Category: Bluebird Community

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

photos courtesy of Cow & Clementine

Like many people, Cow & Clementine bakery owner Joe Cowan found himself having trouble digesting wheat. But unlike many people, Joe sought and found a solution. After consulting with his father, the renowned holistic physician Dr. Thomas Cowan, Joe began baking bread using the natural fermentation method outlined in the Tartine Bread book. “My dad said ‘if you prepare bread the real way, your problems may be alleviated,'” says Joe. They were. “My dad turned out to be correct.”

A pathway to eating wheat was not the only thing Dr. Cowan gave Joe. He also gave him a grounding in a philosophy of making food. A founding member of the Weston A. Price Foundation–a pioneer organization for information about nutrition and health–Dr. Cowan specializes in helping people heal through natural medicines and, with his sons, started a business to create and market organic, nutrient-dense vegetable powders. Joe manages operations for the family business, Dr. Cowan’s Garden, and through this work continues to support a tradition of nourishing foods.

In the process of learning how to make a nice sourdough loaf, Joe says, he learned a lot. And “over the years playing with recipes, reading more, and figuring out the basics of dough I got good enough at it to start a business.” Fortuitously, Joe and his wife, Emily Clemetson, had just relocated to Morgantown, West Virginia–an excellent place to open a bakery. Emily, a physician, had recently begun her residency in West Virginia University’s internal medicine program, and Joe was still on active duty with the Marine Corps, which he had joined after college. Joe moved into a space previously occupied by a gluten-free bakery, and Cow & Clementine was launched.

“The place was really easy to move into,” Joe says. “The nuts and bolts were already in place; it was already built to fire code, the ovens were there, and it didn’t need anything structurally.” The building’s owner, says Joe, had a great vision for Morgantown and local business. “It was a really good fit.”

Joe’s business model was somewhat unconventional in the bakery world, but has proven to be quite successful. In addition to operating a retail bakery, Joe also runs a brisk mail order business, which means that customers all over the country can enjoy fresh Cow & Clementine sourdough bread any day of the week. “We cater the recipe for shipping,” Joe says, by ordering whole grains and milling them ourselves. We grind it on one of our stone mills and then we let it ferment overnight before baking it. The fresh-milled grain holds up to the shipping process in a way that fluffy processed flour won’t.”

Joe sources nearly all his grains from Bluebird Grain Farms, about whom he learned through his father. “My dad knew about Bluebird years ago,” Joe says. “When I was starting to bake and didn’t want to use an all-purpose grocery store flour, my dad showed me Bluebird Grain Farms and said ‘this is the one you want to use.'” Joe complements the full flavors of Bluebird’s grains with his wild leaven, which provides a rich and earthy taste to his sourdough breads. “When I moved to Morgantown I lost the previous leaven I had been using,” he says, “but I started a new one as soon as I got here, by mixing flour with water and letting it ferment, and that leaven has been going strong for three years now.”

Joe says that he was drawn to Bluebird because of the variety of grains they grow and the superiority of the product, as well as their farming ethics, which he says are the best in the industry. “I really like the varieties,” he says. “The dispersion of heritage varieties, the hybrids. In the summer I like to use the Pasayten Hard White Wheat, in the winter we use the Methow Hard Red Wheat.” The bakery also features an Emmer loaf, an Einkorn bread, and a Heritage Dark Northern Rye. Joe notes that bakery and mail order bread customers tend to fall into two camps. “People want their bread to be dense and sour, or they want it light and fluffy. Cow & Clementine caters to those two camps.”

For Joe, purchasing whole grains extends the shelf life of his mail-order breads, so they arrive fresh to his customers’ houses. He has a couple of stone mills that he runs continuously for the first hour of each day; milling the grain is not an onerous task. But for most consumers, who can eat or freeze their bread the day they bake it, it makes more sense to purchase Bluebird’s fresh-milled organic flours rather than whole grains.

Cow & Clementine is more than a retail bakery and mail order bread company; it’s also a Morgantown hot spot that hosts art exhibits and occasional events, such as Ikebana classes, tie-dye sessions, and knife skills training. “The space is so large that I am only using 1/4 of it for bread,” Joe says, “so it makes sense to share the space for other purposes. Morgantown is cool and lively. There’s a lot going on here–art walks, farmers’ markets, gallery openings.”

As if a baker’s and a medical resident’s schedules weren’t hectic enough, Joe and Emily added baby George to their family four months ago, prompting Joe to hire another baker to work with him. “We hired and trained Chris while Emily was pregnant,” says Joe, “and it came right down to the wire. He baked his first successful loaf the week before George was born. It takes a long time to understand the nuances of sourdough–there’s barometric pressure that changes bread, and a lot of other variables. You can control the variables, or they can control you and spoil the batch.” With Chris assuming some of the baking duties, Joe can both spend time with George and work on growing Cow & Clementine, as well as continuing his work as board president of the legendary Mountain People’s Co-op.

Long term, Joe would like to decrease his oven-to-doorstep delivery time by opening regional bakery distribution centers. Such centers would also allow him to expand Cow & Clementine’s customer base. He’d also like to start making a sourdough pasta–the way pasta is supposed to be made, he says. “Any grocery store has whole aisles of dry unleavened pasta,” Joe says, “but you’re supposed to ferment it first. It tastes better and keeps longer.” And finally, Joe would like to add even more varieties to Cow & Clementine’s bread repertoire. “That will happen soon,” he says, “it’s just a matter of time.”

For more information, visit Cow & Clementine’s website. And to mail order small-batch artisanal bread, visit Cow & Clementine’s store.

Since this was posted Cow & Clementine closed and Joe and Emily moved to Yarmouth Maine where they hope to set up a bakery someday soon.

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

Imagine these items on a menu: Asian Beef Rice Bowl with Broccoli Spring Roll, Chicken Cordon Bleu Sandwich, Chicken Yakisoba. Vegan Chickpea Masala. Sounds like the kind of place you’d want to eat, right? Then imagine those menu items created from scratch using locally and regionally sourced ingredients. It sounds like the lofty goal of a trendy bistro but it is instead the vision the Bellingham Public Schools (BPS) has for its food services program. Called the “Bellingham Good Food Promise,” the mandate seeks to “encourage a lifetime of healthy eating by serving students nourishing, delicious, whole foods in a welcoming environment.”

Says BPS Executive Chef and Food Services Director Patrick Durgan, “we want to make sure every kid eats nutritious and tasty foods at school.” And the way to best accomplish this aim, says Durgan, is to change the school food culture from one of processed foods to one where entrees are prepared from scratch–a long-term goal that he and his staff are focused on, even as they go about their daily task of providing breakfast and lunch to 6,000 students in the BPS.

Converting to cooking from scratch is not an overnight process for a kitchen of any size, but it’s particularly challenging for institutions feeding large groups of customers. Add in local, state, and federal guidelines governing school lunch nutritional guidelines and budget constraints, and you’ll find it unsurprising that most public school kitchens rely on processed foods. But about a decade ago the BPS began to closely examine its food program, and with help from a farm-to-school advisory board and numerous conversations with and surveys of stakeholders ranging from students to parents to teachers to community members, the district determined that it needed to prioritize whole foods cooking, and has been moving methodically in that direction ever since. And for the past 3.5 years, Durgan has been at the helm of this movement, doing a job he seems destined for.

Durgan grew up in Mukilteo, in a family that appreciated the social aspect of food. “My family has always been great about entertaining,” Durgan says. “There are a lot of really wonderful cooks in my family.” Although Durgan loved cooking for others and recognized it as a way to make people happy, he says he never thought about cooking as a career potential. “I didn’t want to lose the love I had of cooking by doing it as a career,” he says. So Durgan dipped his toes in the waters of many other professions, thereby learning “exactly what I DIDN’T want to do”: vacuum cleaner sales, retail, cleaning grocery stores, making espresso, food delivery. He never stopped thinking about cooking, though, and one day in 2000 he thought to himself, “let’s just try it out,” and enrolled in the Western Culinary Institute, which was affiliated with Le Cordon Bleu.

Attending the Western Culinary Institute in his birthplace of Portland, Oregon, says Durgan, was deeply satisfying. “I learned a great work ethic,” he says, “and the art and science of food were such amazing things to me. It became clear that I could never learn it all and know it all. There would always be something new.” Cooking, Durgan realized, “would always bring me joy and satisfaction.”

No longer worried that he’d lose his love of cooking by doing it professionally, Durgan threw himself into the food world. “I did my externship at [Oregon’s] Sun River,” he says, “and I worked all the different elements of the business: cafe, fine dining, banquets.” Durgan fell in love with high-volume production at Sun River, and upon his return to Portland got a job at a convention center, where he “got 20 years of experience in five years of employment.” Menu planning, employee management, food science: Durgan learned about it all. Those were busy years, Durgan says. “I missed reunions, weddings, and funerals.” But he was still young and unmarried, and ultimately, he says, “It was a good sacrifice for my career. I gained a lot of confidence, as well as learning that I’d need a better work/life balance for my own longevity in the profession.”

