Rearch For The Roots

DAYTON - It isn't too often that you can sit at a fine-linen banquet table outdoors enjoying the farm-fresh cuisine of a Whitehouse Crawford chef one day and get your paper plate piled high with some of the best chuck wagon chuck in the west the next.

Yet, that was my culinary journey two weeks ago.

I attended the four-course natural gourmet dinner hosted by the international Outstanding In The Field group at the Monteillet Fromagerie on Wednes- day. On Friday, we were in line for the chuck wagon cook off during the launch of Mule Mania at the Columbia County Fairgrounds.

Both were firsts for the Touchet Valley and may become new traditions. Mule Mania organizers have already committed to returning to Dayton next year, while there seems to be little doubt Outstanding In The Field will be back too. Its California-based founder, who is taking the movement to Europe this year, is reportedly raving about his experience at the goat farm to the "other Times:" the Times of London. The venerable newspaper has already called for an interview with the Monteillets.

All this is in the Touchet Valley, all just few miles apart in the Dayton area.

So what did I discover on this cultural expedition? To put it simply, these two worlds aren't nearly as far apart as they might seem.

Standing Out

When we drove up the gravel drive to the fromagerie, we were waived in by a young man who pointed us into a freshly cut hay field for parking. I had never seen so many cars at the farm before.

The air was fragrant with grass and lavender. Insects danced in the balmy afternoon sun as we walked up to the big outdoor kitchen Pierre Louis Monteillet built this past year. Jamie Guerin from Walla Walla's Whitehouse Crawford and Claire Johnston from the jimgermanbar were among the chefs busy at work.

Guests were admiring the expansive natural vegetable patch created over the past two years by Erin Horan of Nourish Gardens. Waitsburger Paul Gregutt stroked our ear drums with finger-picked guitar tunes.

Kurt and Vicki Schlicker from the Rulo Winery in Walla Walla greeted us with an offer of their Rulo Rose 2010. We mingled with old friends and new guests while staff and local hands from the Outstanding In The Field crew came around with hors d'oeuvres: crostini with fresh goat cheese and lovage oil, corn arepas with duck and cherry mojo, lavash with fresh peas, prosciutto and anise hyssop.

Joan Monteillet intro- duced us to Jim Denevan, founder of what is now an international farm table movement that brings pro- ducers and consumers together in an experience one participant summed up as being "all about dirt."

Denevan started with the concept when he was a chef at Gabriella Cafe in Santa Cruz. In the summer of 1998, he invited a number of his regular producers out of the field and into the restaurant.

The night's menu would feature dishes with ingredients that came straight from the farm. The "girls" or "guys" who grew the food, raised the animals or caught the fish joined the meal, giving the diners a chance to interact with them and ask questions.

In an age of processed, chemically grown and genetically engineered foods, it was time to bring consumers back to the source of what they eat.

"At the first dinner, we had a lot of 'pretend' customers (friends and family)," Denevan joked.

But the experiment had begun and to make it a truly unique "reconnection," Denevan took the concept further afield, literally.

What better place to host the farm dinners than the farm itself, where the diners could tour the place whence their ingredients came and the cooks could pick their source material straight from the earth.

The idea caught on.

After a few years, he had dinners with 14 notable chefs from around the San Francisco Bay Area and in 2003, he organized the first dinner outside California.

Now, Denevan tours the country putting together 87 Outstanding In The Field dinners during the warmer season. The feast at the Monteillets was the 30th of the year, the seventh outside of California. In September, he and his team hit the road in Europe for the first time with events lined up in Ireland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

"We want to promote the idea that food doesn't just pop out of nowhere," he said. "There are people behind it. This way, we can visit the source of our food."

In the midst of Nourish Gardens, a long table had been set up between its two large sections and curved like an apostrophe in its context: the rolling hills channeling the Touchet River Valley with its mantle of winter and spring wheat.

Denevan made introductions: the Monteillets, Guerin, the Schlickers, Horan, Johnston, Elsa Edwards from the Edwards Family Farm in Milton Freewater and Ashley Trout from the Flying Trout Winery in Walla Walla.

"We saw what the wine community was doing in Walla Walla and figured you have to have cheese," Pierre Louis Monteillet told the guests about the origins of the fromagerie. Then about the couple's involvement in Outstanding In The Field: "There's a need to know where your food comes from."

Joan Monteillet echoed that sentiment.

"I want to feel good about something I'm growing," she said.

Split in two, the crowd of more than 60 diners toured Nourish Gardens and the cheese-making operation before sitting down for their multi- course meal, each complemented by a different wine. Summer beet soup was accompanied by a 2009 Flying Trout Torrontes; cold smoked lamb salad with feta, greens and vegetables came with a 2007 Rulo Silo Syrah Reserve; grilled chicken with herbs, yogurt, greens and potatoes came with a 2008 Flying Trout "Old Vines" Malbec and the dessert that capped the meal was a strawberry fool with chocolate wafers, fresh berries and creme anglaise.

