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

Dish of the Week: The Lazar Lissitzky Side Salad..... In the Gallery: Fashion for a Cure......

Dish of the Week

Filet Mignon & Ricotta- Egg Yolk Ravioli with "just a salad on the side"

Lazar “El” Lissitzky was one interesting dude, an architect, designer, photographer and typographer who lived between the Czar’s downfall and the rise of Communism in a little window of time when a humanist approach to the arts in Russia was allowed to flourish.  Though he played a role in some of the most revolutionary art movements catching wind in Europe at the time ~ developing Suprematism with Chagall, teaching in Germany with the Bauhaus ~ his lasting contribution was a unique visual language which considered the power of geometric form when projected into the third dimension. Alive today he’d probably be rich and famous at Pixar or Apple.

He was not, to my knowledge, ever a chef, nor does anything you read about him (except perhaps the fact that he once walked across Italy) indicate any interest in food beyond eating it. Yet I think about El a lot these days as I watch our dishes leave Barndiva’s kitchen.

How important is the way food looks to our enjoyment of eating it? Ryan is fond of saying we eat with our eyes first, but do we actually taste things differently depending on the way we perceive them? If a great landscape painting has the power to wake us up to the beauty of nature, does a beautiful plate of food help connect us ~ even subliminally ~ to the place where it was grown, the people who raised or grew it?

Pretentious looking food isn’t what I’m on about; a plate of “beautiful food” that makes no connection to taste ~ and through taste to a field or meadow or body of water ~ is as lost an opportunity as a painting appreciated for its technical prowess that does not have the power to move us toward a love of nature and from there, a desire to protect it.

Over the past year shooting Ryan’s food for Dish of the Week, while I’ve enjoyed writing about all the tricks and clicks that separate the amateur from the professional cook, I find I keep coming back this question. Lazar's language for art had a social context which for him ~ given the times ~ made it relevant. His theory posed that if the right connections were made between the components of "volume, mass, color, space and rhythm," the eye would make an emotional connection to the work which supplied a meaningful narrative, even when the work was 'abstract.' That was art, this is food, but in a curious way the sensory connection we bring to cooking and eating is also the dominate force that defines our relationship to it. We eat to live, but we also live to eat. And the vibrant life of vegetables, the texture of proteins, the delicate colors of edible flowers, the filigreed edges of herbs have all the same compositional resonance we respond to in a work of art. What's more, we don't experience food in a fine dining setting from the prescribed museum distance; we are an essential part of the process, bringing to the experience a crucial interactive piece.

Fine dining is a hybrid art using the physical picture plane of a small 3D canvas with the repetitive timing of a theatrical production. It takes an enormously disciplined aesthetic. As a performance art it starts with sourcing, moves through the precision of cutting, prep and a range of cooking techniques (with and without heat) to the minutes before presentation. Only then are the final 'colors' added 'backstage' in a moment of intense choreography that can make or break ~ within seconds ~ everything that's come before.

Think I'm crazy? Perhaps, but check out the visual appeal and the production values of what Ryan calls "a simple side salad" which we serve with the Filet Mignon and Ricotta-Egg Yolk Ravioli on the lunch menu: slivered dark heart carrots, red and gold beets, tiny toy box radishes, spicy micro sprouts and pineapple sage petals follow a sinuous line that transitions from raw to cooked ~ garlic confit, steamed baby carrots, artichoke hearts and pearl onions ~ halfway across the plate. What's interesting beyond the visual delight of the plating is the narrative arc of the dish, which manages to give equal billing to the salad and vegetables (and for crunch, two house-made lattice potato chips which look like they drifted onto the plate on a breeze) without upstaging the star of the show: a perfectly cooked Filet Mignon.

There are few things in life as satisfying to a carnivore as a forkful of charred steak flooded with glorious golden egg yolk, but the umani seduction we get from eating animal proteins does not necessarily need to rely on the amount of it we consume. Ryan's plating, beyond its visual appeal, also reflects this evolving consideration, and choices that stretch from the plate all the way back to how and where we source our food.

As much as I respect (and try to adhere) to Michael Pollen’s #1 rule: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants", I don't believe any directive ~ no matter how sensible ~ can teach us as much as an actual experience we feel connected to. Dining is a journey, the more visual the better. Our appreciation and joy should be something we build upon, one which grows with every bite we take. Barndiva was created from a desire to feed people delicious food, sourced sustainably, leaving them wanting to eat with us again. Like Lazar Lissitzky, who believed in transformative art ~ the idea that beyond the experience of looking lay connections which could effect a society of change ~ I’d like to think we are also part of a transformative food movement.

Art first, food first, or for us, any thoughtful combination in between.

Tour de Cure

Studio Barndiva is thrilled to be working with our good friends David and Nicole at Brush Salon to help host their Couture for the Cure Fashion Show on Sunday, April 22 in support of the American Diabetes Association. Entertainment for the evening will be an exciting runway show courtesy of four of Healdsburg's most popular shops: Susan Graf Limited, M Clothing, Outlander Men's Gear and Clutch. Before the show Barndiva will provide cocktails and hors d'ouvres, Vin Couture will be pouring wine ~ so don't be late. A live and silent auction will augment the runway show which will star local and professionals models with hair and make-up by the talented folks at Brush. Space is limited for this very special evening. Great night, important charity. We hope to see you here.

