Lowcountry Cuisine Summer/Fall 2019

www.LowcountryCuisineMag.com | www.MountPleasantRestaurant.com | www.CharlestonRecipes.com lowcountry cuisine — a water buffalo. “To make a very, very long story short: this guy rented a pasture from us to milk water buffalo and make real mozzarella cheese, which comes from water buffalo,” explained Legare-Floyd. “We ended up with a lot of water buffalo because that didn’t work out.” The Legares have opted not to attempt milking the water buffalo and are instead processing the meat to sell it in packs of ground water buffalo, kielbasa sausage, rib-eye steak or water buffalo liver. Legare Farms continues on with one unexpected farm microcosm after the next: turkeys, ducks, horse and donkey stables, the skeet-shoot range, the full-sized lacrosse field where Sea Island Lacrosse practices, the open field where they host reenactments each spring of every major American war (including pirates), and Legare- Floyd’s large and stilted home with a million-dollar view of the Stono River with the Ravenel in the distance, and a 1976 Airstream on the side lawn. Beside this, there are remnants of an 11-acre plant nursery. “In 2006 we closed the nursery because the economy was really bad and went back to growing vegetables and direct-marketing our meat,” says Legare- Floyd. “We figured that people don’t need a pretty plant in their garden, but they need to eat.” The Legare Farm was forced to adapt then, as it undoubtedly has during recessions and wars before. The farm now has an expansive community-supported agriculture (CSA) business and two busses that serve as de facto farmers’ markets on wheels. You can hop on a bus and hop off with a sweet bundle of onions, jam made with Legare berries by a Mennonite couple in North Carolina, honey sticks, bread baked by Linda Legare-Berry, pimento cheese, okra that Legare-Floyd and her husband pickle on weekends, family-recipe tomato pie, and maybe even bacon made from Legare pork belly. “The owner at Angel Oak buys pork bellies from us, which he smokes to make his own bacon. Then I buy the bacon and sell it on the bus,” explained Legare-Floyd of the cyclical relationship of local production. “That is good bacon.” As we drove past a big, open field with what looked like a carport in the distance, she painted a picture of this symbiotic relationship that cycles inside the farm and then eventually out to its consumers. That carport is in fact a “chicken tractor” — an enclosure around a tractor with shade and feed — where the “laying hens” live and lay. Every day, the chicken tractor moves to a new square of land, leaving behind it some spilled feed (which the pigs will quickly eat) and thriving green grass “because the manure fertilized the grass so well.” With 300 laying hens on the farm producing an egg every 26 hours or so, Legare-Floyd can sell around 120 dozen fresh eggs each week. This circle of life is not just about selling eggs for the Legares but also ensuring that the idea of local farming isn’t lost to the grocery aisles. In 2003, the three D