Yes, and breakfast and lunch too!  We’re sold, we’re excited, we’re totally turned on.  How did this come about, you might ask.  Well, slowly actually.  We’ve been reading about the health benefits of various seaweeds and sea vegetables- they’re really high in trace minerals and vitamins, and they’re reputed to have wonderful, medicinal qualities.  But, we haven’t been able to commit to integrating it into our daily routines.  Until this past weekend.

In an effort to regroup and come down from a really crazy summer/year, Rod and I rented a little house up at Sea Ranch for a week. 

The view from our house

Sea Ranch is one of our absolute favorite spots in the world.  Just an hour away from Forestville, but a whole world away from our day to day.  Seven days of nothing but rugged coastline and, beautiful beaches, totally isolated, but surrounded by a really exciting, eclectic community.  When things get crazy, we pack and head up the coast.  We eat, we drink and we just hang out together.  And inevitably, we encounter something new and exciting that comes home with us.  No, not the snake. 

Helen and her "beach pet" a small, friendly snake

At the Gualala Farmer’s Market last Saturday, we were pleasantly surprised to find a small but thriving community of

Biodynamic for 32 years.

biodynamic and just plain-old farmers, beekeepers and environmentalists all working together and producing/creating a diverse and beautiful collection of crafts and edibles.  Of course we picked up loads of dry farmed tomatoes, lacey lettuces and absolutely gorgeous coastal berries and some fantastic pickles. 

Wild halibut tacos with local tomato salsa, shell beans and, of couse, kombu!

 But, what really caught our attention, were two different stalls.  One with beautifully crafted containers of salt and what looked like a seasoning mix.  And one with bags and bags of dried seaweed and vegetables piled in big baskets. 

The first turned out to be a new venture, The Mendocino Sea Salt Company,

Bob and Lora La Mar, and their bounty

started by Bob and Lora La Mar when fishery closures forced their commercial fishing business to close its doors.  Rather than dry up and move away, they discovered another sea harvest.  Salt!  Bob takes the boat out into deep areas off the Mendocino and Sonoma Coasts and gathers water.  He brings it ashore and through a painstaking and meticulous process, crystalizes the salt, extracts it and packages it for sale.  Lora, who’s a passionate cook, has created a blend, using locally harvested seaweeds, ground and blended with the salt.  At first taste we were hooked.  We picked up some salt and some of the blend, which they call Seasoning Sand, and we’ve been using it on everything. It’s local, it’s amazing and it’s healthy!  They’re bringing in samples.  I”m hoping to start using it in the restaurant.

The other stall housed Gualala Seaweed Products.  Founded by the self-proclaimed, and I think actually Renaissance woman, Donna Bishop, they sell all kinds of edible seaweed and seaweed products.  Donna does all of the harvesting, drying and processing herself.  We picked up some of her Kombu- which is particularly great added to beans, while they’re cooking, stews and soups. 

If you haven’t tuned into seaweed yet, look into it.  It doesn’t just taste good, it’s easy to use, really versatile, and a super-powerhouse.  Best of all, for me anyway, now we can get it locally!

Helen and Rocco having a tong battle. Things get interesting when we're just hanging out...

“The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey….and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”
Winnie the Pooh in A.A. Milne’s
‘The House at Pooh Corner’

Pooh and I have a lot in common.  More than I’ll actually get into here.  A whole lot of what passes as important, I can take or leave.  But honey, now that’s serious. 

Spring Honey, 2009

When I moved back onto the Ranch in 1997, the place was an absolute disaster.  Being an Italian family, feuds are in our blood.  We can’t seem to help it.  So, when  my great-grandmother died back in ‘78, the family couldn’t come to grips with what to do with the place.  She was the absolute glue that held everything together, and she was something really special (the memory of her and how she and my great-grandfather lived really does drive our vision for Farmhouse).  Well, when you can’t figure out what to do, and you’re a certain kind of Italian family, what do you do?  Talk about things, clear the air and come to a resolution?  Nope, you fall back on that old saying,  ”If you can’t stand the heat…” and you get the heck out of the kitchen and don’t look back. 

Until some little pain-in-the-neck in some future generation grows up and just won’t leave it alone.  That would be me.  Well, I mean really… You have this amazingly gorgeous property, in an absolutely heavenly location, with all of your family history just rotting away.  Wouldn’t you take on the elders and have a go at getting it kick started again?  Boy, did I not know what I was getting into…

But, here we are, 12 years later.  Talking about honey.  After we took care of some of the “bigger issues”, you know propped up the house, replanted the vineyard and dug out about one hundred million poison oak and blackberry plants, we started thinking, what next? 

