Tag: JMU

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Culture Living

Dough-ing home: A renowned pastry chef hopes to taste success where it all starter’d

Pastry chef Rachel DeJong’s mixed berry pie is a sweet option at The Workshop Coffee & Wine Shop at The Wool Factory. Supplied photo

Rachel De Jong has traveled the world and rubbed elbows with its best chefs. She earned her diplôme de pâtisserie from Le Cordon Bleu École de Cuisine in Paris. She learned hospitality from The Inn at Little Washington’s Patrick O’Connell. And she traded dessert ideas with Ludo Lefebvre at Petit Trois in L.A. But De Jong’s roots are in Charlottesville, and it’s here she’s returned to bake her own way. We recently chatted with De Jong about her new gig as pastry chef at The Workshop in The Wool Factory, the bakery she’s opening, and her illustrious young career.

C-VILLE: What brings you back to Charlottesville after eight years away?

RDJ: I was at Petit Trois, and I loved it—loved the work, loved my co-workers. But L.A. is expensive, and I found my work-life balance was out of whack. And there is a unique interest in food here. I found out about The Wool Factory, and I asked Brad [Uhl, of Grit Coffee] if he was interested in a pastry aspect.

What was it like working with a brash personality like Ludo Lefebvre?

Food is very much his passion. He loves developing the menu and the savory side, but he also has an extensive background in pastry. We collaborated well and had a lot of fun. Often he would come to me and say something like, “I love fraisier, can we do it?” Or I would bring him something, and we would tweak it. Everything we did there was so classically French.

He must have been a change of pace from Patrick O’Connell.

Patrick is just an incredible human. What I learned most from him was about true hospitality and how to take care of guests. He knew how to take something very simple and mundane to another place.

How did you get into pastry?

It started super early on. I come from a large family of five kids, and my mom is an excellent cook, but she doesn’t have a knack for baking. I had a sweet tooth, so I started making cakes and enjoyed it. When it came time to think about a career, I knew it would be in some creative realm. I think it was my dad who finally said, “Pastry can be a career.”

And your first job was at the Baker’s Palette right here in C’ville?

I started college at James Madison University but decided I wanted to get my hands dirty. That’s when Sheila [Cervelloni] took me on with no experience. She taught me all she knew. It was a huge help and eye-opening.

Then after a stint at Gearharts Fine Chocolates, you left.

I think everybody goes through a growth period where their hometown feels small. I was ready to be away from Charlottesville. But working at the Inn, I still had connections and kept in touch with those folks. I would come home for holidays and hear what was going on from family and friends.

Now that you’re back, what can people expect from you?

Technique-wise, I’m a  traditionalist. I have always loved French pastry, and all of my work is grounded in that. When I was growing up, my mother and grandmother always had a natural and organic world—wild flowers and growing their own stuff. I like finding ways to bring those two worlds together and elevate classic French pastry, bringing to it a natural, organic, tangible, free style.

Categories
Living

Star-struck: For a planetarium visit and so much more, Harrisonburg is out of this world

Stars shine during the day at JMU’s planetarium. Photo: JMU Marketing & Communications

Some day trips have a singular purpose (i.e., “We’re going to the zoo!”), while others consist of a medley of experiences in the same general location. My family’s recent Saturday in Harrisonburg was one of the gumbo type. My husband and I and our girls, ages 5 and 8, saw a planetarium show, then visited a couple other universes while we were in town.

We had previously been to The John C. Wells Planetarium at James Madison University on organized field trips, but after I found out that families can visit for free most Saturdays, we packed up and headed west. On its dome-shaped screen, the university shows astronomically themed films—such as, A Teenager’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Did an Asteroid Really Kill the Dinosaurs?—followed by student-led star talks.

Inside a nondescript concrete classroom building, we entered the planetarium and settled into our stadium-style seats. The lights went down and a 20-minute film began—a cartoon version of the ancient Greek story of Perseus and Andromeda, the couple immortalized as constellations. My children were well entertained, craning their necks to follow the story unfolding overhead.

After the film ended, a cool-looking device—like a short, fat robot bristling with lenses and lights—emerged from the middle of the floor. Turns out it’s a projector that creates an image on the dome of what we’d see in the night sky from this very spot. The projector operators can manipulate the starry vision—spin it around, whoosh it forward or backward in time, or overlay the outlines of constellations, for example.

The two students leading the post-film talk were full of interesting facts. Did you know the Big Dipper isn’t really a constellation? It’s an asterism—a smaller collection of stars. It was fun to observe college students—closer to my kids’ age than my own—commanding the room and showing off their knowledge (and also their bad jokes, such as, calling Orion’s belt a “waist of space.”)

After the movie, star show, and talk—all of which filled an hour—we needed a bite, and a short drive delivered us to Taj of India, in downtown Harrisonburg. To a soundtrack of Indian pop music, we gorged on the lunch buffet, a feast replete with hot fresh naan, savory kormas and dahls, fiery tandoori dishes, and sweet rice pudding. The tab came to $35, a great deal for four people.

Did I mention this was a day of odd juxtapositions? Uh-huh. Next stop was a dairy barn.

At Mt. Crawford Creamery, 15 minutes south of Harrisonburg, we tromped through the muddy barnyard, then slipped through a small door into the milking parlor. Ten cows were slotted into two narrow lanes, like cars lined up in a parking lot. Standing on a lowered floor, which put them at roughly eye level with the cows’ udders, were farmer Kenneth Will and two helpers.

