Barndiva Mother's Day 2020

At Barndiva we ‘normally’ celebrate Mother’s Day with great fanfare, starting with an expansive Sunday menu that is served in the gardens on what is usually one of the last utterly gorgeous days of Spring. Large floral displays snake their way up to the ceiling on the main bar and overflow the back windows as mothers of all ages are fêted. It is at heart an optimistic holiday, a time to celebrate (or repair) the defining relationship of our lives, a longing to make good on that particular defining notion of love that once upon a time set everything in motion.

Knowing we cannot be together this Sunday to do what we’ve done for the past 16 years gave us momentary pause, it’s true. So many won’t and can’t be with their mothers this year. All the more reason to celebrate the relationships that have long sustained us, finding in the shadow of our fragility right now a deeper appreciation of the connections we make to one another that are the most indelible. So as you cannot come to us, we’ve designed a way to bring the best of wine country, Barndiva style, to you.

This is Chef Jordan’s first Mother’s Day with us and we couldn’t be more proud that he’s chosen to honor our traditions with a groaning board of locally grown or produced delicacies - from Freckle Farms, Front Porch Farm, Bernier Farm, Jackson Family Gardens, Journeyman Meat Co, Pennyroyal Farm, RedBird Bakery. We are curing salmon, making cultured honey butter and Sarah is baking up a storm. Chappy is including a bottle of chilled Rochioli Wine. We are especially delighted to send a Barndiva Farm bouquet down from Philo where it was grown and arranged by Daniel.

All pre-orders for Sunday will include delivery anywhere along the 101 corridor from Healdsburg to SF.

For the feast: shop.barndiva.com

This is a great time to add a few special bottles to your delivery. For that, contact our intrepid wine director Chappy at wine@barndiva.com.

Though it will not make it to the main bar this Sunday….

#staytuned #stayhealthy #stayhealdsburg #healdsburgchamber #stayhome #eattheview #shelteringinplace #barndiva #togo #healdsburg #thisishealdsburg #sonomacounty #sommtablehealdsburg #sonomastrong

Think Pink

The Pink Party rides again!

Yes, it's not yet May and Healdsburg can already feel as crowded as Summer while round-about construction and lack of downtown parking (still) sucks, but damn. For bonhomie and style, not to mention a refreshingly up close and personal interaction with a merry and talented band of winemakers and vintners, the Pink Party rocks it. What makes our Northern California wine shed truly great isn't how many grapes we grow, but the personal stories and passions behind the wines we produce. It's something you just can't read off a label. And it was on full display this past Sunday. 

This is why we love the Pink Party: with the first hint of Spring, along with wildflowers and roses comes bud-break and a fresh desire to make wine tasting relevant to a 'local' crowd. The loose knit group who come together here in our gardens re-affirms that to love wine is to celebrate where and how it's grown. 

We have two more collaborative Wine Events in the same spirit as The Pink Party, both before harvest: Fête Blanc and Fête Rouge. Secure tickets before they too sell out! Barndiva also has two upcoming Sommtable spotlight series dinners early Summer, with Flowers Vineyards & Winery and Peay Vineyards. And, starting in May, every Wednesday we will host a different 'local' vintner we admire in the Gallery Gardens. How do we define local? Susie Selby is down the block from Barndiva. Alison Story and Eric Smith are down the road from Barndiva Farm. Barndiva is stretching its wine wings in new ways to connect our lives with what we continue to love about this community. For information on all upcoming wine related events check out barndiva.com/wine or sign up for Eat the View, our blog.

 Apologies to anyone we missed in this Pink Party 'who poured' album, and mea culpa to the two vintners left out of the group shot!  No worries identifying who is who if you didn't meet them: A complete list of vintners and wineries is listed below. 

A great big shout out to all our chefs - especially Andrew, Thomas, Deron and the gang in the Gallery kitchen. There was killer food and plenty of it (ok you had to be quick when those platters hit the orchard table). To DJ Jeremy and the beautiful Janine, and to Daniel Carlson for the incredible blooms - all from Barndiva Farm, we love you! And a special tip of the chapeau to our awesome wine director Alexis Iaconis who, along with Chef Ryan, Lukka, dear Natalie and Cathryn, pulled off another great annual Spring party. To all the beautiful ladies and gents who dressed in pink, thank you! 