Not being inclined towards farming ourselves- Rod and I love living on a working farm, participating and, well, reaping all of the benefis…but don’t have the time or actual inclination to do all the never-ending work associated with each individual endeavor- we started looking around for people in our community who are farmers without farmland.  And lo and behold, we’ve met an incredible, number of passionate, talented people who share our vision. 

One of the first brave participants in our little scheme came our way via some friends who have a gem of a  farm, right up the road.  Mark and Rob have a few acres, a lot of gophers and a great vision.  They have enough olive trees to make a little olive oil, enough grapes for a little wine and enough bees for … You get the picture.  When Rob brought me a jar of honey, I couldn’t believe it.  My oh so fastidious friend, out there in the full garb, with a little smoker, convincing a hive of angry bees to just “give it up”? 

Turns out they were just reaping the benefit of someone elses bravery.  He’d heard of a local bee keeper who was searching out prime locations to place bees.  Can you imagine?  How incredibly cool!  He brings the bees, cares for the bees, extracts the honey and then gives you some??  So my trees, vegetables and flowers get polinated, I don’t have to do any work and then I get honey from my own property?  We’ll you guessed it, I called them up that same afternoon.

Doug and Katia Vincent own a local business called Beekind.   And, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaYD3e9KOA- here’s a video of them on YouTube.  They really are “all things bee”.  They have hives all over Sonoma County, sell honey, sell candles, teach bee keeping, specialze in dealing with swarms and are huge advocates and proponents for bees in general. 

Doug Vincent, see his funny hat?

It was through them that we first learned about the incredible and potentially catastrophic decline in world-wide bee populations.  (If you haven’t heard and would like to, helpthehoneybees.com is a great place to start).  We also learned the difference between commercial, heat pasteurized honey and real honey- the raw stuff that’s full of enzymes and not only tastes a thousand times better, but has medicinal and healing properties. 

The bees, like every other endeavor on the Ranch, have taught us so much and have opened our eyes to how perfectly interconnected our world really is.  Our kids are learning that the bees polinate the garden that grows our vegetables, the vineyard that produces the wine that makes Mom and Dad so happy… and the orchards that give us cider and applesauce and pie!  And then, at the end of each season, Doug comes out and puts on his funny outfit and gives them honey still in the comb and warm from the sun.  Not a bad scenario.

Doug just delivered our Late Spring Honey.  We don’t have a ton of it, but it’s unlike any honey we’ve produced yet.  Doug says that the late rains and the additional growth that came with them, account for the delightful cinnamon character in the honey.  Our spring honey is usualy lighter and more butterscotchy.  This one is really deep with great acidity- kind of like wine. 

We have some for sale, and we’re serving it at breakfast and in the restaurant.  So if you come and visit, you’ll surely see some.  We’ve taken a page out of Pooh’s book.  The honey pot doesn’t stay empty for long!

I do.  Not just any pastry chef, but an amazing, make-anything-you-want and make-it-the-best-ever kind of pastry chef.  Farmhouse has always had a really good pastry program.  But, Steve will tell you himself that it’s not his favorite thing to do (even though he’s really good at it).  It’s been Steve and his team doing pastry with everything  else they do.  So we’ve been looking forever, for someone to take over our pastry program.  But, we had an almost impossible expectation.  Which is, I guess, not uncommon for us.  (Well, several staff members here have alluded to feeling that way…hmm).

We’ve hired a lot of different Pastry Professionals.  And they’ve all ”gone on to other opportunities”.  Which is unusual in our kitchen, because everyone stays.  Seriously. Everyone.  The team keeps getting bigger and bigger.  And the kitchen stays the same size.  It’s like a clown car or something. 

Anyway, back to Pattie.  So, after much wrangling and some starts and stops, we found our person.  Pattie Taan started with us, officially, just a month or so ago.  And boy, it’s great having her around.  She just left a job at a much bigger restaurant, working 60+ hour weeks and she’s easing into things here.  She does great big-restaurant things like make drawings and diagrams for her desserts.   

Dry Creek Peach Semifreddo photo and diagram

And she totally gets Farmhouse.  We’re all about fresh, simple and unexpected.  We don’t do dishes with a million little components, and every single item on every single plate is there for a specific reason.  We’re not huge on “food technology”, although sometimes soemthing new and different really is better.  And we focus on seasonal and local.  The new dishes Pattie’s brought to us really have enhanced the dining experience we offer.  Right now we’re serving a Local Dry Creek Peach and Lemon Verbena Semifreddo with a Peach Sabayon.  This weekend, for the 4th, we’re running a Bombe of Local Cherries, Chocolate Sponge Cake, Cherry Granite and a Vanilla Bean Bavois.  Don’t those just sound like summer?