Seeking this balance, Durgan found a job with a food services contractor at Portland State University (PSU), which operated student dining halls, campus catering, and retail outlets. “It was a step in the right direction,” he says. “And I loved the education world. I loved watching kids grow and learn.” Five years later, this contractor bid on and won food services operations at Western Washington University (WWU) in Bellingham, WA, and Durgan was offered the opportunity to move.

Durgan is a man who takes opportunities seriously, embracing the chance to consider what each might do to his life, his path, his family, and his own personal growth. “I was married and had a two-year-old by then,” Durgan says of the Bellingham offer, “and it was a way to reorganize my life and to come back home to western Washington.” Durgan and his family moved to Bellingham, where he spent the next six years serving 40,000 meals/week on campus. Part of Durgan’s job at WWU was to engage with farmers, producers, and growers in the area and help them understand what was involved in providing products for the institutional world. “It was a phenomenal opportunity for the farmers to bring a lot of products to market,” Durgan says, “as well as for us to be able to serve locally grown products on campus.”

Understanding the farm-to-school supply chain later proved even more useful to Durgan, as did his experience weathering two management transitions, one at PSU and one at WWU. “I learned that these transitions are all about the people,” he says. “When things like this happen, there is a lot of apprehension and unknowns. We need to always be concerned about the people.”

Because of his work with farmers and growers, Durgan was asked to join a farm-to-school advisory board that the Bellingham Public Schools had formed to examine its food services program. “As we went through this process, the district realized they didn’t have the right people in position for the transition. They needed a chef with a particular skillset.” Durgan was, to some degree, uniquely suited for this position: high-volume institutional cooking, educational food services background, management transition experience, and proven ability to bring farm products straight to institutional kitchens. And more importantly, Durgan understood that establishing a new food culture would be challenging for the existing staff, fraught with unknowns, and emotionally charged. “I knew I didn’t have all the answers,” Durgan says, “but I wanted to create this path, where together we could move forward in building a kitchen that would serve us well now and into the future.”

Durgan began work as the BPS’s Executive Chef and Director of Food Services on January 2, 2016, and since that day has never stopped thinking about ways to implement the priorities the district and its stakeholders laid out in their strategic planning sessions. “We realize it’s a long, slow road,” says Durgan of their systematic approach. “To do it in a smart way, we needed to take time, and continue to go back to our foundation. We appreciate the patience our community is showing with our process.”

Progress may take time, but changes are noticed. “We celebrate the little things,” says Durgan. “Parents, teachers, staff, and students all were really happy with one of the first initiatives we implemented to get things going in the right direction: a salad bar.” A salad bar is so simple, says Durgan, but it provides so much. “First of all,” says Durgan, “a salad bar allows you to offer, not just serve food. In a salad bar kids can choose what appeals to them, and they’re likely to eat it. If you just serve them something on a tray, they may eat it, or it may go straight into the waste stream.” Salad bars also provide the opportunity to offer more variety of produce, says Durgan.

Other small but celebrated changes include things like the food services staff creating a recipe for “queso cheese sauce” from whole ingredients to pour on tortilla chips for nachos, rather than using the institutional cheese sauce product. “We put in cauliflower and onions,” says Durgan, and the staff and kids love it. “And, Durgan notes, the food services employees are excited by the positive feedback and proud of what they create. “They love these kids and they are proud to serve them delicious food,” he says.

Fairly recently, Durgan was thrilled to hire Chef Mataio Gillis, who owns Bellingham’s popular Ciao Thyme restaurant. “Mataio embraced everything we have in our Good Food Promise,” says Durgan, who cannot praise Gillis highly enough. “Mataio has helped us get almost a full year ahead in our menu planning,” Durgan says. “We are already well above 50% transitioned toward scratch cooking for Fall 2019, and I only expected to be at 10-15%. It’s so exciting.”

In addition to menu-planning wizardry, Gillis also brought to the BPS a grower that Durgan is excited about: Bluebird Grain Farms. “Mataio already used Bluebird’s grains at Ciao Thyme,” Durgan explains, “and he loved it, said it was so versatile. So we tried it at community events and we worked with the product a bit to see what feedback we’d get from kids and community members.” The response was overwhelmingly positive, says Durgan, especially for Bluebird’s Emmer Farro options. “We’re so ecstatic about these products,” says Durgan, who uses farro in grain salads, as a hot grain pilaf, and as texture in black bean burger patties. “You can abuse it a little, but it always resuscitates itself.” The BPS has to “abuse” products, Durgan adds; it’s the nature of institutional cooking. “This grain stands up,” he says.

Emmer farro is also fairly different than what most kids are used to. It’s a grain with texture and flavor, unlike most pastas and rices. “We like to expose kids and staff to new things,” Durgan says. “Even if something looks unfamiliar or unappealing, we encourage them to ‘take an adventure bite.'” Stepping out of one’s comfort zone appears to be a theme for all involved in the BPS’s Food Services Program, from creators to consumers.

School’s out for the summer now, but Durgan and his staff remain busy, serving roughly 16,000 free meals to kids under 18. “It’s a standard bag lunch now,” says Durgan, “but we are hoping to maybe grow our offerings.” Durgan is always asking, “How can we do more? How can we address a need, while still balancing our capacity and our ability to deliver on core things, and our long-term sustainability?” This desire to feed hungry kids was put to the test over the winter, when the BPS had a week of snow days. “We knew there were kids counting on getting meals at school,” Durgan says. “We figured out a way to serve nearly 800 lunches to kids in need. We made things hamburgers and vegan curry. AmeriCorps helped us deliver the meals. Those kids got fed.”

Unlike restaurants, the BPS is not competing for customers. “Our customers are our students,” says Durgan. This makes the BPS well-positioned to be a leader and a resource in a fairly revolutionary approach to institutional cooking. “We want to share recipes and processes with other school districts,” says Durgan. “We want to be an example. We’ve learned a lot and want to share that knowledge.”

Indeed, as a food service program testing with great success recipes like beet hummus and felafel, the BPS Food Services Program under Durgan and Gillis has much to offer. “We’ve taken all these things that used to be highly-processed, like meatloaf and sauces,” says Durgan, “and transitioned those to scratch. We tested, got feedback, revamped.” The kids are so ready for this kind of change, Durgan adds. “They are far more prepared for it than I had dared hope they’d be.” The staff, too, are embracing the changes. “We have such dedicated staff who bring all this excitement to work every day,” says Durgan. “We all own a piece of this change.”

Learn more about the Bellingham Public Schools’ Food Services Program and chefs Patrick Durgan and Mataio Gillis on the district website.

by Ashley Lodato

staff writer, Bluebird Grain Farms

photos courtesy of Sage Mountain Natural Foods

As if farming, running a fermented vegetables business, teaching in Wenatchee Valley College’s sustainable agriculture program, and raising three kids under the age of 12 weren’t enough, Danielle Gibbs had to go and buy herself a natural food store.

Buying Sage Mountain Natural Foods wasn’t, however, a hobbyist move for Gibbs; it was a strategic decision that positions her as a change agent in food systems. “I wanted to be a part of getting more healthy food to people,” says Gibbs. As a farmer for her husband’s family farm (Gibbs Organic Farm in Leavenworth, WA) Gibbs grew healthy, organic food on a small scale. As an instructor for the Wenatchee Valley College (WVC) system, she reached a receptive but small segment of the population. But it is in retail food sales that Gibbs believes she can reach the biggest and broadest audience, reinforcing the importance of making choices at all levels–proverbially, from farm to table–that change our food culture.

Gibbs grew up in suburban North Carolina and later earned a degree in philosophy (“useful for everything and nothing,” she notes). Although her family was not particularly outdoorsy, they were interested in healthy eating. “We shopped at health food stores ever since I was little,” Gibbs says. “All these shops with crystals everywhere in the 1980s, my parents giving us tons of herbs.” After college, Gibbs worked on a farm in Massachusetts before making her way out to Washington to “see the west and learn what it was like to farm in this region.” Gibbs interned on the Gibbs farm in 2001 and soon became the garden manager at Leavenworth’s Tierra Learning Center in 2003 before returning to the Gibbs farm in 2006.

Interspersed with farming, marrying, and bearing three children, Gibbs started fermenting vegetables and producing three flavors of live sauerkraut as a value-added product for the farm, as well as teaching for WVC and managing the campus greenhouse. It was during her tenure at WVC that Gibbs first encountered Bluebird Grain Farms, when she took a class on a farm tour with Brooke and Sam Lucy. “I’d tasted Bluebird’s products before and loved them,” says Gibbs, “but seeing the farm and hearing how passionate the Lucys are about organic, sustainable farming–it really registered for me what quality products they offer.” When Gibbs purchased Leavenworth’s 21-year-old natural food store, Sage Mountain Natural Foods, Bluebird was one of the many local suppliers to whom she turned in her quest to offer her customers the best ingredients at the best prices.

