Our Oregon tour ended on Sunday in Portland. I may be one of the few people in the world who is not a fan of Portland. It’s a little too much on all fronts. Yes there are tons of cool shops, restaurants, food carts and people are nice, but I am not a fan. Part of the reason I think is I am always there after being on the river for a few days and it is so beautiful and practically perfect down there that the city seems to feel like a let down.

With that being said, we did have a great field trip dining experience while there at Le Pigeon. I’m not sure how I came across this place, probably Gourmet or Chowhound, but I was excited by the experimental menu that changes frequently and has some offal components. Offal according to Wikipedia is a term used to refer to the entails or organs of a butchered animal.

The place is small there is table seating for about 20 and then 10 more seats at the bar which overlooks the place where all the food is prepared. It’s cozy and warm and lovely. The menu is equally brief, maybe 12 items, half starters and half mains. The 5 desserts and cheese plate were listed on a board.

We started with Pork Belly with green beans, cashews, and mushrooms. It was amazing and really my favorite dish. There was an Asian flare to the sauce, sweet, salty, and gingery. Our other starter was Sweatbreads that were fried in a walnut batter that really had the effect of a cornmeal batter. It was not heavy or thick. The Sweatbreads were served with an amazing cold beet salad and a what seemed like a blue cheese cream. This was my second favorite. It was so good. The various textures from the Sweatbreads to cold but cooked beets, to blue cheese complimented each other perfectly. The colors were beautiful and the flavors exquisite. Sweatbreads can be awful. These were fabulous and it wasn’t just because they were friend. The batter was, and this is rare in my Sweatbread experience, secondary.

Our main courses, Duck with fresh figs and leeks and Beef Cheek Bourguignon were both good but not nearly ask good as the starters. My duck was overcooked a bit, but was served with these little fried potato balls that were awesome. The Beef Cheek while amazing in flavor would have been hard for me to eat more than a bite of. It was a big punch of red wine and beef in equal amounts of force.

Finally for dessert, Honey Bacon Apricot Cornbread with Maple Ice Cream and an Olive Oil Cake with Goat Cheese whipped cream and Plum sauce. These were both pretty excellent although I liked the Olive Oil cake better. Neither of them were very sweet but the cornbread, well wasn’t really cornbread and was too dry. The bacon and apricot together however were lovely flavors.

The evening of amazing food was of course rounded out by lovely conversation about what makes a good place amazing (otherwise known as, why doesn’t a place like this exist in Knoxville), family dynamics (or congratulations to my boyfriend or surviving 20 Sohns all at once), and what were some of our best meals of the year since clearly we were in the middle of one on Sunday!

On Saturday I cooked for about 20 Sohns out in Oregon where the family gathers every August. The kitchen has very little counter top space but is well equipped. I went with an easy menu which would have taken 45 minutes or so at home, but it was still a production.

There was a last minute addition of beets but the last minute cook got pulled away from cooking when one of the young ones needed to find a doctor for a bee sting in the eye, not an easy task in rural Oregon on a Saturday eve. So there were phone calls going on, the beets boiled over, and then forgotten till later. I was making peanut sauce while having a dramatic inner-family concersation and there was a meeting happening on one of the porches.

After all the hustle and bustle that resides in the kitchen whether there are two people in a house or 20, the meal was served almost on time. We sat around the table well into the dark catching up, remembering dinners past, and talking about the future. With the 4th generation of our family steadily growing there is a lot future to think about. I’m hoping in time, one of those young ones will be a better cook than I and serve me a lovely dinner under the Oregon stars. In the meantime I need an even easier meal to pull together in the bustle of that Ranch House kitchen for next year!

From Jennifer Niceley and I. Enjoy.

Farm to Table dinners are gaining popularity all across the country bringing farmers, eaters, and food lovers together at the table. Google “farm to table” and you get millions of hits, from blogs, to restaurant guides, to radio shows, to agricultural extension office sites. Here in Tennessee I like to say we never really got that far away from the farm to table concept. We live in a land with a long growing season and fertile land, surrounded by rivers and growers that take care to grow the best fruits and vegetables. One only has to stroll through the Market Square Farmer’s Market to see the bounties of our farmers.

In an effort to capture the importance of family farms and the bounty of summer 2010 Mockingbird Events is partnering with the Riverplains Farm to host a Jefferson County farm to table dinner. This will be an incredibly unique locavore experience. Not only will everything you eat but the spices be from the farm, but it will be prepared on the farm by the family that lives on the farm.

