A behind-the-scenes look at a New Hampshire highlight from season three of Weekends with Yankee.
By Amy Traverso
Oct 24 2019
Mayfair Farm’s Sweet Potato Fritters
Photo Credit : Liz NeilyToday I’m helping Sarah get ready for the dinner, but we’re also filming an episode of Weekends with Yankee that highlights the beauty of this sylvan corner of southwestern New Hampshire. It’s a place of hilly pastures, lakes, and forests lined with old stone walls. Mayfair Farm sits just up the road from Harrisville Pond, and, like many successful family farms in New England, it’s an amalgam of businesses: an orchard, a vegetable garden, an Airbnb cottage, and a farm store that sells maple products, prepared meals, and baked goods (their almond cake won a 2017 Yankee Editors’ Choice Food Award). There are pigs in pens, and lambs up on the hill. And there’s this Instagram-ready event space, where Sarah and Craig host weddings and community farm dinners spring through fall.
“My mom is a chef, so I grew up around her different food businesses,” Sarah says. “I tried to do different things. I rode horses for a long time; I got a master’s degree in school counseling. But my first love was really food, and I just kept coming back to it.”
Sarah made the following recipe as part of our harvest dinner. Inspired by Indian vegetable pakoras, these fritters are sweet and deeply savory, with just enough warming spices to make them an excellent appetizer as the weather turns cold.
Food Editor Amy Traverso oversees the Yankee Magazine Food department and contributes to NewEngland.com. Amy's book, The Apple Lover's Cookbook (W.W. Norton), won an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) cookbook award for the category American.
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