I'm High on Cooking

so blue

2012-05-06T10:53:15Z

floating here, under the moon’s pale blue light, it takes nearly no time before I, myself, become the water.

the flow of it, and its’ uncertain source, its’ nonexistent end, its’ unknown depth and its’ continual movement—it’s me—my breath.

before the water—nay, for the water—is my awareness.

the water, and myself, we both are but an object of awareness—swirling.

thoughts about this water—thoughts about myself—my conscious mind is but a witness, while awareness simply lies in wait—the depth of blue beneath us both.

just a log now, a log adrift, I marvel in awareness of my breath—the water.

each inhale I swell with the sea, and each exhale a new inhale crests white.

saturated, and fully alive, I float here in sopping wet gratitude for my breath and the sea.

life—awareness—breath—they simply live through me, while i—the body—dissolve into nothing.

being with catalonia

2012-04-26T17:30:31Z

not gaudi, nor picasso, nor no man, could sing the song catalonia sings each day without being asked.

The salt roars off the rugged coastline and cures the entire place in one fell swoop.

The salt in the air is no different than the salt in this ham--the deep red, the fatty wet--the ham i seem to find in this hand whether breakfast or dinner does the church chime ring over the salt-cured children of this lovely place.

And as the catalonian sun rises up my spine and neck the same deep redness rises from beneath my skin as it comes to roast.

sweat gently fills the cracks of my forehead like raindrops fill the crevice of that boulder before it's burrow is full and rolls off the tip of my nose in one salty plunge.

i too, now, reddened by the sun, salt-cured by my sweat--i too, now, can raise my forearm to my lips and taste catalonia with a lick of my own skin.

i too, now, having suckled catalonia's full teat, taste of this ham, of this people, of this place.

no one, not the stray dogs howling, not the roosters strutting, not even the wind which carries this salt from the sea, through the grasses to and fro--no one, and certainly not my words, can express catalonia more sweetly than herself.

drinking and being happy at coturri winery

2012-04-01T03:11:43Z

an afternoon of farmthought and vino, walking the vines with winemaker nic coturri. nic is twenty seven years old, and is a lifetime apprentice to his family’s celebrated natural vineyard, championed by his pioneering father, tony coturri, since the early sixties on a Sonoma creekside hill in glen ellen, ca.

if you read my recent post on the hunter’s wine, the wine of the forest—as inspired by an event at Blackberry Farm featuring Aleš Kristančič from slovenia’s movia—then it will be no surprise that coturri, my number one favorite wine from Sonoma, produces their wine through an emphasis on good farming practices and basically, at the end of the day, “not getting in the way” of their product.

this weekend, in mixed company, I mentioned my preference for only drinking wines which are produced such as coturri and movia et al.--no added sulfites, no dilutions, stabilizers, filtrations, etc. a friend asked, "how come?" I felt as though the implication was clear: how could I simply eliminate ninety eight percent of the entire world of wine? including some of the world's "greats"?

my answer was simple. I feel the same way about wine as I do about any food that I grow or eat—wine is an essential part of the diet! if wellness or culture are to have any place in our society, soils must be built not destroyed, and food must nourish not sicken. wine is a gift from the universe, not a creation of man. I would rather not drink a single drop of wine again, if I couldn’t drink wine made like this.

it was a true pleasure walking the vines with a producer who truly lives these words.

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many thanks should be given to our friend and culinary consigliere chef Andrea, from new york’s mamma duchess, for turning us on to these beautiful wines.

spirit springs

2012-03-27T05:29:39Z

a stone, fleeced in the cold embrace of a passing stream, stands alone in full company.

bold, and staunch, in the face of an unbroken current, the stone stands seemingly still.

-how deceiving-

nothing like the pressure of water and time can mold stillness into movement.

my great, great, great offspring will sit here on this bank and see a pebble of my stone--and likely, they'll see nothing at all.

A log, or a branch--a flush of upstream detritus--and my melon sized stone will dislodge from its nook, and move on from this mellow place i sit.

as unknown as its' future may lie, what unknowns for my stone have already come to be?

did this stone sit atop that ridge up yonder? through the oaks, and the furs--surrounded by eagles and the breeze?

did it stand atop that ridge and wish upon the day that a storm would carry it and the mud down through the roots and the bush, down past the early spring buds and the sopping wet leaves, down to the babbling thread of life singing wet sonnets for the forest to adore?