And, today, she did something that just sealed the deal for me.  She made truffles.  Gorgeous, sexy, delicious truffles.  Truffles have been a big deal for me for a long time.  Hard to believe, I know, but you’d be amazed at what I get hung up about.  Really, how many truly great truffles have you ever had?  Too big, bad.  Too sweet, bad.  Too much chocolate, bad.  Not great chocolate… You see, a truffle-maker can go wrong in a million ways.  When you come to stay at Farmhouse, and you tell us it’s your anniversary, birthday, etc, we put a little box of truffles in your room with a little note.  And I’ve never liked our truffles.  We’ve purchased everything you can imagine.  And I’ve never been happy.  Until today. 

Passionfruit and Hazelnut truffles

What they are

 She’s talking about all kinds of different flavors- really farmy ones.  Rosemary-raspberry sounds particularly interesting.  So, celebrations at Farmhouse just jumped up a bit.  And, I love that!

Having Geoff on the team these past four or so years has been a great experience.  When Joe and I bought Farmhouse, there was literally no wine program.   Steve, our chef, would actually tell anyone who asked to bring their own wines- there was nothing on the list that went with his food.  The food was amazing, the rest of the restaurant was a train wreck.  The previous owner just didn’t care about the wine program, and didn’t have the finances or staff to allow anything to change.

So, Joe and I had nowhere to go but up.  In the beginning, I did the list.   But, tasting, ordering, updating the menu, training the staff on the wines, is really time consuming.  And plus, I wasn’t that good at it.  So I passed it off to our Maitre d’, who got things rolling along a little more swiftly, but still, it was miles from what it should have been to complement the quality of Steve’s food. 

Finally, after a few more stabs at sort of pasting a wine program onto the restaurant, the person who was running it, while maintaining a full server position, decided to move on.  It was time to give wine at Farmhouse some serious thought.  We were still really small, and money was still really tight, and the thought of hiring someone just to manage wine seemed impossible- we weren’t selling a whole lot of wine, and profits weren’t very good.

But, timing and luck have seemed to be in our favor over the last eight years (I probably just jinxed that one), and as luck would have it the person we were seeking was also seeking us.  Joe placed an ad in Craig’s List of all places, for someone to come in and I’m not sure what- basically take over the program, cost us little and make us tons. 

Within a day or so, Joe got a call from this “great sounding guy in New York”.  Geoff was working as Sommelier for Balthazarin the city, and helping to manage the programs for their other restaurants as well.  His girlfriend had been offered an opportunity to come out and work harvest at Williams Selyem, and so he was looking for something fun in Sonoma County, while he prepared to take the Master Sommelier exam.  We got together, struck a bargain and it’s been great for both of us.  Geoff passed the Master’s almost two years ago- and now finds himself on a short list of top young American wine professionals.  Which is, of course, great for us!

So, things like the StarChef award, while not uncommon for our Farmhouse Crew, provide great opportunities for us to get out, attend the events planned around the awards and see what’s really going on out here.  As we already knew, Wine Country is amazing.  Joe and I attended the “Gala Awards Party,” at Charles Krug Winery in Napa, last night. 

Charles Krug Winery at Sunset

What an incredible collection of talented people.  Visit the StarChef link above- it takes you to the list of winners, with their bios and the “Dish That Cinched It” for each of them.  Each chef prepared that dish last night, and Geoff paired all of the wines to go with each dish.  So, the Barrel Room at Charles Krug was transformed into a series of stations, where they were preparing and serving these incredible little morsels paired with wines or beers from around the world.  Two of the dishes that really stood out were Restaurant Eloise’s Egg Yolk Ravioli with Sweet Peas, Local Butter and Black Truffles and Bouchon’sTrumpet Mushroom and Sunchoke Salad.  John and Duskie, from our favorite neighbor,  Zazu, did housemade salumi and antipasti that were some of the best I’ve ever had.   I have all of the recipes- actually all of the recipes listed on the StarChef site- let me know if you’d like any of them.  And, Scott Beattie’s Bella Ruffinas and Bellinis

Scott's Bellini

were incredible.  He has a beautiful book out with all of the seasonal and ground breaking cocktails that he invented/created while he was at Cyrus.  A few of the wines that, had I not been driving, I’d have gone back for more of were the 2007 Pinot Gris, RRV, from Wind Gap (a new producer, right here in Forestville-we can make you an appointment to visit when you come to Farmhouse) and the Sheldon Wines 2005 “Vinolocity”, cooincidently the owner/winemaker, Dylan Sheldon, is part of our Farmhouse Team in his “spare” time. 

So, all in all, a wonderful evening under a spectacular Napa summer sky, celebrating tributes to well deserving industry professionals.  So, it’s not all hard work for me and Joe…