Gibbs was aware that the store was for sale for a number of years before she purchased it, inspired in the end by the thought of creating a place full of healthy food options, grown by local and regional producers, in an environment welcoming to and nurturing of the local community. “As Leavenworth gets more touristy,” Gibbs says, “those of us who live here full-time feel the need for places that are for us, places that have our needs and values in mind. I want Sage Mountain to be one of those places.” Visitor business is seasonal and ephemeral, says Gibbs, “but it’s the locals who sustain us.”

Sage Mountain Natural Foods is a feast for the senses for anyone who visits, from local to tourist, and even those just passing through and unlikely to buy the ingredients to make a meal from scratch can find many delights to take home, from soaps to wildflower mixes to gifts to deli and bakery treats. Local shoppers can stock up on everything from bulk cleaning and beauty products to grains to dairy to produce. And shop for produce they have indeed. Gibbs says “Our produce sales are six times what they were when I first bought the store.”

Produce, it seems, is not just Gibbs’ passion, it’s also her secret superpower. “I was in that world, and I know many of the produce growers,” Gibbs says. “I sold at markets with them. I know who grows what well.” Gibbs calls herself “picky” when it comes to produce selection, and despite the fussy negative connotation of that description, being picky–or discerning–translates into gorgeous produce available to her customers. “I select exactly what I want to buy from each farmer,” she says. “I encourage them to grow the things they grow best and enjoy growing.”

To support the store’s increased emphasis on produce, Gibbs also installed a new cooler and assigned produce to a larger area. She keeps prices low by participating in a natural food cooperative that gives her access to steeper discounts on fruits and vegetables. And, Gibbs says somewhat apologetically, “I do the produce myself. I like to control the display and how it looks.” She is, however, training another store employee to pinch-hit for her on occasion. “We have the best produce in town and people come in for that,” Gibbs says, adding that “Dan’s Food Market [another local grocer] also has a great selection.”

Getting nutritious and delicious foods into the hands and bellies of locals was important to Gibbs, but so too is supporting small-scale farmers in the region. To this end, Sage Mountain Natural Foods supports Regenerative Agriculture, which Gibbs describes as a movement that focuses on farming according to environmental principles of enriching soils, protecting water sources, and regenerating ecosystems (which pretty closely matches the Regenerative Agriculture’s definition of the “system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services”). It’s a holistic approach, Gibbs explains, where farmers put a lot of energy into “nourishing their land, rotating crops, and maintaining buffers.” Instead of focusing on food production first, Gibbs says, you focus on regenerating the land. “When you harvest you remove crops and take away from the land, which takes away nutrients. You need to give back to the earth.”

“We believe that farmers are an essential part of a healthy community,” Gibbs continues, “and we want to keep our farmers viable. We also want to keep the money in our local economy. So we buy from local farmers as our first option, and Charlie’s [an independent regional produce company] next, then other Pacific Northwest growers, then California growers.”

In addition to a robust and appealing produce display, Gibbs worked more fresh fruits and vegetables into Sage Mountain by opening a deli in the store, offering wraps, baked goods, salads, and soups. “It’s all about cooking seasonally and creatively,” she says, “And we have some consistent options and some options that are constantly changing.” The deli has been a big draw to the store, Gibbs is pleased to report. A long-time fan of Seattle’s PCC Community Markets, Gibbs found herself saying “We need something like PCC’s deli.” Once she realized that she had the venue to turn that idle wish into reality, she immediately contacted a deli manager she had in mind, who had managed the deli at The Food Co-op in Port Townsend; that employee now fully manages Sage Mountain’s deli.

Through her work at Sage Mountain, Gibbs has learned how many people really do cook from scratch, despite popular impressions that Americans are all about quick and easy these days. “We’ve offered quick meal packages,” Gibbs says, “but we don’t sell a lot of them. People are buying really basic ingredients from us.” Some of those basic ingredients are somewhat surprising, like Bluebird’s wheat berries or rye berries, for example. As delicious and nutrition-packed as they are, organic Methow Hard Red Wheat Berries are not exactly an impulse buy. Less surprising are the Bluebird Grain Farms Organic Einkorn Flour and Organic Emmer Farro Flour, which Sage Mountain customers scoop up with gusto, indicating widespread baking projects at home.

Cooking from scratch may seem a small gesture, but it’s an important one, giving people like Gibbs hope for a growing population of citizens who value fresh, natural foods grown in a sustainable, regenerative manner. An indication, perhaps, that bigger changes in food systems are afoot. Sage Mountain Natural Foods may be small, but this treasured and vital piece of Leavenworth’s healthy economy and healthy community is making its mark.

Visit Sage Mountain Natural Foods on Facebook, or stop by the store at 11734 Hwy 2 in Leavenworth.

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

Perhaps more so than any other cuisine, Italian cooking is imbued with the rich and comforting flavors of love, and the pizza and other dishes that come out of the Nonavo Pizza kitchen are a vibrant example of food steeped in this tradition. For chef Joey Chmiko and his partner and wife, Alder Suttles, Nonavo Pizza has been a true labor of love, from its original vision to every last Neapolitan-style pie that comes out of its wood-fired oven.

Located in downtown Vancouver, WA, Nonavo Pizza opened in 2016 but was a potent idea percolating in Chmiko’s and Suttles’s heads for five years before that. Shortly after the couple began dating, Suttles, a visual artist, gave Chmiko a watermelon smencil (a scented pencil) and asked him to draw a picture of the restaurant he would one day love to own and operate. Chmiko drew what would eventually become Nonavo Pizza; that original drawing now hangs on the wall of the restaurant.

Being a pizza chef was not new to Chmiko. His first pizza gig was working with Ria Ramsey at Pizzetta 211 in San Francisco, which he says changed the way he cooked. “Farm direct, best products you can afford, care and love of the food,” he says, “Seeing that in a restaurant setting was the pivot point for me.” Pizzetta, says Chmiko, “was a pizza restaurant, yes, but much more also.” His experience there shaped his philosophy at Nonavo Pizza.

Born in Trenton and raised in Florence (New Jersey, that is), Chmiko grew up with celebrations filled with food. “All the holidays were feasts with food and family,” he says. “Even when someone died, there was a tremendous amount of food. Eat your feelings kind of thing, I suppose.  We were never shooed from the kitchen. More like, ‘come help me stretch this strudel dough until we can see the tablecloth through it.'”

Meanwhile, Suttles’s first job was in a burrito shop, and contrary to the cheese-and-sour-cream-laden cholesterol bombs ubiquitous in that genre, these burritos were made with an intentional focus on nutrition and quality. “The food and how it was cooked was very important to the owner,” says Suttles. “It was about transparency and believing that knowledge about where one’s food is from makes for conscious consumers. I respected that.” Suttles prepped and cooked all the food, and had to know about every ingredient. She emerged from that experience a vegan and fought against genetically modified foods. “For me,” she says, “food was political. I felt responsible to make a positive change in the food system of the 1990s.”

Food was and continues to be, social for Suttles as well. “I became an adventuresome home cook, hosting giant dinner parties and feeding all my punk friends. I loved serving people, sharing food, and exploring ideas.”

Quality ingredients cost more, Chmiko concedes, but “we don’t want to eat that stuff–or give it to our family, or customers. From a business angle, it was never really a decision. It’s not a money-making decision. But we’re not going to change.”

Nonavo’s pizzas have artistry to them that belie their unpretentious titles: sausage, anchovy, hazelnut. The creativity and aesthetic visual presentation of the pies are no accident, given Suttles’ artistic influence. Suttles paints shows her work and teaches art full-time at a public alternative school. She is in charge of all the art things associated with Nonavo Pizza: label making, sign painting, T-shirt design, and one-off projects like a toy vending machine that dispenses one-liner jokes and oddities. “The artist part of me is always there, there’s no switch for it,” Suttles says, “It’s a way of seeing.” Being a mom is a similar experience, Suttles adds. “It’s the same sort of constant, a way of being.” Still, she doesn’t feel like she’s juggling too many roles: “They’re always there grounding me.”

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

photos by Aubrie Pick

With a resume that includes culinary leadership at restaurants named for the Pacific Northwest’s most renowned explorers, Executive Chef Dolan Lane might be mistaken for a man who favors hardtack and pemmican. After all, the namesakes of Portland restaurants Clarklewis and Meriwether’s survived quite happily on such fare for more than two grueling years, making their way across plains and over mountain ranges in the quest for western expansion. But although Lane’s menus feature more carefully curated and varied cuisine, there’s one thing Chef Lane has in common with the crews of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark, whose parties hunted and foraged their way across the western territories from 1804-1806: he’s partial to locally-sourced, seasonally-available ingredients.

Chef Lane’s culinary roots lie in the adage that necessity is the mother of invention. A south Seattle suburb latchkey kid in the 1970s and 1980s, Lane learned to fend for himself early, coming home after school and making omelets for himself and, often, a few friends, to tide over the hunger pangs until dinner. “I still have a thing for omelets,” he says.

