Plant-Based Cooking: From Garden to Table – Saugerties, NY

In this garden to kitchen class, we’ll grill vegetables to make the Spiral House plant-based muffaletta three different ways: an individual sandwich, a carb-free alternative wrapped in a collard green leaf, and a party loaf that can feed 30. Along the way we’ll make a couple of sauces and oven-dried cherry tomatoes for winter storage. You’ll go home with tips about our favorite plant-based pantry items and a copy of our cookbook — For Goodness Sake.

Weather permitting, part of the class will take place outdoors surrounded by the sculpture, the gardens, and the Catskill Mountain views.

Your guide for the day is Chef Diane Hagedorn. Diane was raised in a home where there was always a bounty of food on the table, all of it prepared by a mother who never used recipes. After moving to New York’s Hudson Valley with her family in the early 1980s, Diane studied at the Culinary Institute of America for three years. She went on to serve as the chef at numerous area restaurants, including those at retreat centers and resorts.

When she started cooking at the Spiral House — first at holiday parties and eventually as the property’s full-time chef — Diane began to adapt her repertoire for a plant-based diet. And so we have plant-based versions of the comfort food she grew up on, the Italian food her kids loved, the New Orleans food she craves from her many visits there, and the elegant dishes from her restaurant days. Many of those recipes are collected in For Goodness Sake: Plant-Based Recipes from the Spiral House Kitchen.

Due to limited enrollment, this program is open only to people 18 years of age and older.

About Spiral House Park

Located in the Hudson Valley between Woodstock and Saugerties, the Park is home to Tom Gottsleben’s stone and crystal glass sculpture and a house that spirals five stories to form a bluestone nautilus with magnificent views of the Catskill range. The site features extensive mixed native and traditional ornamental gardens and trails that wind through woodlands and abandoned stone quarries.

Gottsleben’s art was inspired by nature’s art — the fundamental patterns of life. The intersection of art and nature that informed the creation of the property also informs the mission of our nonprofit organization: to enable visitors to experience a sense of wonder in art and in nature, and to create programming that supports and transforms the way we see and care for the Earth.

Spiral House Park is a fiscally sponsored project of the Open Space Institute, Inc., a nonprofit public charity exempt from federal income tax under Sections 501(c)(3) and 509(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code.