Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Let's talk about Washington state's wine industry and it's playing a significant role in rural economic diversification efforts. I find this to be invaluable information today because we still have people who are misinformed about the value of our regional wineries in providing alternatives to traditional agricultural crop production. The Washington state wine grape growers and producers are governed by a board of directors. The commission provides a marketing platform for the Washington wine industry and raises awareness of its wines so that...
Permitted to permit! The word is out, the rules are explicate and to participate in the Walla Walla Farmers Market as a vendor selling foods of any kind, you must have liability insurance and a health permit, plus any other permits your booth may require. I know from experience the health permits in Walla Walla are more expensive than in Seattle or San Francisco and liability insurance can be expensive. For these reasons, if you're thinking about getting involved in selling your produce this year or in the future, make sure you research these...
Today, I boarded an airplane coming home from the annual Seattle Green Festival where 2,400 people attended. I spoke in the afternoon to a packed room of people who share a common interest in the way we eat and think about food today, a theme that currently runs through my webpage, cookbooks, and food and wine columns. Previous to climbing on stage, I'd been in a yoga class promoted in the festival's brochure, wearing a pair of leggings and festival sweat shirt and in my state of yogi bliss, I almost missed my introduction on stage. Backstage,...
Today, I received word about a food contest I'd entered and won. This was a bet I took from a friend who said I was too good to send a recipe into Tony Tantillo, Safeway Stores fresh produce representative. The truth is I am neither too smart nor too old to think I am too good at anything. So, I took the challenge and won. You can pick up the recipe in Safeway's "Fresh Start Magazine," a free-bee located in the produce departments of Safeway, distributed across America for the month of May. I received a call this afternoon from Tony Tantillo...
Wine weekend is over and done for another year and I have some information to share with those who didn't make this year's event: IT WAS WONDERFUL! Of course, you can always get down to your favorite wineries any weekend through the coming months and taste what the regional wineries poured for all the fun-loving winos who attended this weekend's event. It was really interesting even for this writer, who gets out to the wineries every week. I still found information I didn't know existed and met new people who share like minds. During the time...
A nyone who knows me knows I am a yoga freak, on my mat practicing each morning before coffee or hello. Yoga and stretching keeps me vital, limber and most at peace with everyone and everything around me. I have practiced this method of living for the better part of thirty years, in the garden through summer and on the living room floor in winter, there's just no stopping me. When I was asked to speak this year at the Green Festival in Seattle, May 21-22, I jumped at the chance. My lecture topic: "How we eat and think about food today," and my...
This week I visited my old friend and associate Chef/ Organic Activist Jesse Cool. Back in the early '90s, Jesse asked me to take her place as Executive Chef at her popular Flea Street Café in Menlo Park, California, while she wrote her first cookbook titled, "Tomatoes." Today, with five cookbooks and three restaurants to her credit, she invites me to dinner and picks my brain for cutesy titles for future recipes. This time however, I can't spit any off-the-cuff ideas to her because I have a cookbook on a publisher's table, and rules state it's...
Once again the wineries of our region are preparing for May 6, spring release weekend. To ready myself for this year's downtown party, I went to the wineries a little early to quench my fascination for food-friendly red wine, and ended up at Walla Walla's Morrison Lane Winery, tasting and visiting with winemaker Dan Morrison. Yes, Dan makes many styles of good red and white wines, but my favorite, the Morrison Lane '04 Nebbiolo, is a fantastic red wine suited for foods drenched in tomato or brown -sugared barbecue sauce. It's true, no one...
I t's raining again, so what's new? Okay, it's good for the garden and the farmers and the wild things that fly and creep, but sometimes you just want to feel free of an umbrella. Am I the only person in the Touchet Valley who wants spring to be here now!? Funny I ask that. My cousin Betty called. She's getting a divorce. What does that have to do with spring? Nothing, but after that call, instead of moping about spring, I began to feel utterly sorry for the Betty and Bart calamity. Bart called me right after Betty; to say neither he nor Betty...
I went grocery shopping today. I unloaded the four canvas bags, took off my shoes and sat down to balance my check book. Though I'd heard the cashier say the number, as I wrote the check it really hurt to see $77 missing from my checkbook register for just a couple of chickens, two steaks for Wine Guy, some vegetables, bread, bacon, cheese and eggs. Sunday morning, CNN news said we'd be seeing a 14 percent hike in food costs this summer. The reason for higher prices could be weather conditions and transportation, but a lot has to do with...
I n the food and wine business, the weather has everything to do with the harvest. The recent weeks of rain and snow flurries here in the Great Northwest are what make great grapes for crush and make next fall's late-harvest vegetables so abundant. But I am like many of you: bored to tears with butternut squash. How much is too much of a good thing? I am ready for more texture and more variety - something only spring can do for us, and she's a while off. This yearning for something brighter and lighter in food is what brought me into the...
This afternoon, Wild Bill of Wild Bill's Organic Patit Street Garden, Dayton, and I had our seasonal over-the-fence-visit. Bill's in the planning stages of his 2011 organic summer garden. In a couple of months he'll plant various leafy greens, corn, potatoes, cucumbers, green beans, beets, carrots and culinary herbs. I love having a big garden like Bill's in the neighborhood; it's an eco-friendly kind of thing. Even Bill and my bees, butterflies and dragonfly kanoodle over the fence. In the summer, we share a family of Dayton bats that pay a...
I n the wine business, there's nothing more apparent than one designated wine growing AVA compared to another. For those of you who may be new to wine lingo, AVA is short for American Viticulture Area, an official term designated to wine-grape growers by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Actually, the AVA serves as a point of reference defining the area's climate, soil, elevation and properties of the land in concern. This information is absolutely necessary for the grower, who, unlike a stock broker, will need to know what to...