-unlikely-

and now, fleeced in the cold embrace of a flowing stream, does it miss the high altitude? does it miss the mountain fog and the misty views? does it yearn for the day when that upstream log will dislodge it towards adventures to come?

-unlikely still-

the stone stands alone in full company, today as it is.

the stream flows over and by, away from this mellow place, while the stone and i sit. what more could we possibly do?

laissez le vin de se faire--let the wine make itself

2012-03-03T20:42:43Z

ten or twelve moons ago I met a sorcerer who told us the ways. we’re tubes, he announced. cosmic tubes—superhighways for energy—to channel from the earth, through our bodies, and out to the universe. the energy we put out becomes the energy we live in. our reality is a reflection of our vision. to quote the Navajo, we walk in beauty.

while inspiration can strike anywhere, and can come from anyone, many moons will come and go before a person is likely to encounter a spiritual guide in the flesh. so filled with love and energy that the beauty they walk in actually reshapes not only what you too are walking in, but how you feel at your core. their presence makes you feel different. they say things in a way that makes everything so simple, everything so harmonious.

when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

last weekend her and I were invited to attend a dinner featuring the wines of Slovenian biodynamic farmer/vintner Aleš Kristancic. over the years many writers have used many words to capture his philosophy and techniques: biodynamic, natural, organic, traditional, unique—and some probably less flattering: crazy, or weird. but Aleš uses only one word: wine. he makes wine in the way he knows how.

every form of holistically managed agriculture regards the forest as the earth’s great example of efficiently balanced diversity and productivity. Aleš, and others, including myself, goes through great effort to replicate as many aspects of natural biodiversity as possible in their farming practices. the bounty of life in the forest--below the ground, decomposing on the ground, living above the ground—the diversity creates the balance. natural farming methods strive for this balance through imitation. conventional agriculture stifles this balance through chemicals.

its got what you need

2012-02-21T23:43:13Z

I always leave feeling somewhere between off and rotten. I get dropped into that big apple and it’s as if my only option is to eat and drink my way out. and out I come, three days later, curled up like a slimy worm. a worm, I wish—for if I were a worm I’d be free from this achy skeleton which sits twisted in the bucket seat of this usairways cough box. free from my swollen stomach liner that trembles from the days of binging and boozing I imposed on it.

the perfect cocktails, the finely pressed suits, and the world’s rarest foods. the horn of plenty. a city I once called home now overwhelms me. it stands shining like a brazen trophy shelf, touting gold ribbons in every event. the city? yea, its got what you need.

a foot in the kitchen

2012-02-03T02:46:18Z

who knew at four forty five this morning when the alarm coerced me to attention how much this burn on my forearm would sting as I sit here aching in my chair, ankles swollen, a full arc of the sun later. the cold, wet darkness of my morning commute was both disheartening—in an ominous, foreboding sort of way—and at the same time invigorating, as I used the empty smoky mountain blacktop like blinders on a horse in the infantry. eyes forward, mind like a laser beam, I found myself repeating various phrases: you’re alert, you’re sharp, your ears are wide open, you can do this, you can take every instruction, you can remember every detail. phrases, in my early morning mind, proved a few syllables too much as simple words replaced them in short order: alert, sharp, quick, ready.

my fingers are not enjoying the digital dexterity required to type this entry. the tendons and nerves are tired both. the skin is flush with burns from the dozens of piping hot foodstuffs I had but one choice to bare handle. there’s a thin slice—like a thick paper cut— that runs from the heel of my palm to the its’ center. my right shoulder and right neck are standing upright, reaching towards my right ear—a side effect of the hundreds and hundreds of push-pulls I accumulated on the meat slicer before lunch service.

I wear my white chef’s coat and pinstriped apron with both the pride of an ardent foodist as well as the bashfulness of a person who absolutely knows they performed none of the labor and gave none of the sacrificial bloodsweat the kitchen g-d’s typically require for entry to its’ hallowed bowels. in between knife strokes, smoky eyes, and a bucket of ice I stopped for a second to recognize that not only was I living out one of my own dreams, but I was living out countless people’s dreams.

for years I’ve watched the epically beautiful flow of a kitchen humming towards synchronicity and day dreamed myself into the action. the tickets coming in, the chef at the podium jerking and gesturing his baton at the orchestra, and the cooks pirouetting and waltzing from burner to smoker to fryer to sink. a few years prior, as I strained with focus on the floor of the ny stock exchange, I was constantly convincing myself that the rapid-fire logic required to perform on the floor of the exchange was the same skill set required in the kitchen.