Although Lane’s parents worked full time, his mother always cooked and the family ate at 5pm without fail, winter or summer. “My mom had a great repertoire,” Lane says. “It was always very straightforward and consistent: pork chops, pot roast, a green salad with every dinner. Once a week we’d go out for dinner.”

Before his mother got home from work, Lane would experiment in the kitchen. “My mom would come home and there would be spaghetti noodles stuck to the wall,” he says, “because I’d read that that was the way to test if they were cooked.” (It’s not, and Lane now knows that.)

Lane took his first cooking job at a mom and pop Italian restaurant when he was 17, making pizzas. “Even at that age,” he says, “I loved it. I knew I wanted to be involved in restaurants.”

But instead of following work he found fulfilling, Lane went to photography school. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t stick with it. “I just wasn’t feeling it,” he says. Instead, he spent a summer working at a friend’s resort and subsequently was accepted at the California Culinary Academy. When he graduated, Lane says, “I was young, I was just out of school, and I hadn’t traveled much.” So he got a job cooking on cruise ships, sailing around the Caribbean and Mediterranean working with a crew of 11 in the kitchen to provide meals for nearly 200 guests on the ship. “I had a great time,” Lane says, “and we did a pretty good job with the food, cooking in that environment for so many people.”

After a stint on a local cruise line running trips from Portland, OR to Lewiston, ID in 1998, Lane spent some time in Portland and has been there ever since, working as chef de cuisine and later executive chef at Bluehour, in addition to Clarklewis and Meriwether’s.

Cooking at Clarklewis was instrumental in Lane’s development of a reputation as a chef with strong ties to farm-to-table philosophy. “Clarklewis really came with a big history,” he says. “That’s when I really started meeting farmers and foragers. We were going to farmers markets three days a week, hand selecting produce, and writing menus on that.”

At Meriwether’s, says Lane, he would walk around the restaurant’s Skyline Farm with farm manager Caitlin Blood and talk about what she would like to grow and what he would do with the products. On days when Lane couldn’t visit the farm Blood sent him pictures of products like carrots, held in her hand for scale. “Pick them today,” he’d tell her, or “Wait until tomorrow.”

“I developed a deep connection to the farm products,” Lane says. “The farm grew such quality produce. I was able to pass that information on to the restaurant’s guests. It wasn’t just a marketing tool. I was really able to talk about the farm and what we were trying to do with all the amazing different varietals we were able to grow and how we were able to get the absolute freshest ingredients onto the table the same day they were harvested.”

The flip side of farming, however, is that sometimes crops don’t well as hoped, and sometimes they exceed expectations. “And then we ask, ‘What are we going to do with all this basil?’” Lane says. “You can only do so much pesto.”

Lane has long been inspired by other farm-to-table pioneers, mentioning Dan Barber of Blue Hill Farm north of Manhattan, who runs a restaurant, working farm, and consulting company supporting sustainable agriculture and world food systems. Barber’s work motivated Lane to make his own polenta, which involves growing the corn, threshing it, milling it, and making it into a smooth boiled cornmeal porridge. The result is heavenly, quite unlike the commercial ready-made versions available in supermarkets.

Lane was hired as the Executive Chef at Portland’s Red Star Tavern in 2016 with the promise of bringing “lighter and brighter” food to the menus. Red Star Tavern is what Lane calls a “modern tavern,” with modern tavern fare. “Tavern fare” is traditionally comfort food and meats and the “modern” twist to that, says Lane, is “providing balance to heavier dishes.” He continues, “It’s really easy to use butter and rich sauces, but you also need acid, seasoning, and freshness.” For example, the Red Star Tavern lunch menu features a perennially popular mac-n-cheese dish, to which Lane adds pickled peppers. “The pickling juice cuts through the richness,” he says. “It’s nuances like that that tweak the traditional pub food and lighten it up.”

Lane’s wife is influential in his focus on healthier habits at home as well. “My wife keeps us on the straight and narrow,” he says, referring to the couple’s three children ages 14, 8, and 5. “Food is a big thing in our house,” he continues, “but I can’t do the kind of food I do at the tavern at home.” Instead, Lane and his wife focus on a diet low in gluten and dairy, using their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) shares from Gathering Together Farm, and making soups for the week ahead. And although it’s difficult with his schedule, Lane also commits to a signature ritual from his childhood: sitting down together for dinner every night.

Lane addresses Portland’s solid foothold in the farm-to-table movement. “In the beginning,” he says, “farmers didn’t know how to connect direct and we [chefs] didn’t know how to find farmers. Now it’s easy, it’s all set up by these great chefs who made it all happen. When I got into this business I never thought we’d see what’s happening now, with chefs interacting directly with farmers and foragers.”

The role of the forager, while limited, provides an opportunity to create menus with unique intrigue. “The foragers bring us berries, mushrooms, wild plums, sour plums, watercress, and sorrel,” Lane says.  “The products are short-lived, but we use them whenever we can get them. A bright lemony wood sorrel or the pungent flavor of wild watercress—they’re just so unique.” The products are available unpredictably, based on seasons and weather, and thus provide an unusual challenge to chefs, but the results are worth the extra inventiveness required.

Lane became acquainted with Bluebird Grain Farms products in 2008, through Provista Specialty Foods. “I started using the organic whole grain emmer farro,” he says, because of its versatility. “At first I was just connecting it with lamb, because it’s such a natural fit with lamb.” But then, Lane says, “You can do so many other things with it. I started studding it with dried fruit or nuts, or arugula and roasted beets. It’s a warm salad or a cold salad. You can marinate it and it absorbs the flavor. In the summer you add tomatoes, or you add steak and kale for bolster. There’s just so much you can do with it.” The Red Star Tavern dinner menu currently features a lamb meatball, with ground lamb and smoked farro.

“We’re lucky to have smart diners,” says Lane of his Portland and visiting clientele. “We get people looking for nuances and twists. We want to highlight for them the best of what we offer in the Northwest.” To this end, Lane works closely with Red Star Tavern’s head bartender, Brandon Lockman, to connect the dots between food and drink, so whether clients are ordering a local craft beer or a high-end Japanese whiskey, their drinks and food work well together. “People can come in and get some of the best beers, wines, and craft cocktails available, paired with seasonal menus,” Lane says. “We’ve got a great team working hard to provide that experience.”

Red Star Tavern, Lane continues, “has remained relevant. We provide a quintessential modern Pacific Northwest tavern experience.”

To learn more about Red Star Tavern, visit their website.  (Sadly they closed since this post was written).

by Ashley Lodato  / Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

In these times of corporate conglomerates, independently-owned businesses are a welcome prospect and employee-owned co-ops are downright refreshing. Sno-Isle Food Co-op (Sno-Isle) located in North Everett, WA, is one such breath of fresh air. The 21-year-old non-profit retail food source is democratically governed by a board of elected trustees representing the more than 5,000 families who belong to the co-op and is dedicated to offering high-quality local and sustainable products.

Connecting individuals with the local food system are paramount for Sno-Isle, says Retail Manager Stephanie Davis. “We can help people understand the importance of and value in sourcing food directly and regionally. Sno-Isle offers a sensory experience that other grocery stores lack. We want people to feel connected to their foods and their communities.”

Davis grew up in the kitchen with her grandmother and says that her grandfather always had an impressive tomato garden, giving her an early taste for the perfection of a home-grown, sun-ripened tomato: a product rarely found in large mainstream grocery stores but readily available in season in co-ops like Sno-Isle. Although her immediate family was not focused on local or organic foods, says Davis, “they did put a lot of energy into preparing whole foods for the family to enjoy together. Those hours spent in the kitchen as a young person undoubtedly shaped my love for food and my desire to improve our food system.”

Sno-Isle’s retail department‘s practices reflect this desire. The buyers’ top priority is in “sourcing local and sustainable products.” With the goal of ensuring the ongoing preservation and betterment of the Earth, buyers consider “biodiversity in farming, products packed in compostable materials, and companies that recycle limited resources” when making their sourcing decisions. Sno-Isle is also committed to organic and non-GMO foods, even going so far as to require all products that are found on the Top Ten GMO crops list be certified Non-GMO or be in the process of gaining said certification.

Sno-Isle is invested not just in the health and longevity of individuals, but also that of communities. To that end, Sno-Isle offers classes & events, recipes, tips for healthier living, and it supports and sustains local non-profits through efforts like its Register Roundup program (members can round their purchase totals up and Sno-Isle puts the difference into member-selected non-profits) and its grants program, to which local community organizations apply for funding. It also promotes local growers and artisans by selling and displaying their work, and features an Artist of the Month. Says Davis about this community focus, “A strong commitment to community is a base value of any true co-op. Co-ops are formed when community members come around an idea and work together to create a viable solution that serves the identified need. It’s about the WHOLE serving the individual and that individual supporting the whole.” Sno-Isle takes this very seriously, says Davis. “We work to provide high-quality food and education for our owners, their families, the community at large, food producers, farmers AND our staff.”