Our raffle tickets this year were sold in support of Farm to Pantry. Heartfelt thanks to our friend Chris Paul from Copain, who kindly helped Alexis organize and sell the lots- three full cases of Rosé from generous wineries who attended the event. We were able to raise $1,800 for this very worthy organization. A community, like a country, is only as strong as it's weakest links. 

Sweet Sundays

Food and joy are inextricably tied, often in unexpected ways, but more often than not bound up in celebrations around tradition. Easter is a special joy, coming as it does (and not by accident) at the start of Spring, when the world around us is bursting with color and promise.

Our Gardens were chock full this Easter Sunday with beautiful families coming back from church, regular brunchers, and friends from out of town meeting up for farewell mimosas. Among the bustling crowd were two little girls in matching Easter dresses who made the day extra special for all of us here. Rylee Fancher is an old hand at hunting Easter eggs by now, but this year was baby sister Reese's first go at hunting eggs in the gardens. Coming at the end of a busy week our Sunday brunch service, with it's split second timing, can be a challenge. This past Sunday, all that hard work to make it memorable never felt so good.

Weather permitting the Barndiva Gardens are now open for lunch, brunch and dinner service. The Gallery Gardens will serve cocktails, wine and our full bistro menu. Get ready to be blown away by this new use of the space - previously only available for private parties.  The Gallery Bar Garden is slated to open May 1. 

Coach with Brioche French Toast for a little guest, Caramelized Onion, Blue Cheese and Bacon Tart

Omar with Quiche Florentine & Baby Hearts of Romaine Salad, Eggs Benedict with Prosciutto di Parma, Lobster Huervos Rancheros

Ryan in the thick of things - Barndiva is blessed to have a chef that still insists on 'touching' every plate that leaves our kitchen.

Ryan and Reese find the golden egg.

"Funny Face" cocktails; Barndiva Farm lilics

George making Flying Goat lattes

Scott Noll's Easter dessert: Carrot Cake with Toasted Pecan Streusel and Cream Cheese Ice Cream. 

Going, going...

Almost but not quite gone are tickets to the fabulous Terrie Odabi concert and the Pink Party, a tasting of Rosé from some of the finest wineries around (when I say finest I'm talking Banshee, Claypool, Copain, Front Porch, Idlewild, La Pitchoune, Limerick Lane, Lioco, Passalacqua, Petrichor, Poe, Red Car, Reeve, Rootdown, Unti, Westwood and Wind Gap!) You can purchase tickets for Terrie's concert on Friday April 22 (and make reservation for dinner on the same night) here in Studio Barndiva, or at Copperfields Bookstore. Pink Party tickets can be had at any of the participating wineries or online at brownpapertickets.

Tête a Cochon

Just as the term ‘farm to table’ should imply a direct connection to an actual place where things are grown, ‘nose to tail’ carries with it a literal meaning: start with a whole animal and render as many parts of it delicious as talent and time allow.

There are great reasons to cook and eat this way. Starting with the extremities and moving through a properly raised animal you have brain, heart, liver, tongue, kidneys, sweedbreads, caul fat ~ all nutritious with incredible potential for tasting delicious. Our ancestors in the food chain saw using every part of the animals they killed as a way to honor the exchange of life for sustenance and warmth. They were also hedging their bets, never sure where or when they'd find their next 'free range' protein rich meal.

Which, sadly, isn’t that far off from where we find ourselves today. Grazing land is a rapidly diminishing resource in the world, while the skills needed to raise and humanely dispatch healthy animals “the old fashioned way,” because of our tragic reliance on CAFO's, has become a lost way of life. For those of us who still have access to pasture raised animals, cooking nose to tail honors every step of the journey that goes from animal, to farmer, to chef, to eater. It encourages us, in the most wonderful way possible, to use as many parts of these precious animals as we can.

But nobody said it was pretty.  In a society that gorges on all manner of evisceration day after day, night after night, on screens big and small, we are still, by and large, squeamish as a nation when looking into the animals we eat. Food blogs are inordinately obsessed with staging only the most beautiful pictures ~ which fun as they are to look at ~  tell an incomplete story. Whatever the disconnect (perhaps fascination with fictional gore allows a certain distance to real death) it's important to post images now and again that honestly document what it looks like to cook the way we do. We do not wish to offend. But for those of us still eating and loving animal proteins raised sustainably, getting as close as we can to the history, the science, and yes, the mystery of why we love eating them is part of the story of our lives.

