Chef Paul is expecting a shipment of the first fresh beans of the season Friday. 

We know you're all looking out your windows at your frozen driveways in confusion now. Not the local, upstate New York growing season, obviously, but the South American season. While we buy from local farmers and patronize and promote organic and sustainable agriculture whenever possible, we live in the real world. If we sold nothing but local produce, we'd be serving nothing but frozen meat and cold-cellar pumpkins, apples, carrots, turnips and onions right now. We wouldn't have escargots, or fish, or any of the spices and imported products that we use to add zest and interest to our dishes. Heck, we'd also have very little wine on the list, and almost no hard alcohol behind our bar.

This is going to sound really weird to people who are used to us extolling the virtues of local, organic, sustainably produced food. We're about to be a little critical of the idea that "organic" is a guarantee of safety, quality or even moral turpitude.

This was partly prompted by some visitors who were in town last weekend who insisted on having the waiters vouch for the certified organic-ness of every item on the menu before they would order it. In despair, the servers sought out Cheryl, who told the diners they would be better off going someplace else, because this time of the year, there is precious little officially organic food even at Chez Sophie, which prides itself on knowing the provenance of every element of its food. Even our milk, which we are very proud of because it is slow pasteurized, un-homogenized, locally produced, and untainted by hormones, is not certified organic.

"What I've tried to define," said Chef Paul Parker, "is that first and foremost, I want perfect ingredient. I want local ingredient if it's possible. If those local ingredients are sustainably produced, that's a positive for me. After that comes organic."

"Sometimes organic food is much better than anything you can get, and sometimes it looks and tastes and looks like crap," Paul said. "Just because someone doesn't use pesticides, that doesn't mean they use good agricultural common sense or care or love in producing their food. And it's expensive to meet those standards, so you have to sell that brown orange or squishy speckled squash, even if it looks and tastes terrible."

We support those who go to the effort to produce products that are not chemically engineered or laden with pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones or antibiotics. That's good common sense and we'll pay extra for the knowledge that we're not stuffing ourselves, our customers, our children or our planet with unnecessary chemicals.

But nothing is so simple as a label. The term "organic" has been watered down by the attempts to officially regulate it. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: "Organic crops are raised without using most conventional pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers or sewage-sludge based fertilizers. Animals raised on an organic operation must be fed organic feed and given access to the outdoors. They are given no antibiotics or growth hormones."

The application of these standards are such that it is possible for an aerosol, spray-on pancake batter to be USDA certified organic. "Organic" can appear on the label of products that have 5 percent non-certified components. And there is a whole sub-class of products with non-certified ingredients comprising 30 percent of their bulk that can be labelled "made with organic ingredients."

Every environmental decision is weighted by counterbalancing factors. Organic farming produces less food per acre than conventional commercial agriculture. If a law were to be passed mandating that all food sold in the United States be organic, we would need to increase the amount of land in agricultural production by 20 percent. That would mean clearing forest and a significant loss in biodiversity. Plants, when attacked by insects and fungi, produce their own natural counter-toxins. In fact, organically produced plants produce more toxins than those treated with synthetic insecticides and herbicides, because they are attacked more heartily by predators. Just because those toxins are naturally occurring, that doesn't mean they aren't harmful to humans. One example is solanine, a substance produced by potatoes as they turn green. Too much can make you sick.

There's also the issue of organic fertilizers, which are largely animal feces. While organic food is not contaminated at any rate higher than food from mass-production, there's always a chance that E-coli could enter the food chain through a pile of not-thoroughly fermented cow-dung.

We strongly support small-scale farming and sustainable agricultural methods that decrease or eliminate the need for synthetic chemicals. That doesn't mean that all commercial production is bad.

Which brings us back to Paul's imported, commercially produced South American beans. He's getting dragon-tongue beans, which are a variety of the species Phaseolus vulgaris.  This family includes wax beans, green beans, and yard-long green beans. Dragon-tongue beans look like green beans except they are creamy white with streaks of bright purple on the edible pods, which cause some to fancy them to look like dragons' tongues.

We're also expecting fresh green muscat grapes. These are the sweet, slightly acidic grapes that are used to make Italy's Moscato, France's Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, Moscatel in Spain and Portugal and fat golden raisins throughout the world.

This week's food specials

Another gratuitously good word - shad are "anadromous," which means they migrate from their saltwater habitate to spawn in fresh water. 

Pink Plate Special

We've decided to try something different for Easter Brunch than we did last year. We did a sit-down prix fixe menu that went quite well, but we noticed that a disproportionate number of people stood in line at our designer omelette station, probably because they enjoyed the show. So this year, we're doing all of the food service in stations, like a buffet, but a little more like performance art. 

So this year, we'll keep that omelette station, because it was extremely popular, and will also be offering a waffle station, a carving station with leg of lamb, prime rib, and baked fresh ham, a raw bar, a salad and vegetable station, and desserts.

Easter falls on March 23 this year, which seemed early until we got an email from Mary Pratt at Elihu Farm. Her first lamb of the season dropped Wednesday morning, a white Romney ewe. This was the dam's first lambing and she managed the delivery all by herself. Normally lambs don't start dropping until mid-April, but Mary was tempted to buy four Romney ewes last fall that had already been bred, so she's ahead of the calendar.

Artist in residence Joseph C. Parker

Joseph, who has been artist-in-residence at Chez Sophie since 1969, is taking orders for castings of the pieces in his exhibit, "Expressions of Love," which features tiny sculptures that he created to be gifts for Sophie over the 52 years of their marriage.

The castings will cost between $300 and $3,000 depending on the piece. The castings will be done to order, so if you want to give one as a gift to your romantic love in the near future, we can create a pretty promise package for you with a photograph of the original to present as a gift for a birthday, anniversary, engagement. Castings for one of the pieces have been completed, and a series of another piece will be finished in the next week.  The other pieces will take six to 12 weeks for delivery depending on the complexity of the sculpture.

To preview some of the pieces in "Expressions of Love" visit http://www.chezsophie.com/sculpt_val.html

Jazz Brunch