Sno-Isle works collaboratively with its members to best serve their needs. “We’re always learning from our customers,” says Davis. In fact, Sno-Isle started carrying Bluebird Grain Farms products when a customer introduced co-op staff to their grains. “A few years ago a customer came in raving about Bluebird Grain Farms,” Davis recalls, “and the rest is history. We presently carry a variety of whole grain products in bags and in bulk, as well as some of the fabulous mixes and flours that Bluebird offers.” The products introduced by the customer proved popular and, says Davis, other customers who try the products “keep coming back!”

This is just one example of the autonomy that Davis and her colleagues have at Sno-Isle: the ability to respond quickly to a customer suggestion and better serve all customers. The co-op structure makes this possible. “We aren’t tied down by off-site corporate rules,” says Davis. “Instead, we are able to work in a way that allows us to truly reflect the needs, desires and assets of the community we are serving.” In fact, one of the line items in Sno-Isle’s mission is to “encourage members to contribute and participate.” The Bluebird connection shows that members are indeed active in the co-op.

As for those who harbor the notion that food co-ops are exclusive and expensive, Davis dispels the myth. “Our knowledgeable staff can show you how to shop the store economically. There is something for everyone here. We are family friendly [and every child who visits the co-op gets a free banana!].” Davis urges customers who care about their food’s quality and sourcing to visit Sno-Isle. “Come in!,” she says. You can be a part of making a difference.

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

Some 1960s-era newlyweds took up golf together or joined bridge circles, but for Gail (some call him Pete) and Judy Prichard the mutual hobby was baking bread. “When Gail and I got married we just started baking bread,” says Judy. “We were baking long before we had kids.”

Judy explains that baking bread using organic ingredients sourced as locally as possible was part of the ethic she and Gail shared early on in their marriage. “We planted a garden and grew as much food as we could,” she says. “It was all part of our intention to eat as well as we could.”

Although Judy grew up with a mother who baked bread regularly, Judy didn’t really learn to bake until college. “In my early college years, both of my parents were very ill. I had to cook for them one summer. My mother kind of walked me through it.” Taking up bread baking with her new husband, then, was a perfectly logical next step. “Now it feels like something I’ve always done,” Judy says.

Through her middle child, Susan, who lives in the Methow Valley where Bluebird Grain Farms is located, Judy learned about Bluebird Grain Farms. “It was so wonderful to learn about their family farm and to be able to buy grains from a family that is doing a really good thing,” says Judy of Brooke and Sam Lucy. “We just really wanted to support them in what they do.”

“And their products are just so good,” Judy continues. “We love the taste of their fresh-milled flours and cereals, as well as the whole grain emmer farro.”

These days, Judy mainly bakes whole wheat bread for hers and Gail’s consumption. “Unless it’s Christmas or the grandkids are coming,” she says. “I don’t bake a lot with just 2 of us now, but when I do bake I always use Bluebird Grain Farms products.” For her signature whole wheat bread, Judy uses Bluebird’s Methow Hard Red Wheat flour. For pie crusts, biscuits, muffins, scones, buttermilk hotcakes, and banana bread, Judy likes the Pasayten Hard White Wheat flour, although she is quick to acknowledge that the Organic Emmer Farro flour and Organic Einkorn flour add a nutty flavor and chewy texture to quick bread like banana bread. “We really like the Einka flour,” she says.

Judy notes that she and Gail routinely substitute Organic Whole Grain Emmer Farro for rice, finding it a far more nutritious carbohydrate than rice, as well as one with a hearty flavor and robust texture.

Judy didn’t deliberately train her own 3 children in the art of baking, but threads of her passion for good grains were passed on to her kids in different forms. Her daughter Susan bakes stacks of cinnamon whole wheat sweet bread to give away at Christmas. Her youngest, Karin, orders Bluebird’s Organic Old World Cereal blend to be shipped to her home in California.

And with a nod to the single degree of separation that seems to be the norm of social relationships in tiny communities like the Methow Valley Judy notes, “It’s neat to be able to buy your organic flour from a farmer whose daughters are in piano recitals with your own grandkids.”

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

photos by Ashley Loyer

The “farm to table” movement has swept the country by storm in recent years, but for those brought up like Chef Cameron Slaugh (rhymes with “raw”), farm to table isn’t a movement–it is a way of life. Raised on a rural Utah subsistence farm, Slaugh grew up eating gorgeous produce served raw or prepared simply, freshly-laid eggs, and whole grains. So even while his peers were slurping up popsicles as an after-dinner treat, Slaugh found pure pleasure in the form of a warm vine-ripened tomato or a handful of berries for dessert. And at the impressionable age of 8, Slaugh began seeking inspiration in the kitchen, surrounded by the bounty of his family’s farm and the freshest ingredients he could ever hope to handle.

At 12 Slaugh started washing dishes at a small local ski area, then helping with banquets, then serving in the dining room of another ski area. “At 17 I finally found my way to the kitchen,” says Slaugh. “I’d always had that desire to cook. Cooking made sense to me.”

When Slaugh decided to pursue cooking full time, at 20, he proceeded full steam ahead, jumping onto a train bound for New York City–a place he had never before visited–and entered the French Culinary Institute. He got a room in the dorms, started school, and almost immediately found a job cooking at Park Avenue, a restaurant with a seasonally rotating menu then located in New York City’s Upper East Side (it has since moved downtown).

“Everything really started for me there,” says Slaugh. “I loved the way that everything changed with the seasons at Park Avenue,” he says. “The uniforms, the menu, the dining room decor. It was very refreshing.” Mentoring with the acclaimed Chef Craig Koketsu at Park Avenue, Slaugh learned to maximize the flavors of each season’s freshest available produce.

Slaugh’s next job was at NYC’s renowned Eleven Madison Park, and landing that position took special effort. “I basically annoyed the chef at Eleven Madison until he let me into the kitchen as a sous chef,” Slaugh says. But it was worth the effort; being part of the culinary team at Eleven Madison Park’s kitchen was both professionally rewarding and personally meaningful. “I took so much away from that experience,” says Slaugh. “The detail and organization, the technique and creativity.”

But most of all, Eleven Madison’s lasting impact on Slaugh were the lessons he learned about cooking from the heart. “In an intense environment like Eleven Madison you can forget about that,” Slaugh says, “but the best advice I ever got there was to cook with heart and soul. Your technique can be flawless, but the best food has to also be delicious, and you can really only get that if you invest yourself in the process.”

In the fast-paced, stress-filled kitchens of the world’s finest restaurants–of which Eleven Madison Park is one–preparing meals takes on game-day proportions, day after day after day. “Being one of the best restaurants in the world doesn’t come without sacrifice,” says Slaugh, “but while in many restaurant kitchens there is a pervasive fear of failure, Eleven Madison wasn’t about that.” Instead, says Slaugh, at Eleven Madison the kitchen team worked toward common goals, with a high enjoyment factor. Still, “It’s like a Super Bowl every day,” says Slaugh. “You have to push yourself, it’s like you’re pushing through battle every day, sprinting to the finish. But you feel like you accomplished something. And when you look back you see the growth.”

Slaugh and his wife eventually moved back west to his mother’s hometown, Los Angeles, and Slaugh began cooking at Osteria La Buca, a country Italian tavern focusing on “grassroots Italian cooking.” Slaugh’s legacy at Osteria La Buca is the West LA farmland he leased and used to grow produce for the restaurant. This allowed Slaugh and his team to plan seasons ahead in their menus, planting what they wanted and creating menus around the daily harvest. Restaurant staff picked produce just hours before it was to be served to La Buca diners. “It was a different way of thinking about menus,” says Slaugh. “It was more spontaneous. Sometimes we had no idea what a dish was going to look like, but we grew the best produce, and we bought the best of everything we couldn’t grow: from salt to grains to caviar to oil.” Quality ingredients make quality food.

This implementation of farm to table in its most literal sense brought Slaugh right back to his childhood. “We ate so much in a raw state at home,” he says. “Tomatoes sliced with vinaigrette, peas just shelled, the sweetest carrots.” Slaugh says he fell in love with cooking all over again at La Buca.

In early 2016, Slaugh ran an Osteria La Buca pop up restaurant in Yakima. “We did it in the Icehouse Bar,” he says. “There were 8 seats. We did 4 dinners–2 dinners each day for 2 days. We sold them all out. There was no menu; guests had no idea what they were going to get. They just signed on to this journey with us.”

That visit to Yakima turned out to be fateful for Slaugh; he was recruited shortly after by Cowiche Canyon Kitchen owner Graham Snyder to move to Yakima full time and embark on a new restaurant with a farm-fresh mission. The rural aspect of Yakima appealed to Slaugh, but he also sensed a hunger–both literal and figurative–in Yakima patrons for his style of cooking. “There was a community desire for adventuresome eating,” he says. “I just connected with it.”

