Local Harvest

I recently attended a local sustainability festival. It was an event called Sierra Green Days and it featured local vendors who apply sustainable practices to their businesses. There were farmers showcasing their organic produce and products (I highly recommend LouLou's Garden), there were recycled products like a woman who makes baby items (bibs, hats, and neckins) from recycled cotton fabrics called Grubgear, solar energy companies, holistic healers, and of course food vendors like me! I was selling among other items, pizza made from my special recipe crust and topped with simple balsamic roasted tomatoes, feta cheese, locally grown organic fava beans, and locally grown organic green garlic from Taylor Mountain Gardens.

The process of preparing for this event was very meditative. I shelled fava beans for several hours, thinking of the local farmers who grew them and sold them to me. How they had been plucked from the plant just a day before, and the unparallelled freshness. To me, favas are the condensed flavor of spring, so green and sweet. Well worth the trouble of the double shell. The scent of green garlic filled my kitchen in stages, first pungent and mouth watering as it was sliced and washed, then billows of a mellow aroma with a hint of sweetness almost similar to leeks as the prepared product cooked slowly in the pan with only olive oil, salt and pepper. I thought how just an hour before, they had been gathered in a sack, still clumped with bits of warm earth clinging to the roots. I made my best effort to honor the integrity of each ingredient as it was in it's simplest and freshest state.

At the event, the sense of community was prevalent, and bound the grower, cook and diner together by the sharing of the final product. I pointed across the lawn area to the place where the Taylor's had their booth and explained to my customers that they could meet the folks who grew the produce I was using by stepping twenty steps to the left. It was an earth to table moment that lasted all weekend long and hearkened back to my youth in the valley where we snapped beans off the stalk for our dinner, and waited for the moment before the peaches, heavy with nectar, fell off the tree to harvest. I cherished every minute of the process from prepping these high quality ingredients to the moment I handed the plate of food to friends old and new. It was a celebration of season, honest work, simplicity, sustainability, friendship, love of earth and community.