presently, it’ three days into my foray as a member of the kitchen staff at blackberry farm’s main house kitchen. I type at a quarter to eight with a weight in my eyes usually reserved for several more laps around the track of the clock. I look back at my former self's assumptions of can-do-itness and question my untested confidence. it’s a hard life, a life in the kitchen, and it’s only taken me three days to understand that in completely new ways. lessons and skills for my body and mind are being accrued in leaps and bounds, and the numbness that fills my body right now is spiked with content. and tomorrow, as I walk out the door into the damp quiet which sits on these foothills each day, i’ll make sure to smile as i cruise towards the great smokies in a fresh white coat.

keeping house

2012-01-20T21:59:19Z

my knees are bent, with my caps pressed hard into the tiled shower floor. an unnatural Gatorade-blue mist is raining on my exposed hands and forearms and the choke of ammonia is scratching at the back of my nose and throat. my eye itches, and had this been any other day I would scratch it, but just moments ago I took a tissue around the inner rim of a toilet bowl to check for discoloration. for the last three days I joined the housekeeping staff at blackberry farm.

to me it was like farming. it’s an incredibly hard job made up of thousands of simple tasks. the eye for detail required to see a vine-colored pest chewing on a vine, and the eye required to see the shimmer of a single cob web in a light fixture overhead—they're identical. pushing grime off the counter--pulling a hoe. hunched over the bed and tugging on a sheet—hunched over the earth and tugging up potatoes.

also like farming, the customer’s appreciation of the finished product doesn’t recognize the unsung and dirty labor that goes into it. sure, when you buy an heirloom tomato, or lie down onto a king size feather top, you know somebody grew the food or made the bed—but you still don’t really know what that means.

each cottage at blackberry farm takes nearly two hours to turn over in between guests. every surface in the entire room is cleaned, wiped, dusted, tested, touched, tilted, and brushed. housekeepers are tested not only on their ability to clean, but also on the quality of the job done, and the time taken to accomplish it. two hours per cottage. sixty two room hotel. do the math on that and complain about cleaning the dishes.

as her and I continue to rotate through each department at blackberry, learning and working our way through a year long apprenticeship, building towards the confidence required to tackle our own dreams in this business, we are constantly challenging ourselves to understand not only the front lines, but to think from the bird’s eye as well. housekeeping, for example, is one of the hardest departments in the hospitality business to manage. extremely high turnover—relatively low paying—dirty, dirty work that most people don’t want to do. how do you motivate?

the woman who trained me at blackberry has been a housekeeper for sixteen years—eight of them at blackberry. she cleans toilets, dirty beds, and trash. while some who are not initiated to the world of luxury hospitality, you might assume that guests paying large sums of money for a hotel room must be well mannered enough to keep quite clean—and you’d be wrong. the job is inglorious, to say the least, and she loves almost every day of it. she is prideful, and a perfectionist, and untold thousands of guests in the last sixteen years have been the unknowing beneficiaries of her hard and sometimes disgusting work.

to her, it’s not just a bed—are you kidding me??—a two foot thick tempur-pedic mattress topped with nearly two feet of feathers, multiple layers of linens of the highest thread count, and a feathery duvet. fluffed, and tucked, and tugged, and smoothed. it’s a mini masterpiece, is what it is, and it’s one of the most noticeable and memorable aspects of how a guest judges their hospitality experience—a good night sleep.

but that’s just at the bottom of the barrel. a good night’s sleep is what Abraham maslow would call a base need. every hotel provides a bed, and the potential to sleep. a guest, of course, needs that. but to take that guest from a hotel experience, to a transformative hospitality experience, requires going above and beyond those recognized needs of a guest—food and shelter—to the unrecognized needs of a guest—like feeling valued, or having their favorite snack waiting for them in their room. and a housekeeper who loves her job is attributing to that experience as much as the executive chef in the culinary barn—it’s just nobody knows it.

it’s the aggregate that gets em’, you see. it’s not the mouth watering filet in the dining room, or the knowledgeable guide on the fly fishing stream, and it’s not the fleet of lexus hybrids shuttling bodies too and fro. it’s the sum, and it’s greater. guests leave here having felt the level of service but can’t quite put their finger on when or how. here, they call this phenomenon the blackberry state of mind—Elsewhere, by another name with the same meaning. each little bit and speckle of the experience should flow together from one ripple to the next until it builds a tidal wave of good feelings and genuine hospitality to wash over the guests as they tuck themselves to sleep at night full of food and drunk on wine.