Not long after Slaugh joined the Cowiche Canyon Kitchen as its executive chef, he and Snyder launched Restaurant Wahluke. Although the concept of a four-course prix fixe menu served at a family-style 14-seat table is not new, it’s not exactly commonplace in rural areas like Yakima. But to assume that rural diners are not sophisticated enough to embrace a micro-restaurant like Wahluke would be narrow-minded; Yakima diners filled the dining room night after night for the 90-120 minute dinner services.

Riding Wahluke’s success, Snyder and Slaugh decided to develop an Asian-inspired eatery in what once was Wahluke’s lounge; they opened E.Z. Tiger in April 2018. The dim-sum and noodle house features “the flavors of the Pacific Rim” and caters to a regular local crowd. “It is a better fit for the space, and we had a feeling this might work better,” says Slaugh. “There was nothing in Yakima really like this.”

Meanwhile, Wahluke operates as a pop-up restaurant that will serve season-based menus out of various Yakima Valley venues. Response to Slaugh’s menus has been “huge,” says Slaugh. “Way more than I ever could have imagined. The reviews are off the charts. We are just thrilled by the positivity. We feel blessed to have people that believe in us so much.”

Both EZ Tiger and Wahluke are quite young and are still evolving. It’s this evolution and innovation that feed Slaugh. “I can’t be doing the same thing all the time,” he says. “That’s who I am, that’s how I cook. I can’t grow as a chef and as a person if there isn’t evolution.”

Slaugh learned about Bluebird Grain Farms from the 21 Acres Center for Local Food & Sustainable Living in Woodinville (a center for “conscious consumers who want to learn new, more sustainable ways of living”). “They sold Bluebird products and I tried some,” says Slaugh. “It was the summer before Wahluke opened and we were looking for the best of everything. We needed quality grains, so we bought whatever they had and started cooking with it. I was blown away.”

Slaugh continues, “Bluebird sent me some samples–milled flours, Einkorn, emmer farro–so I started a little R&D, playing with the ingredients. All of the flours, all of the whole grains–everything was just excellent.” One of Slaugh’s most surprising innovations is his popular farro/celery root dish. “That dish was such an unexpected hit,” he says. “It’s almost literally just emmer farro and celery root. People love it.” He adds, “Vegetarians always get short-changed. I want the vegetarian entree coming out of my kitchen to be as special as any of the meat dishes, if not more so.” The celery root farro is indeed that, evidence that Slaugh is honoring his commitment to “cooking properly” for all guests, not just the omnivores.

For Slaugh, “cooking properly” means maintaining a steadfast connection to food sources. He adheres to the basic food principle he learned as a kid, and which was reinforced early in his career in fine dining: the best chef is the one who uses the best ingredients. Slaugh and his wife settled in Yakima with not just a house, but also a farm. His parents moved from Utah and bought a farm as well, where they grow some of the produce Slaugh uses at E.Z. Tiger and Wahluke. “Farmers are the real superstars,” Slaugh says. “If the ingredients are right, we don’t have to do a lot with them in the kitchen. We let the ingredients shine.”

To learn more about Slaugh’s food ventures, follow him on Instagram (Wahluke) and Facebook (E.Z. Tiger).

They say some things are so addictive you can get hooked on your very first try. Patrick Jeannette (aka “Grampy Pat”) had this experience the first time he sampled a true Alaskan sourdough bread, and he’s had nary a sourdough-free day since.

Growing up in the Los Angeles area, Grampy Pat learned to cook beans, tacos, enchiladas, and Mexican rice from his Mexican-American father. The eldest of 6 children, Grampy Pat was the official babysitter and ad hoc parent when his mother and father needed to “get away from the brood,” he says. But Grampy Pat had never really baked anything until he was 17 and his father died, leaving him as the main supporter in the household for his stay-at-home mother and 5 siblings. Still, the “baking” was just Bridgford frozen par-baked breads–a far cry from the gorgeous hand-shaped baguettes, boules, and miches he would later pull hot from his oven.

Still, many years passed between those Bridgford rolls and Grampy Pat’s signature sourdoughs–years that Grampy Pat spent, in his wife’s words, as a “serial entrepreneur.” Life moved at a fast pace in the 70s, says Grampy Pat, and after a couple of failed ventures a successful printing business allowed him to “buy the big house on the hill for my wife and 2 kids,” before migrating north to Alaska to use his design minor to create fabulous kitchens for affluent Alaskans. When Grampy Pat had completed a kitchen, he always cooked the first meal in it for his clients. One night a client said “That’s great–you cook dinner and I’ll bake Alaskan sourdough bread to go with it.”

Well, “OMG,” says Grampy Pat, “for me that first dinner was all about the bread!” The client used a sourdough starter that fed gold miners in 1878 in Ketchikan, AK. He gave Grampy Pat some of the starter and wrote the recipe on the inside of a paper bag, quite possibly unaware that he was unleashing a culinary tornado of leavened bread potential on not only Seward’s Folly but on the rest of the continental United States as well.

A passion was born. “A few weeks later I was holding seminars on baking Alaskan sourdough,” says Grampy Pat.

Grampy Pat eventually moved back to California and baked for family events and friends. Forever the entrepreneur, he had 3 different businesses going when one day his next door neighbor asked if he could bake her 14 baguettes. “Yes,” he said, “but I only bake naturally leavened sourdough breads, nothing with commercial yeast.” This was not a problem for the neighbor, nor was it a problem for Grampy Pat that he had never shaped or baked a baguette. “I went on YouTube to learn how,” he says, baby boomer in age but millennial in spirit.

Grampy Pat was working by day and baking by night when his wife, now Dean of the College of Arts at California State University, Long Beach, told him “Honey, I can’t sleep with you banging around and baking bread in the middle of the night.” So Grampy Pat quit his day job and started baking in his home, after securing licensing that made him legal and an oven that allowed him to bake 48 loaves of bread at a time. He also acquired a name for his bakery: GrampyPat’s (almost famous) Sourdough Bread, after his grandson said “Grampy Pat, why don’t you start a bakery and call it Grampy Pat’s almost-famous sourdough because someday you’ll be famous.”

Grampy Pat still uses that 130-year-old Alaskan sourdough starter for all of his breads. He began baking for restaurants and breweries, as well as selling at the Orange Home Grown Farmers & Artisans Market, at which–judging by online comments–Grampy Pat has achieved at least a modest level of notoriety, if not outright fame.

It’s a well-deserved reputation, built on the taste, texture, and quality of Grampy Pat’s breads. He creates only 100% organic breads made with high alkalinity water and ancient fiber-rich freshly milled grains. “Enter Bluebird Grain Farms,” says Grampy Pat. He uses Bluebird’s Organic Einkorn Flour in his Einka Sourdough, noting that these breads go through a 48-hour fermentation period. “The longer the fermentation, the healthier naturally,” says Grampy Pat. “It’s baking like our forefathers did; they couldn’t go to a convenience store and buy yeast.”

Indeed, not only does Grampy Pat not buy his yeast at grocery stores, but he doesn’t buy his flours there either. That’s why he says that Bluebird’s reliable shipping process is critical to his success. “Their bread flours are fresh-milled and dependable,” he says, “and I always receive my orders in a timely fashion.”

Grampy Pat admits to a more health-conscious approach the older he gets. It’s why he values the 48-hour fermentation, why he likes Einkorn Flour (what’s not to like about a low-gluten flour that’s rich in protein, phosphorous, vitamin B6, potassium, antioxidants and amino acids?), and why he uses sprouted wheat flour in other breads. (Ok, so maybe his Wine Flour Sourdough with Chocolate Nibs isn’t at the top of the list for a weight loss diet–especially when you can’t help but eat the whole loaf yourself–but if you’re going to eat Wine Flour Sourdough with Chocolate Nibs, you won’t find a more nutritious version than Grampy Pat’s.)

Grampy Pat’s offerings read almost like a full menu: pretzels with mustard seeds marinate in unripe sour grape juice for starters; warm up with sourdough spelt, rye, or whole chili sourdough; cleanse the palate with gluten-free bread before moving on to Asiago cheese sourdough or true Italian biga ciabatta; sourdough baguettes for the main course; and finish with the aforementioned chocolate wine flour bread. For a moment there you could believe that you weren’t just eating a 6-course bread meal.

A few years ago Grampy Pat got the opportunity to bake in a 17th-Century wood-fired oven in Cortona, Italy. It’s a bit of an “Under the Tuscan Sun” memory for Grampy Pat: fresh Italian Asiago cheese, an aged Borolo wine opened the day prior, 16 loaves baked in the village oven, his wife, and friends, in a villa near an olive grove. “It was incredible!” says Grampy Pat, (only he added an expletive before “incredible” for emphasis). “Stupefacente!” the Italians might say. “Amazing!” Read more here about this experience.

Although Grampy Pat’s bread is best enjoyed fresh from the farmers market, those of us out of reach of Orange County, CA, can still experience the flavors and texture of his sourdoughs through shipping channels. “I ship internationally and stateside,” says Grampy Pat. Sourdough is a natural preservative, so Grampy Pat’s breads will last up to two weeks, as long as it’s not too hot, so order away.