Mimi and Peter Buckley get this. Their two much admired food production enterprises in Sonoma and Mendocino are deeply respectful of land, animals and people. Front Porch Farm, here in Healdsburg, produces organic fruits and vegetables and Mimi’s great love ~ flowers. Up Hwy 128 in the heart of Yorkville, where they have been renovating the old Johnson spread, Peter and a talented young crew are raising heirloom Cinta pigs.Cintas are classic salumi pigs, usually weighing in at well over 300 lbs at slaughter. But when Ryan heard about Acorn Ranch he began to dream much smaller, about the size of the milk fed pigs he loved to cook at The French Laundry. He wondered aloud if the Buckleys were open to producing something special for us. They were. And so we received two 30 lb pigs a few weeks ago, beautiful animals he set about cooking "through" before inviting Peter, Mimi and their ranch and garden managers to dinner.

Several skill sets are needed for nose to tail cooking, but they all start with great butchery ~ the cleaner and closer the cut, the more protein per lb. Each part of an animal is then prepped and cooked using often laborious techniques where the main objective is teasing flavor out of each cut with an understanding of texture and how each cut will react to heat. It takes optimizing the characteristics of each region of the animal, understanding the way grain runs in sub-primal cuts, fat to muscle ratio, which bones to roast, which to braise. Nose to tail is not a proprietary culture but one about taking nourishing culinary traditions and playing them forward. The techniques Chef relies upon, ones he learned working alongside Richard Reddington and Thomas Keller, key off preparations handed down the centuries from country kitchens where the main objective was to marginalize waste. Chefs of this caliber, while pulling on those traditions, have taken nose to tail taken to a whole new level.

Tête a cochon is a good case in point. It is all about using up the least lovely, hard to get to bits in the head. As Drew broke down the whole animal and went about portioning it, Chef wrapped the head in cheesecloth and slowly braised it in a stock with leeks, apples, white wine, garlic & herbs. He then peeled everything off the bones, discarding the fat and gristle, mixing the soft bits of meat with the thinly sliced tongue and ears. This mixture was then seasoned and tightly wrapped in plastic wrap into a roulade, which he put into an ice bath to start the consolidation of protein and fats, then left to rest overnight in the walk-in. (Another route would have been to pack the softly rendered collection of head meats into a terrine mold and serve them cold.)

As the orders came in the roulade was cut into 1 1/2”discs, brushed with Dijon, dusted with Panko and spices, and sautéed in a bit of butter, garlic and thyme until crisp. Tête is often served with gribiche but Ryan finished this first course dish simply, with a sprinkling of chives and a crispy trail of sublime Acorn Ranch bacon. For a special entrée tasting he did the same night, (our first image, above) he served the chop, belly and shoulder, with a summer spin-off of bacon, blistered tomato and avocado, a brighty acidic, fresh olive tapenade on the side. The shoulder in this dish was one of the best I've ever had, bathed in an sauce he'd made by heating the bone jus with a touch of butter, letting it reduce slowly in the pan while basting to form a beautiful silky glaze.

There is no taking away the initial visceral intensity of watching a dish like this prepared from scratch. But beyond the fact that the tradition of nose to tail produces food which is incredibly nuanced and nutritious, we consider ourselves lucky, if not blessed, to be able to cook this way for you.

Follow Us in 2014!

All text Jil Hales. Photos © Jil Hales

Wyeth Acres Vanilla Bean Goat Milk Ice Cream w/ Barndiva Farm Cherries & Honey Almond Pralines

 Chef and I have been reading Cooked in tandem for the past few weeks, amazed and grateful that opportunities keep cropping up to take what we love about Michael Pollen's new book directly onto Barndiva’s menu. Case in point: a few weeks back, after salivating over his description of slow roasted pork (“an irreducible packet of salt, fat and wood smoke… with the occasional mahogany shard of crackling”), I was contemplating an acre of scrub Oak and Madrone we’d just cleared from the upper ridge when David Pronsalino, our forester at the farm for the past 35 years quipped, “You could chip it all ...or you could have a lifetime of wood fired BBQ.” The following Wednesday, at lunch with Mimi and Peter Buckley at their beautiful Front Porch Farm, we got to talking about Peter’s passion project in Yorkville where he is breeding pure bred Italian Cinta Senese ~ the ultimate salumi pig. Which, as it turns out, is also delicious slow roasted. Over wood. Bingo.