I found it very comforting to be home this weekend to answer letters from you, readers, to re-pot house plants and do a little cooking of all things. Last week, I had such an incredible wine tasting while visiting Livermore, California, wine country, that all the way home I knew I needed to get into the kitchen and revamp an old 1960s Haight Ashbury Chicken Mole recipe ,to pair with the one wine that "blew my cork in Livermore." But first, a discussion about the Livermore Valley AVA. As a child I remember driving through this part of Northern...
A rriving in Park City, Utah, I was met by staff of the Washington School Inn Bed and Breakfast who drove me to the B & B where I was booked to stay for the week of the Sundance Film Festival. I'd been hired to cook by a private group of guests who booked the entire B & B for the week long Festival. This was my third year working the annual winter event, and it promised to be interesting with a house full of celebrities, a well-known producer/director and me, the chef. Among the exclusive food and beverage requests were the cigar, wine and bran...
While visiting wineries along the North Coast this week, I had the fortune to dine with friends in Mendocino, who served a wonderful Chicken Tandoori. I love this dish and always thought I needed to have a Tandoori pot to make it in. I guess figuratively speaking, you do. But back home I experimented, and I am happy to say, a good Tandooristyled dish can be made using the correct spices and by keeping the chicken moist throughout the cooking time without the specialty pot. Back on the coast: While driving to my friend's home for dinner, I stopp...
This morning I watched a gaggle of snow geese honk their way over the house, flying north. I looked up between their feathered underbellies, little orange legs tucked tightly under their bodies, and caught a glimpse of the lavender sky, dappled in violet hues against a backdrop of waving silvertip spruce and 40-foot dancing pines. It just took my breath away. It's this kind of subtle beauty that reminds us why we live here in Touchet Valley. By late afternoon, I'd baked an old-fashioned gingerbread, a request granted to my Wine Guy. The house s...
Feeling a little blue this weekend having not been able to celebrate the holidays with family in California due to booked engagements, I pulled myself together and caught the 7:45 out of Pasco to Phoenix. I had agreed to speak to a room of guests at a Cancer Foundation Benefit in Scottsdale. Next day, I rented a car, put the case of Walla Walla wines I'd lugged along with me into the trunk, and headed out across the desert for Hollywood's winter playground, Palm Springs. I was booked to present a demonstration class to celebrities on the...
Greetings from another winter food and wine event, in glorious Aspen, Colorado! Yesterday it was demonstrations in Agra-Agra, the vegetarian red ocean algae made into a gelatin used in making liquid-dessert molds. Tonight I cooked dinner for 16 private diners, my fifth year doing so, and tomorrow I am teaching a class in making flatbread and chutney. This evening, I lugged a case of Walla Walla wines with me to show off at dinner. At this all wine and food officials' appetizer-dinner, I was particularly happy to hear an exceptional response to...
While attending a champagne tasting last week in Manhattan, New York, I was blown away by the exceptional differences in tastes and styles of the all-French tasting. After a visit and dinner with associates, I returned to my room with the nagging thought: What about bubbly here in Washington state? As soon as I landed at the airport, I met with Chad Diltz, owner/winemaker at Tru Cellars, the only producer of sparkling wine in Walla Walla. I sampled his Blanc de Blanc Me'thode Champenoise NV, and I was stunned. No wine at the New York tasting co...
I am a pear lover! That's right. I love a good winter pear, and what constitutes a good pear is simple: ripeness without bruising. I was in Andy's earlier today, and the produce clerk came around the corner with a box of beautiful Washington State Organic Pears unblemished! I was heading back to the barn to create a catering order for a customer who had ordered, "Salad for a Crowd," an item from the Flying Aprons Catering Menu, made of pears and other wintery foods. This salad is simply made. On four salad plates, line each in composed lettuces...
The first winter snow recedes, and what do we find? Mushy gardens. So what now, weather person? Maybe more rain, wind, even another good dusting of snow? Are we experiencing global warming or just a mild winter? Even the Farmer's Almanac can't seem to make up its mind. Maybe it's too early to tell. I was home this weekend and pulled a box of bulbs from the basement where I usually store unplanted bulbs from the fall. Because we haven't had but one freeze this winter, I was able to dig in the earth and plant the straggling bulb. Now, I wait for...
When long-time cohort Desi Kitchens unexpectedly strolled up nodding her head in agreement about our winter Cabernets, I thought, who better to pal around with during Barrel Tasting Weekend than Desi, who equally loves wine. First Up: Foundry Cellars winemaker Mark Anderson's '03 Cabernet Sauvignon: 89 percent cabernet, 20 percent merlot. This is a Cab created uniquely like the Smithsonian artist that Anderson is; layered in explosive strokes of tannin, brambleberry and "meat-in-a-glass," a profile given two years ago by yours truly. This par...
Recently, someone asked me about the validity of California Cuisine in today's restaurant market. I was surprised by this question because without California Cuisine, we'd still be eating canned foods, meat and vegetables dusted in DDT. In fact, the way we think about and eat food today is based entirely on the fresh food movement of the 1970s and '80s known as California Cuisine. Think about it. Without the early integrated food movement, we wouldn't see regional, fresh vegetables listed on our menus today, including baby carrots, mixed l...
The holidays are quickly approaching, and I have a quick recipe here I think you readers might appreciate along with a great wine pairing. When Wine Guy mentioned that one of his clients asked if I might share a quick, cold-processed, pickled food recipe for the holidays, I said, "Why not!" Here's a recipe from my new cookbook, Edge of the Plate, available through Amazonkindle.com. You can take a free look at the book with a direct link-up on my webpage listed below. In the mean time, watch out for the wild turkeys in Dayton, they are e...