In a celebrity-filled place like Los Angeles, fame can be fleeting. But like his 1878 Ketchikan sourdough starter, Grampy Pat is in this baking business for the long haul.

Learn more about Grampy Pat’s (almost famous) Sourdough Bread by visiting his website.

For Mazama Store owner Missy LeDuc, it’s all about keeping things fresh and lively. From the produce to the pastries to the housewares to even the employees themselves, everything and everyone in the iconic Mazama cafe and general store seems to be infused with an internal bit of pep. Missy herself is no exception and is, in fact, quite likely the origin of the Mazama Store’s positive buzz of energy.

It’s hard to put your finger on it, but there’s a certain feeling you get when you walk through the doors of the Mazama Store. It’s an air of possibility, a hint of the unexpected, a whiff of indulgence, and mostly, a sense that whether you’re a daily regular or you’re stopping in for the first time, you are welcome in this place. This neighborly atmosphere is no accident; at the Mazama Store, it’s tradition. From its humble roots as a tiny 1920s way-station at the end of the road to its current iteration as an intimate marketplace with a surprisingly broad selection of food, beverages, kitchen implements, and gifts, the Mazama Store has for nearly a century been a watering hole in the hinterlands, a gathering spot for Mazama locals, and a place where, as the store’s motto promises, you can get “a little bit of everything good.”

When current owners Rick and Missy LeDuc bought the Mazama Store in 2007, it was with the specific intention of carrying out the Mazama Store’s tradition of providing quality edibles and hard goods in a community environment. Missy had worked at the store as an employee for the better part of a decade and “really loved the community feeling”; it’s partly what motivated the LeDucs to buy the store. Missy says that prior to the purchase, she took some time away from the store and “felt lonely in the community.” She continues, “you really do get a connection to Mazama by working at the store. In Mazama we can all just get isolated down our own driveways unless we get involved in things.”

Missy’s other incentive for owning the store was, of course, the food. “I just really love food,” Missy says without apology, voicing a sentiment shared by–oh, basically every living creature. “I really appreciated that so many of the products in the store were homemade,” she says, “and I was interested in exploring the food aspect of things at the store.” And explore she has, in the form of expanding the bakery, offering a wide selection of soups and sandwiches daily, and keeping the display cases full of irresistible pastries and breads, from rustic loaves to fruit pies to bagels to sel de mer baguettes. Everything in the kitchen is made from scratch, using the best ingredients Missy can source. For grains, naturally, Missy turns to Bluebird Grain Farms, not just because the Mazama Store’s chief baker is Polly Lucy, Farmer Sam’s sister, but also just because Bluebird’s grains make the freshest and best-tasting whole grain flours available. “Our Emmer Loaf is one of our most popular rustic loaves,” says Missy, noting the bread’s heartiness and nutty flavor derived from Bluebird’s organic emmer flour.

Missy is such an advocate of Bluebird’s grains that she says “We wouldn’t even do a whole grain bread if we didn’t have Bluebird flours.” She continues, “You can taste the difference. It’s very obvious. You use a whole grain flour from somewhere else and it just tastes dead; Bluebird’s flours are fresh and lively. You can’t compare anything else to Bluebird.” Missy notes that the Mazama Store sells a lot of whole grain bread, all of which is made using Bluebird flour. “People really look forward to it and reserve it ahead of time,” she says. “We truly feel that using Bluebird products makes a difference to our customers.”

Other things that make a difference to Mazama Store customers? The inviting atmosphere, check! The fresh locally-roasted java from Blue Star Coffee Roasters, check! The impressive selection of beer and wines, of gifts, of bulk food items, of Husky ice cream, check! The summer pizza nights on the patio, check! But it’s the employees who really give the store its character. “They’re really lovely people,” says Missy. “I enjoy working with them so much.”

Missy continues, “I want my employees to have the best pay they can get. We want to keep them; they’re part of our family.” But she acknowledges, “It’s still so hard to make a small business pencil out. We are constantly working to keep the business profitable while paying our employees a living wage.” This concern feeds into what Missy refers to as “the 3 prongs of sustainability”: longevity of the employees, longevity of the business, and longevity of the planet. To address planetary issues, the Mazama Store has taken a close look at the waste it generates. “We look at how things come to us and we try to minimize packaging,” says Missy. “When you own a store you really see how things arrive. We make many ordering decisions based on not just the quality of the product, but also the amount of packaging involved.”

Where the store has really been able to make a difference is its approach to food waste. First of all, employees strive to minimize, if not eliminate, true food waste. “We are very creative,” says Missy. “With the bulk items, we don’t like to let them sit in the bins too long before we incorporate them into the kitchen. Same with produce–we only want the freshest things out in the store, then we take the older items back into the kitchen to be made into soups. Fruit is made into pies, or apple butter, pear butter, or pastries.” It’s the reason there is no published menu at the Mazama Store; the kitchen needs to have the creative freedom to look at what needs to be used and design menu items around those ingredients. Food scraps are composted by locals who pick up buckets of food waste; someone else picks up leftover milk from the espresso machine and feeds it to her pigs. “It’s very rare that we throw anything out,” says Missy.

Mazama Store employees hold regular sustainability meetings, coming up with solutions for reducing waste. One employee idea resulted in the store re-using shipping boxes to send customers’ groceries home with them; another employee came up with the system of using canning jars for to-go soups, instead of disposable containers. “We don’t even think about those things anymore,” says Missy, “we just do them. And then we’re on to the next idea. It’s creative for everyone–it keeps us energized.”

The Mazama Store gracefully dances the line between folksy and sophisticated, with a carefully curated selection of clothing, mugs, glassware, gifts, and toys augmenting food offerings that would rival those in a chic urban market. Both the store’s shelves and its website promote the work of Methow Valley artisans and growers. This is important to Missy. “The quality of what we offer would decrease if there weren’t local and regional growers out there being successful,” she says. “We feel proud and notice the difference in taste, we see the difference in quality.” Missy believes that more collaborative promotional efforts amongst local providers would benefit everyone; it’s why she devotes a significant amount of website space to other local businesses. “We should all be doing this in the valley,” she says.

Despite a solidly upscale range of products, the store retains a comfortable character. It’s not just the scuffed floors, battered by ski boots. Nor is it the fact that the employees seem to greet nearly everyone by name. It’s more just the atmosphere that comes only from an independent business–a mom-n-pop store, where you know that mom and pop (and in the LeDucs case, most of their children) actually work there and care deeply about the business.

For the LeDucs, the Mazama Store is truly a family business, with Rick, Missy, and their 4 children all working at the store at various points. Although their youngest daughter, Sylvie, is in China, the other 3 LeDuc adult children all work at the store, as well as being involved in the community. Missy manages to find a balance between home life and work life by getting outside whenever possible, and taking little trips out of the valley with Rick here and there. (“Although when we travel I am always looking at other general stores, getting new ideas,” she admits.) But much of Missy’s energy is derived not from being away from the store, but from being right in the thick of it. “I have to put a lot of time into the store,” Missy says. “It’s like an organism that’s changing and growing. I need that, otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy it.”

Missy says that customers, too, feed her energy. “We have really wonderful customers,” she says. “We have our locals who we know and love, who come in to visit and talk about things weighty and trivial. And then we have our part-time customers. The part-timers work really hard in their other lives to be able to come here, so when they’re in Mazama they’re in a really good mood. They want to say hello at the store, they want to enjoy the outdoors.” She continues, “We don’t seem to be just a convenience store for the part-timers. They know our employees by name. They want to get to know the locals. It’s really special for me to watch.”

Missy appreciates the Mazama Store’s customers in the bigger picture as well, because they are choosing to support a family-owned independent business. “In this world of WalMart, Amazon, and Costco,” she says, “you need to value your small businesses. If you don’t actually physically go and support them, they will disappear. New laws don’t favor small businesses. You need to go to your local store, get to know the people there, and support them.” This is no selfish request, motivated by personal gain. Missy reminds us that small businesses like the Mazama Store allow employees to earn a living locally. “These small businesses are supporting the people in our community,” she says. “Our employees–this is our community. We’ve seen other places where small businesses close and people have to move out of the community to find work. We see it back east. To me this is a big blinking red light–you need to cruise your towns and support your local stores.”

For more information about the Mazama Store, visit their website or stop by Mazama Junction and experience the Mazama Store for yourself.

It’s fitting that Bluebird is featuring Ecliptic Brewing on this first full day of winter. The Portland brewery and pub unites Oregon craft brewing icon John Harris’s two passions: brewing and astronomy. The centerpiece of the pub is a massive light fixture in the shape of the Analemma (the figure-8 that depicts the sun’s path in the sky through the year) and much of the brewery’s beer and food are in constant change throughout the year. In fact, the seasonal menu rotates every 6 weeks according to the old world calendar: on the solstices, the equinoxes, and Samhain, Brighid, Beltane, and Lammas.