to make a long tale short: no matter where you are in life, or what you do, take a minute to stop and appreciate the housekeeper.

a very offal christmas

2012-01-02T22:47:01Z

this is what happens when my brother and I have a casual conversation over the phone about maybe having some sort of holiday dinner party. what started as a good excuse to bring in our farmer/chef friend francois from the halls of athens georgia turned into a one hundred person gala, with staff and vendors totaling well over thirty people.

new york is a crazy place, and this dinner would probably be much different had it been in any other location. the amount of people in one singular space, such as manhattan, is an astonishing fact of modern life. but to live in a space so void of nature, which at the same time has unparalleled access to all of the products and food stuffs of the entire planet, is an equally as confusing accomplishment.

to celebrate sustainability, and whole animals, and small producers while surrounded by steel and concrete, is as unnatural as it is necessary. the industrialization of this country, and of the world, has driven the biggest population shift in human history from country to city. although the hustle and bustle of the city was too much for her and I to handle, it does not take anything away from the sustainable and good food movement which has gone to new levels since our departure from the city.

people in new york who seek the balance and energy of a more farm driven lifestyle have to go to creative and extreme new heights to counter the stress and the grit of city life. what makes me the happiest, is to see the sheer number of people who are gainfully employed and emotionally fulfilled by a career whose foundation is holistically raised food.

it’s a positive feedback loop. it’s good for the city, it’s good for the country, and it’s good for the earth. while this dinner might be a long distance removed from nature, it’s in line with its’ principles.

elew rock jazz

david garibaldi arts

town house, chilhowie, va--happy new year

2012-01-02T00:08:30Z

it’s two am, and two thousand twelve is but minutes old. standing there in full embrace, my chest to her back, she’s engulfed by my arms. arching backwards, with our heads titled up to the skies, her body acts as a counter weight to my backwards arch and we stand suspended in an effortless gaze at the stellar canopy overhead.

we haven’t seen stars like this in any recent memory. welcome to southwestern Virginia. welcome to Chilhowie, home to about two thousand people—home of a metal scrapper that can chop two midsize vehicles into marbles in under ten seconds—and, home of town house, a tiny thimble of a restaurant on an equally as tiny main street, where the food rivals the best in the nation.

on thirty six acres, buffered by a quickly flowing stream, her and I are spending our anniversary, as well as the new year, nestled into a two bedroom prohibition era cottage in the hills just outside Chilhowie. the house and the restaurant are of the same husband wife duo, and the man himself was our personal chauffer when it was time to leave the cottage and head “downtown” for dinner—a most gracious host, he was.

a several hour, multi course, extremely creative and intelligent display of artistically crafted plates composed from well sourced ingredients. town house was described to me by more than one person as “one of the best meals in the country”, and now I would nod in agreeance.

while our future plans are to exhibit hospitality, with food service as a pillar, town house is exhibiting brilliant food, with hospitality as a supplement. to reach the cottage one must first stop at the restaurant to pick up a key. at the house, no steward or concierge is available, but instead, a few delicious homemade snacks, wine and water in the fridge, breakfast already prepared for the morning after, and a warm note, asking us to make ourselves at home. an honesty bar of other local and homemade treats awaits behind a cabinet, with a pad to jot down what you take.

left to our own devices we were instantly whisked away into the romantic solitude of the surroundings. it wasn’t but a few moments once we had settled into our bedroom before we found ourselves beckoned by the surrounding acreage, frolicking through the fields to the stream by the tree line ahead. a wooden swing hangs out front, almost insisting you indulge. it was still three hours before our reservation at town house, and we were already deep into the experience.

the meal and the cottage both were inspiring. with just a handful of strangers, and the extremely talented staff at town house, her and I rang in the new year about as peacefully and quietly as we know how—a table, some amazing food, and drunk on wine.

as much writing as I do about our experience, and planning for the future, it’s not nearly as often as it should be where I just press pause and verbalize how amazingly fortunate I am. I am in love with my soul mate, and together we are pursuing our dream. 2011 was an entire lifetime for us, and I am grateful and excited for the rebirth of 2012—it’s got big shoes to fill, and I look forward to it’s lessons.