Trail? Bring it with you and we’ll put it on your pizza at a discount.

Seasonal Wood Fired Pizza #1

Caramelized Onion (Remembrance Farm, Trumansburg, NY)
Herbs de Provence Chevre (Lively Run, Interlaken, NY)
Finished with a drizzle of Butternut Squash Seed Oil (Stony Brook WholeHeartedFoods, Geneva, NY)

What We Love About This Pizza: 100% of its ingredients are locally sourced (i.e., Remembrance Farm is 12.3 miles away, Lively Run Goat Dairy is 8 miles away, and Stony Brook WholeHeartedFoods is 26.5 miles away).

Suggested Wine Pairing: Cayuga Ridge Estate Reserve Chardonnay

Seasonal Wood Fired Pizza #2

Pepperoni (The Piggery, Trumansburg, NY)
Herbs de Provence Chevre (Lively Run, Interlaken, NY)
San Marzano Tomatoes (La Valle, Italy)

What We Love About This Pizza: Anything with The Piggery’s products is, um, good.

Suggested Wine Pairing: Cayuga Ridge Estate Cabernet Sauvignon

Since opening The Copper Oven at the end of April 2010, our blog readers and customers have asked us: What do you mean by Community, Sustainability and Food Culture?”

In going back through the notebooks and flip charts filled during our initial business planning sessions, multiple themes cropped up – and a few of them stuck.

In summarizing those themes into a handful of words, we ended up with Community, Sustainability and Food Culture.

This post is an attempt to explain – at least partially – what we mean by Community.

To start, I was struck by a story that Mary Jane shared with the family during one of our business planning sessions this past winter.

She recounted childhood memories of working in the garden with Tom (her dad). In the same breath, she talked about being in the kitchen with Susie (her mom) and enjoying working together with her to prepare meals from food that came directly from the garden.

At one point she looked up at us and said, “That’s why The Copper Oven makes sense. That’s why it’ll work.”

While we do plan to dedicate some of this year’s family vegetable garden to produce that will be turned into toppings for our wood fired pizzas, the lack of space (and time) points us to the opportunity to work together with likeminded producers near our home and in the Finger Lakes region.

So in one sense, community means family. But in another, it means the opportunity to engage… with family as well as with those outside of our immediate circle.

Then again, community means recognition of the interdependence that exists between us, the land, and the people that surround us. Therefore we dare say that community means the responsibility that we have to it – no matter how big or small the circle we draw.

The Copper Oven is committed to Community.

We are part of the family business (Come visit Cayuga Ridge Estate Winery).
We grow or source our ingredients from local producers whenever we can (check our Menu page).
We engage in mindful practices (Our disposables are compostable and our heat source is renewable).
We donate 5% of our profits to a local program that feeds families in need (Learn more about Healthy Food For All).

Between the sun and the snow (yes, the snow was flying when we woke up this morning and the weatherman says it’s going to get down to 34 degrees tonight) we want to thank everyone who visited The Copper Oven this weekend.

Special thanks goes out to our Elm Beach Road neighbors, the Kappa Kappa Gamma crew from Syracuse University and all the families who brought their moms and and grandmothers to The Copper Oven at Cayuga Ridge today to celebrate Mother’s Day with feasts of wine and wood fired pizza (long live Batman!).

And continued good feedback on the local ingredients that we use to make our wood fired pizzas: One after another, people who are new to goat cheese realize how much they love Lively Run’s Herbs de Provence chevre. And with the pepperoni (better known as Piggeroni) firing so well, we hope to eventually hear from The Piggery that our customers are going direct to who we think is the best charcuterie in Central New York.

Finally, Mary Jane’s Test Kitchen continued this afternoon… Local ingredients on this largely apple-based Pizza included Red Jacket Orchard’s Apple Butter, local apples from Kingtown Orchards (thinly sliced and soaked in Finger Lakes Distilling Maplejack Liqueur) finished with a drizzle of Waid’s Honey. Mmmmn good…