The mastermind behind Ecliptic’s menu is executive chef Michael Molitor, a native Pacific Northwest resident who came to Ecliptic after attending Scottsdale Culinary Institute and cooking at several Portland landmark restaurants, like the Heathman Restaurant and Pazzo Ristorante. As a teen, Molitor cooked in Italian restaurants in and around his hometown of Boise, ID, but hadn’t really considered cooking as a career until many years later. “I was chipping away at a political science degree during the day,” he says, “and working the line at an Italian restaurant at night. I always enjoyed cooking, but then I started to get into restaurant culture. The work really appealed to me: the fast pace, the stress, the people, the controlled chaos…it was all very exciting.”

The transition from political scientist to executive chef was an evolution–one that confirmed Molitor’s eventual career path. “I learned a lot about myself over those couple of years,” he says. “I realized that my future belonged in restaurants.”

Although Molitor comes from a strong background in Italian cooking, at Ecliptic he uses that background as a footing, rather than an anchor. “A good working knowledge of Italian cooking is an excellent foundation to build upon,” he says. “I use that foundation to help build future menus. I respect the Italian sensibility of using a handful of seasonal ingredients, doing very little to them, and letting the food speak for itself.”

When designing the Ecliptic menu, Molitor says he wants to have fun, but also provide consistent items that people come to expect (“although with a twist,” he says). “I have divided the menu into essentially 2 halves,” he says, “one of which is fairly reliably the same, the other changes every 6 weeks. If you come in and are craving a burger, you will not be disappointed. Our burger is consistently ranked one of the best in the city.” The “twist” in this case, is the option to vary from the brewery’s traditional burger and savor the Ecliptic burger, which is made with beef, pancetta, and gruyere, served with Russian dressing on a potato bun.

Molitor says “the versatility of the rapidly changing menu allows me to explore different cuisines and flavors. If you want something seasonal, maybe a little more whimsical, I want to offer that.” Molitor’s exploration into different flavors led him to Bluebird Grain Farms‘ organic whole grain emmer farro, which he discovered through Provvista Specialty Foods, which seeks to provide Portland restaurants with the best quality food products at a fair price. Molitor was familiar with Bluebird’s other products and “was impressed with the quality,” he says; the farro was a natural fit with the Ecliptic menu. It’s important to Molitor to have a vegan option on the sandwich/burger side of the menu, and the farro burger satisfies both vegans and carnivores. “The farro burger is one of our most popular items,” he says. “I have changed the style of the sandwich over the years, but the farro patty remains the same.”

“Farro is a grain that works well with many different cuisines,” Molitor adds. “And I enjoy dipping my toe in the water of different cuisines at Ecliptic. I think that is an outlook on cooking that transcends geography.”

When Molitor eats out, he says he wants restaurant staff to care. “I want someone to acknowledge my presence when I walk in. I want the server to be engaged with our table. I want the cooks to care about executing the menu.” This attention to the quality of the customer experience is something Molitor thinks about as he designs and facilitates the Ecliptic dining experience. So whether Ecliptic customers are families with young children or couples looking for a night out, Molitor and the other staff at Ecliptic focus on reading each individual situation and adjusting the service to accommodate. “We are just looking for genuine effort and quality,” he says.

Ecliptic’s delivery of effort and quality is matched by the caliber of its beer and the standard of its food. “We are not just a brewpub,” says Molitor. “We have amazing beer and some pretty damn good food to go with that beer.”

Along with “damn good” consumables, Ecliptic also offers tours and events both public and private. To learn more about Ecliptic Brewing, visit their website or check them out on Facebook and Instagram.

Chef Dave Miller of Portage Bay Cafe has jokingly commented that in his family, his career choices were entering the service or restaurant work. He’s only half joking. “I’m the first male in my family not to join the military in 7 generations,” Miller says. “Growing up I thought I was in boot camp.” He adds–again, only partly in jest–“The first half of the movie ‘Full Metal Jacket’ was just like my childhood.” Military life did not call Miller, but fortunately his family’s restaurant ties did. “I got started in [my father’s restaurants] at the age of 11, washing dishes and bussing tables. Through the years I worked on my knife and line position skills to where I could branch out and away from the family restaurant and learn from someone else.”

By high school Miller was quite certain that he wanted nothing to do with the military, but he still wasn’t sure if he would make a career out of cooking. So he moved to Seattle in the late 1980s, intending to attend dive and underwater video/photography school. He needed to pay for school and he landed a job at Ray’s Boathouse (still an iconic Seattle seafood eatery), which is where, Miller says, “Something happened there that made me realize what my true calling was. I never did attend the dive school.”

Food was, indeed, in Miller’s blood, he discovered. With the transient life of a military family, food provided a stable presence for family life. “We moved every 18 months on average,” Miller says, so being in a new and different environments was the norm. “We were stationed in several states, and overseas,” he says. “Cooking was always the way to bring the family together.”

Living internationally also cultivated in Miller an adventuresome palate. “I grew up eating foods from whatever region we were in, always a little different,” he says. “One of my favorite places we lived was Panama, my time there made a lasting impact on me. Both of my parents were great cooks, and they were always using the local ingredients no matter where we lived.” He credits his parents’ cooking for his inventive style: “I’m sure that’s where I got my creative spark.”

It is also, quite possibly, how Miller developed an interest in regionally-sourced ingredients. Although Miller is quick to note that it was Portage Bay Cafe’s original owners, Amy and John Gunnar, who “were truly on the forefront of the local, sustainable, and organic dining” movement, it’s a commitment that Miller has adhered to during his time at Portage Bay. He says, “It has been very exciting for me to work with so many small farms and local producers. We really take local, sustainable, and organic seriously.” So seriously, in fact, that the Portage Bay menu section’s listing of local producers is called “Eat Like You Give a Damn.”

Given this commitment to quality foods, Portage Bay Cafe and Bluebird Grain Farms are a swell match. Still, Miller happened upon Bluebird quite by accident. “Portage Bay was using Bluebird products long before my time here,” he says, “but my first experience with Bluebird Grain Farms was years ago while whitewater rafting in the Methow Valley. It seemed every restaurant in the valley was using Bluebird flours or grains.” Miller was already sold on Bluebird’s products, but “the fact that Bluebird is local and family-run adds to the attraction of the products.”

Portage Bay’s famous pancakes are made exclusively with Bluebird Grain Farms Pasayten Hard White wheat flour, says Miller. “We also feature the Emmer Farro on our Greens and Grains salad, along with other weekly specials.” He continues, “The customer response has always been fantastic. It makes our job easier to work with great products like Bluebird Grains.”

Portage Bay Cafe has been said to have “the best brunch in America.” Miller says, “Breakfast/brunch customers can be fickle. Some will eat their favorite dish every time, others look for a little more variety.” Portage Bay’s goal, says Miller, “is to be consistent with our standard menu items for those who want their go-to favorites, as well as being creative with our specials to entice someone to try something new. It can be a challenge to keep everyone happy, but that’s what keeps them coming back day after day.”

When Miller dines out, he looks to see what his peers are doing. Creativity always catches his eye. “It’s easy to fall into the mindset that everything’s been done before,” he says. “I really look for what’s next with food. Some call it a trend, but I call it menu evolution. Almost every chef has the same product that’s available, it’s what they do with it that counts.” With 4 Portage Bay locations in the Seattle area, Miller has his hands full, but also has the opportunity to exercise his creativity. That’s why you might find on the brunch menu both a Classic Benedict and a Dungeness Crab Cake Benedict; Shrimp and Grits; Oatmeal Cobbler French Toast. Familiar items, yet with a twist.

Portage Bay Cafe is turning 20 this year and to celebrate, each of the locations will be doing a pop-up 3-course dinner in December. Each location will have a different menu created by the cafe’s chefs. “It will be a fun night for all,” Miller says. Check Portage Bay’s website and Facebook pages for upcoming details.

Miller’s professional life has centered around food, and his philanthropic side leans that direction as well. 17 years ago Miller got involved with Fare Start, a non-profit that provides solutions to homelessness, poverty, and hunger by providing job training and real-world restaurant and catering work to those who struggle with finding or maintaining stable employment. “It’s a program that’s near and dear to my heart,” says Miller. “I’ve been blessed to be able to contribute my time, experience, and skills to them. It is truly rare to have an opportunity to give back to the industry that has given me a career, and to directly see the change you can make to an individual.”

Fare Start students work in restaurant jobs, catering, catalyst kitchens, and mobile meals. Every Thursday, Fare Start offers a 3-course meal for $29.95 at the Fare Start Restaurant. Working under guest chefs such as Miller, John Sundstrom of Lark, and Adam Hagen of Alderbrook Resort, Fare Start students prepare and serve meals with menu offerings as sophisticated as chicken terrine, as comforting as lobster mac and cheese. Of Fare Start Miller says, “It is one of the best things I have been involved with in my life.”

Visit Portage Bay Cafe at one of its 4 locations: Roosevelet, South Lake Union, 65th, and Ballard.