They welcomed us in but didn’t miss a beat in their work: cleaning the udders carefully before hooking up the milking machines, keeping an eye on the milk as it rushed through tubing and sprayed into large glass tanks in the center of the room, and then driving one group of cows out and the next group in.

The farm milks 60 to 80 cows in this parlor, twice a day, and it was fascinating to witness. How often do you get to take a really close look at a cow’s muddy hooves, jutting hipbones, and big wet muzzle? The animals gazed back at us with large, soft eyes, while a super-mellow farm dog licked up stray drops of milk from the concrete floor. I was glad for my girls to absorb this experience—the earthy smells of the room and the truth they pointed to, that milk and all the rest of our food comes from real plants and animals.

After we left, we joked about what else we could add to the day to round out the agenda. Go to the circus? Tour the White House? Maybe another time. We’d traveled far enough for one day, right there in Harrisonburg.

If you go

The John C. Wells Planetarium at JMU offers free public film showings on Saturdays at 11am, 1pm, 2:15pm, and 3:30pm. It’s located in Miller Hall on East Grace Street, in Harrisonburg. See jmu.edu/planetarium for details.

Taj of India, at 34 S. Main St., serves a lunch buffet  from 11am-2:30pm daily. Call (540) 615-5888.

Mt. Crawford Creamery, at 795 Old Bridgewater Rd. in Mount Crawford,
is open to visitors M-F 10am-6pm and Saturday 9am-5pm. You can observe cows being fed around 3pm and milked a half hour later. There’s also a shop on-site where you can buy the dairy’s milk products, plus
an ice cream parlor. See mtcrawford creamery.com

Categories
News

From the Oval Office: Obama responds to local’s letter

Jay Varner, a local writer and professor, received a handwritten letter from President Barack Obama. Photo by Martyn Kyle

After a friend was one of the estimated 13,393 people shot and killed in America last year, Batesville resident Jay Varner wrote to eight political representatives about the increasing threat of gun violence. Last month, he received a handwritten response from the president of the United States.

The August 26 on-air slayings of WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward made Varner feel helpless, enraged and upset, he says. Last spring, he met Parker and her then-boyfriend and later fiancé, Chris Hurst, at Roanoke’s Hollins University where Varner was a visiting professor. One of Varner’s previous students, a current WDBJ7 employee, had attended a reading that Varner was giving, and brought the couple with her.

“We kind of immediately hit if off,” Varner says. “Alison was such a vibrant person.”

So they kept in touch on Facebook, and months later, when he learned that two WDBJ7 employees were murdered while filming a live segment at Smith Mountain Lake, he immediately thought of the reporter, her fiancé and his former student—all three of who he knew worked the morning shift at the station.

“I started to shake and nearly fell to my knees when I saw the location,” he wrote in the letter addressed “Dear Mister President.”

Varner, who teaches classes at UVA, PVCC and JMU, says he wrote to ask what he should tell his students when they ask what today’s leaders are doing to end gun violence.

“What are you going to do about this? Have you now seen enough of your constituents gunned down?” Varner wrote. “Have you sent enough condolences and issued enough statements expressing sadness over such tragedies? Have you seen enough grieving friends and family walk shell shocked through the aftermath of bloodshed?”

Some representatives responded, including Senator Creigh Deeds, who was stabbed several times in the face by his mentally ill son who shot and killed himself minutes later, but the only person to answer Varner’s question directly was President Barack Obama.

After opening the letter—written on a cream-colored, high-quality card with an azure letterhead at the top—Varner says, “First, of course, I was shocked,” and also “surprised that the president of the United States had responded to something I had written.”

The president reads 10 hand-picked letters in the Oval Office each night, according to a statement on the White House’s website by Mike Kelleher, the director of presidential correspondence. Obama sometimes chooses to write back.

In his response to Varner, Obama wrote:

“Thank you for your letter, and your passion. Tell your students that their President won’t stop doing everything he can to stop gun violence. And don’t fill them with cynicism—change isn’t easy, but it requires persistence and hope.”

Varner says he especially appreciates the note about not being cynical.

“The more we speak up, the harder this message is to ignore,” he says. “And that’s something in the president’s response that more than just my students need to hear: Change takes hope, it takes persistence, and it means we can’t give up doing what’s right.”

On March 13, Hurst and Parker’s parents appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” for a 90-minute show dedicated to gun violence in America.

“When my daughter, Alison, was murdered on live television, I pledged that I was going to do whatever it takes to reduce gun violence in this country,” Andy Parker said in a speech just days after her death. On “CBS Sunday Morning,” he said he believes universal background checks should be mandated for those who wish to purchase guns, and gun show loopholes that allow private buyers to purchase firearms without a background check or a record of the sale should be closed.

Vester Lee Flanagan II, the disgruntled former station employee who killed Parker and Ward and later himself, did pass a background check and purchased his gun legally.

“There are people that say, ‘Well, nothing would’ve prevented her death,’” Varner says about Parker. “Okay, maybe so. But is that a reason to not try and save the next life? Even if it’s one life?”

Click to enlarge President Barack Obama’s response.

Read President Barack Obama's response here.