In the early 1970′s Frank Niceley and his brothers took over the farm their father had bought nearly 30 years earlier, what is now called Riverplains. It was a time of huge farm credit: copious amounts of money borrowed to buy tractors and silos and dairy equipment. At that time the riverbottom fields were put into corn and other grains for silage for the dairy cattle. The old men who worked the farm for most of their lives were still around: Earl, who was actually raised on the farm, Raymond or “Hot Shot”, and Gilbert who is still living and tending to his own garden and goats just a ways down the road in New Market. They were old then, but they worked hard keeping the fences mended, the fields bushhogged, the baby calves fed — and tended to the countless other chores that are never ever finished on a working farm.

As we all know family farms are disappearing at a rapid pace. According to Wendell Berry in the Summer 2002 issue of Orion, “In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in the United States that we had in 1977…We continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, which was useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose of this now global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace “food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.”

Riverplains Farm is in transition time, which is frustrating and stressful but also exciting. Of course so much of being a farmer has to do with risk — with trial and error and faith and hope and certainly perserverance. The family has been experimenting with growing organic crops: corn and alfalfa and spelt. This is the second year Jennifer Niceley has put out a large organic vegetable garden. There are a handful of Jersey cows, which are hand milked, and they have learned to make butter, cheese and other dairy products in the process. The Niceleys are continuing to build their herd of grass fed beef cattle, and have added four mule footed hogs to the field of Mouflon sheep. In another trial, they put out organic tobacco this year — the first time tobacco has been planted on the farm in over 30 years.

Experimentation and diversification will have to continue for any of us to ever reach the goal of healthy, productive sustainability. For Jennifer, “The “Farm to Table” dinner is in celebration of that goal. As temporary “owners” of this beautiful land, I believe it is our responsibility — and honor — to try.”

Jennifer Nicely and her family embrace their land and the diversity they can bring to the land. From organic spelt, to their dairy cows, to heirloom pigs. Jennifer puts it best on her Facebook page:

After some years of living in Nashville, making somewhat of a living as a waitress and (self) releasing two records, I returned to my family’s  farm in East Tennessee. I have been back almost two years, working and learning and living with these people by which blood makes us bound…The land here had been calling me back for some time. Many songs written while I was away were fueled by a longing to reconnect. A hunger for wholeness I felt could be found at home. Which has been true for me on many levels.

How blessed to have intimate access to this fountain of green, growing things, tucked in between a lovely crook in the Holston River. Great Blue Herons still fly across this peninsula and even Eagles can be spotted on occasion. There are horses in the fields, cows to be milked, chickens who must be fed and sheltered. Such a setting allows me to restring a little of the circle that has been broken — broken in so many ways, in so many places, with so many dreadful consequences. And still there is much more to mend here, as everywhere.

Catching up with the past in a way, where our grandparents may have left off — trying to retrieve the knowledge they may have kept to themselves or forgotten, believing of course that it had become just useless. Outdated yes, but no, not useless Grandma. For those who choose to see: we must lean back now and wonder where our food comes from, wonder just how it was treated on the journey to our plates, wonder how things are made, were made. We must wonder at the wonder — and try to remember, try not to forget, everyday. In the midst of these struggles unique to our time it is essential we endeavor to remember, endeavor against forgetting. We can do it anywhere and in endless ways. For myself I’ve decided to do it here, in this place where I was born and raised and have now come back to — hoping that the circle will be closed a little closer by the time I have to leave.

Join us for this special evening at the Riverplains Farm enjoying food, farms, and the beautiful summer. Tickets at www.mockingbird-events.com/events.

Made at the Bandon Fish Market. Smoky, buttery, delicious on saltines while driving to Crater Lake! Lovely, local road food.

Just a picture…

Wendell Berry is the epitome of practice what you preach. The Michael Pollins and Alice Waters of the world could learn a thing from him. He actually farms, he actually lives in rural America, he is actually part of a small town in Kentucky, he knows how hard it is for people to make a living farming, and to live a sustainable life.

If you’ve never read any of his essays or poems, you’re missing out. One if his articles was published in the 2002 issue of Orion magazine. The title says it all, “The Agrarian Standard.” Check it out here.

Want to check out a local farm in all it’s glory? Come to the Riverplains Farm to Table Dinner. Buy tickets here.

Every year I come to Oregon in August and every year since I was very little we’ve always stopped at Rice Hill for ice cream. At some point it became the annual chance to get bubble gum ice cream. I say at some point but I definitely remember picking out bubble gum pieces as a little one. Eventually they stopped putting gum pieces and it just became pink and flavored.

This area of Oregon has the Umpqua Dairy which is much like Tennessee’s Mayfield. Super creamy and local and awesome. They have a blackberry tracks and chocolate peanut butter and bubble gum!

Food rituals are always important. Everyone has them and they are obviously often tied to childhood. Today I added to the ritual by bringing my boyfriend who has never been west of Kansas City. Seeing everything through new eyes is pretty special.