In the last section of Cooked, on fermentation, Pollen makes the point that in our 20th century haste to eradicate all bacteria from our food, American producers missed the fact (by accident or design) that, er, actually not all bacteria are bad. Many in fact, like those found in raw and fermented products are very, very good, especially when it comes to bolstering our increasingly beleaguered immune systems. Chef was ahead of me on this one. When the engaging Hannah Paquette from Wyeth Acres showed up at our kitchen door with fresh goat milk he wasted no time asking Octavio to produce a batch of ice cream with it. Diners have been loving it and after one bite I could see why ~ the taste is fresh and clean with the slightest hint of a welcome acidity, like alpine snow that still carries the herbal memory of Spring.

I like goats because they are so light on the land, the meat is lean, the milk nutrient dense, packed with calcium and minerals ~ especially the important antioxidant selenium. What I didn't know before I met Hannah was that absent the protein aggllutinin, the fat globules in goat's milk do not cluster together like cow's milk which makes it easier for the body to digest ~ better tolerated by folks with lactose sensitivity. Goat’s milk is rich in oligosaccharides (in an amount similar to human milk) which acts as a prebiotic in helping maintain the health of the digestive tract by encouraging the growth of valuable gut bacteria.

One of the things I love most about Healdsburg is that you can drive a few blocks from downtown and find an enterprise like Wyeth Acres where they produce goats milk and sell eggs. Lots of them. And that’s not all they do ~ Rian Rinn and Jenine Alexander, Wyeth Acres owners, just opened the Sonoma Meat Company in Santa Rosa, where the enterprising Hannah also works in addition to her feeding, milking, egg polishing and bottle washing duties at Wyeth Acres. CSA's get most of the milk, but Wyeth Acres eggs and Sonoma Meat Company bacon and sausages can be found at the Healdsburg Farmers Market every Saturday.

I had a great time with Hannah ~ though I bombed at milking. I’m not at all squeamish but for the life of me I couldn’t get the right hold on that docile animal's teat and get more than a few squirts out of it. Hannah, on the other hand, is a natural. She has an ease around the animals at Wyeth Acres (besides the pure bred Toggenburg and Saanen and American Lamancha mixed breed goats there are dozens of chicks and hens, a sheep and a few mismatched dogs) that you’d guess came from years of working on a farm. Not so. She fell into goatlove when she and her sweetheart were asked to babysit for Rian and Jenine one winter while they traveled. Her previous experience with goats had come from run-ins with Billy goats, by nature irascible and menacing to whatever strikes their fancy. Working with the females she found a simpatico nature, a lean supple beauty in the way they looked and moved, a subtle intelligence that gave up a perfect product through a delivery system that was almost as easy to access (except for me apparently) as turning on a tap. Hannah, the epitome of girl power in a rapidly changing world starving for relevance, knew she’d found kindred spirits.

The goats jump up and down from the milking platform with alacrity, munching from a bucket of oats and molasses while being milked (their main diet is alfalfa). Two goats fill a bucket with gorgeous white foaming milk, which Hannah filters through stainless steel, then pours into sparkling clean glass bottles. The milk we use to make our ice cream is but a few hours old. Take it from a city born girl who has walked a bumpy road toward understanding what a healthy relationship to land and animal should look and taste like: this is as good as it gets.

We are serving Wyeth Acres Vanilla Bean Goat Milk Ice Cream with Barndiva Farm cherries and delicate honey almond pralines this week ~ and while we’ll swap the fruit in the coming month as summer comes into its own, we’ll try to keep it on the menu as long as Hannah and the goats oblige.  Enjoy.

LEARN MORE: The life changing book Nourishing Traditions should have a place on your book shelf ~ what I didn't know until Hannah told me was that its author, Sally Fallon Morell, is also the driving force behind A Campaign for Real Milk. The indefatigable Morell has some profoundly important things to say about food (this campaign is about more than milk) that you owe to your yourself (especially if you have young children) to hear. A Campaign for Real Milk and videos of Morell can be found online.  Closer to home, Shed in Healdsburg is a great proponent of delicious ways to incorporate raw and fermented things into a probiotic lifestyle ~ with delicious kombuchas and shrubs they serve by the glass, fermenting kits and the occasional class upstairs.

links to: Wyeth AcresSonoma Meat CompanyReal MilkFront Porch Farm Shed

All text Jil Hales. Photos © Jil Hales