Sitting at opposite ends of the long curved table, Karen and I enjoyed conversations with the Schlickers, the Monteillets and guests from Spokane to Bellingham.

As the light of the sun began to soften in the west, a near full moon rose above the hills in the west. The first leg in of our week's food expedition was coming to an end.

Circle The Wagons

Looking at Rod McGuire and his chuck wagon, Paradise Rose, I couldn't shake the feeling I had just stepped into a pioneer wagon train on the Oregon Trail around dinner time.

Tucked under a canvas tent just outside the Columbia County Fairgrounds grand stand, the 1880s catering trailer was surrounded by cast-iron Dutch ovens, skillets, fryers and grills smoking above campfire flames. The back of the wooden mobile kitchen sprawled with open drawers and century- old utensils. A pair of antique rifles leaned nonchalantly against a wagon wheel.

A crowd of hungry-looking diners eagerly moved up in the grub line - an echo of ravenous ranch hands who would have gathered around the back of their food trailer after a cattle drive or roundup, breathing down their "cookie's" neck with their portable dinnerware.

The chuck wagon was the brain child of Charles Goodnight, a Texas rancher who invented it one year after the end of the Civil War. But it's not called "chuck" for his contracted first name. That word was already a slang term for food at the time.

The growing popularity of chuck wagon cook offs like the one at the Mule Mania weekend in Dayton earlier this month has its origin in Texas, where a number of Old West enthusiasts and wagon masters decided to form the American Chuck Wagon Association in the late 1990s.

The goal of the group, which now has chapters in 31 states, is to preserve the heritage of the chuck wagon and its use in the era of the cattle drive. The wagons at Mule Mania were from Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

McGuire, a former cattle rancher from Arlington, Ore., who sold his operation 15 years ago, went down to the national chuck wagon cook off championships in Lubbock, Texas, five years ago and got hooked on the pastime.

"I was doing some (chuck wagon) cooking before that, but wanted to see how good I really was," he said.

He soon found his chuck wagon, an original Peter Schuttler, in a barn in Goldendale. He now runs a professional catering business with it year round. In Dayton, he was assisted by his friend John Spain, an employee of Columbia REA.

"I've cooked all over the nation," he said.

Standing in line for the cowboy buffet with my son Niko, I picked up a waft off the grub we were about the heap on our plates. It was hard not to salivate. We chose the longest of the lines in front of the half dozen chuck wagons, thinking the crowd waiting at McGuire's camp was on to something - perhaps the best of the west.

We weren't disappointed.

Before long, our plates were steaming with chunky potatoes, rice with gravy and corn dodgers, biscuits, beans and slices of perfectly cooked beef.

"I use salt and a bit of olive oil (cowboys would have used bacon grease back in the day) then put it over mesquite wood," McGuire said about his refreshingly simple method of grilling beef. "That's it. I did absolutely nothing."

Nothing, that is, to interfere with the true flavor of seared animal tissue. The taste buds aren't overwhelmed by the tang and spices of modern marinades, explaining the growing appeal of back-to-basics chuck wagon cuisine, he said.

"We're so popular because people have gotten so far from real food - it doesn't matter if you're cooking beef, pork or chicken," McGuire opined, adding that many of his ingredients are local and natural, including the beef. "I'm huge on that."

The simplicity extends to the other food groups in McGuire's dish. His rice is mixed with red peppers, jalapenos (sautéed to reduce the heat), bacon and sausage. The gravy is made with ox tail, neck bones boiled in water for four hours, supplemented with stock, salt and pepper. The potatoes are parboiled and fried with pimentos, Walla Walla sweets, salt and pepper.

McGuire's wife Lori described how she prepared desert.

"It's an apple cobbler," she said. "I make it with homemade syrup, juice, brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and butter."

The starch is a sourdough biscuit.

We joined Daytonite Mel Bohleen at one of the picnic tables and dug in.

"I think it's really neat to see how people lived in the pioneer days," said Bohleen, who retired to Dayton from a position at the University of Washington Physics Lab. "This is our heritage."

Field Note

As a final note to our food adventure in the valley, it was remarkable to see such seemingly different events with the same basic premise.

These movements are born from fast food fatigue. Consumers embrace them because they miss knowing what their food looks like before it's cooked, are curious who cooks it and how it's prepared.

They want to taste the freshness and spontaneity of simple earthy dishes and reach back in history to the time when their ancestors prepared all they ate over a campfire.

They want to go back to their roots.

To learn more about Outstanding In The Field, go to: www.outstandinginthefield.com.

To learn more about chuck wagon cooking, visit: www.americanchuckwagon.org.