Dan's Papers - October 13, 2006 - Farmers, The North Fork And Breakfast

Eat your breakfast. That's what everybody tells you - your mom, your teachers, your doctors, and all those magazine articles about how to live to 120 on whole grains.

Well, a few breakfasts ago, I set out to find some great breakfasts on the North fork.

Let's have Dan's Papers set the record straight. And not by listing North Fork restaurants where fine breakfasts are served every day. No, we're gonna check out what used to be called "farmer-style" breakfasts. How? By checking with North Fork farmers, of course. What do they eat, at home, for breakfast? Look - the sun's just coning up. Let's go knock on a few farmhouse doors.

There, dressed and ready to go at 6 a.m., is Mike Konarski who farms in Cutchogue. He's the Mike of Farmer Mike's stand on Main Road in Cutchogue. The farmstand sign reads tomatoes, cukes, carrots, eggplants, potatoes - all that good stuff. But what it doesn't tell you is that Mike and his wife Dorothy and their children have farmed this land for 35 years. That's more than 12,000 breakfasts.

Dorothy put it best. "We're breakfast people," she said as she described her husband's first meal of the day. Mike, it seems, starts off with fruit juice and a bowl of cold cereal. (He likes Cheerios.) This is followed by yogurt and then eggs and sausage on a bagel. With coffee, of course.

Dorothy added that Mike had been seriously ill a few years ago and at that time became a firm believer in the benefits of a good breakfast. Mike is feeling fine now and spends his days providing North Forkers with good eating, good health.

Travel further east on Main Road and stop at Barb's Veggies in Peconic. Here's another husband/wife team assisted by family members. Barb and Joe Pelis live in Riverhead but farm in Aquebogue (corn) and Peconic (all the other glorious vegetables). Today working at the farm stand with Barb and Joe, is their daughter Debbie, and their grandson Robbie, a second-grader at Aquebogue School.

Barb, when I talked with her, was on her hands and knees, not with vegetables this time, but with a cluster of chrysanthemums arranged in a rock-circled garden she'd dug alongside the farm stand. And when she isn't with vegetables and flowers? Try Riverhead High School where Barb works in food service during the school year.

Oh yes, breakfast! Up before 6 a.m., these folks eat home fries, eggs, ham or bacon, rye toast and coffee. Barb cooks, of course. But Joe does, too, especially in their relatively new (six years) venture. That's Joe and Barbara's Homestyle Backyard Catering and BBQ. They come to your back yard, do the cooking. You do the eating.

How do they manage all this? Must be the breakfasts. An "out-east" farmer on the North Fork? Stop at Latham Farms in Orient. With a picture-perfect background of Shelter Island across the water, the stand is manned this morning by Peter Sanchez who also works the fields.

Peter, who's been at Latham's for more than eight years, is a slim young guy. Probably, I thought, he didn't have more than a quick cup of coffee for breakfast. But I was wrong. On the North Fork, farmer-breakfast traditions prevail.

He's up at 5 a.m. and, says Peter, does some serious eating. Ham, scrambled or fried eggs, always a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. A big glass of orange juice. And then, just to be sure he'll not be mid-morning hungry, Peter enjoys a cup or two of hot chocolate and a big hunk of cake, preferably pound cake. Peter says, "We have to maintain ourselves." He does.

This breakfast, I add, is prepared by Peter's wife Angela. Their two-year-old daughter Arazay is usually asleep while Daddy eats breakfast. She does, however, visit her father when he's working at the stand. I don't know if Arazay is a big eater like her father. But she is every bit as charming, though not old enough to be an enthusiastic Yankee fan like her dad. Even after Detroit.

Well, there it is. A look at what keeps North Fork farmers, and the rest of us, going through the long mornings. We're a well-fed lot, I'd say. But listen. Isn't that the noon whistle from the firehouse? Clear as can be. So we'll have to stop right here. It's time for lunch.