To make reservations for dinner after the show, call us at 707 431 0100, and mention the show. For tickets to the event, see below.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales(unless otherwise noted).

Our Decisive Moment

Originally posted May 19, 2010)

When life at the Barn gets too intense, which it has a built-in tendency to do, I walk down Center Street to the Plaza and plunk myself down on a bench. I highly recommend it ~ find a bench, ostensibly with a view of something that has its feet firmly planted in the earth, and just sit. After a half-hour of seemingly doing nothing, you will find your personal universe begin to shift ever so slightly.

Sometimes I think great thoughts, but mostly I don’t, I’m alone with them no matter how mundane they are. Our thoughts are like our children, we always seek some redeeming feature in them. For physical health a run would probably be a better option, for speedy energy a shot of caffeine, but for an instant and refreshing change in perspective very few things beat a park bench.

he secret to this particular form of self-medicating is to leave your cell phone ~ blackberry, ipod, laptop, singly or in any combination ~ behind. This is not as easy as it may sound. We all appear to be increasingly addicted to our techno toys, more than we care to admit. Sitting on the bench this week I counted, in the first 50 people who ambled by on their own, 34 who were walking while texting, talking, or listening to something other than the birds in the trees. This was not even counting the groups of people in which someone seemingly “in” the group was simultaneously engaged in a conversation with someone not even there. We go on and on about how little quality time we are able to find in our oversubscribed lives; where once the mantra for our culture was ‘knowledge is power’, now we moan and groan about ‘too much information.’ Why then, do we find it so hard to turn off convergent technology? We are sensible people, right? Where does this insatiable desire to be connected ALL THE TIME at the expense of our and everyone else’s privacy ~ and perhaps our sanity ~ come from?

My first thought sitting on the bench was that digital social mediums wire directly into the part of our brains that bows to a social hierarchy where not much has changed since High School ~ if you aren’t in, you are out. Nobody wants to be left out. The rise of twitching twittering facebook communities seems to support this theory ~ digital popularity as the new religion, documentation of even the smallest details of our lives, as the new confession.

But I had another thought a few hours later, as I watched a man leave the warm and beautiful dining room in Barndiva to go outside in the rain to reply to a text, despite the candlelight, the music and what seemed like an engaging conversation he was having with his girlfriend and another couple. Perhaps our fear of ‘turning off’ rises from a deeper genetic imperative, an urge to know what’s coming before it arrives. Digital Media is our Paul Revere: if we listen closely we will have time to lock the doors and gather the muskets. Or maybe it goes back further still, all the way to our cave dwelling ancestors, where “knowledge is power” really did mean the difference between life and death. You eat the bear or the bear eats you.

In which case this unquenchable desire for information is a rather cool, if subconscious, form of self-protection. The question then becomes, protection from what? What, in modern times, is the bear?

Probably the same thing it’s always been, (when it wasn’t an actual bear), we are, deep down, desperately afraid we’re living unexamined lives and that we will die without ever figuring out what the point was. But trying to find out what the point is, much less finding a point worth living for is an increasingly quixotic challenge. We exist in a world where global warming is touted as a myth, Sarah Palin is considered sartorial, Monsanto “helps farmers learn to be sustainable,” and the oil slick soaking the coastlines on one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, is, according to a “pre-eminent” scientists quoted in The New York Times, “not as bad as you think.” We live in a world where verifiable truth is taking a beating ~ let's face it ladies and gentlemen, truth gets the shit beat out of it every day. Which makes it awfully hard to follow the real storyline of history anymore, much less how our lives might intersect, and even be reflected, in it.

I get all that. What is deeply worrying is that instead of shifting our search for insight elsewhere, using these astonishing media tools and outlets to develop critical wherewithal, we choose to drop the pro and dity in the search for profundity and just go all out for FUN. It's fun to document the minutiae of our lives, and if anyone laughs at us, so what? We, in turn, through the wonders of tweets, facebook, youtube, twiddish, etc. are laughing at them as well. As for traditional ports of call ~ Art, Film, Music ~ where we once sought and found meaningful narratives that reflected a whole range of human values, the work that now gets produced has become, by and large, contrived product placements in-filled with perishable and disposable information. We are manipulated, pandered to, and infantilized from virtually every medium where sales, not enlightment, is the driving force.

Of course Will Shakespeare wanted people to attend his plays as a testament to his genius, but can we assume he didn’t need product placement to get the bard mojo working? If Jean Luc Godard had to track first day ticket sales, would the French New Wave have survived? Where are the Van Goghs and the John Coltranes, who never made a dime out of painting or playing their hearts out? As Thomas Wolfe knew (another example of a crazy art for arts sake guy) you can’t go home again. But where, exactly, are we going?

If everything we are and everything we love, need, and desire, issues from a personal set of values that can only start its engines when our eyes or our ears engage, it's probably a good idea to take a critical look from time to time at how we form those values, what feeds them, and, crucially, what we need to do to keep them humming. When we lose control of the intricate plot of our lives, even for a little while, we lose the linkages that connect one thing to another ~ before you know it you are inside the mouth of the bear.

The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson believed “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment." By decisive he meant personally verifiable. Bresson wasn’t out to prove things only happen because we see them, but that with patience and perception human beings have the power to visually organize the world so it fits a pattern that means something, and from that pattern a blueprint for living can emerge.

Two years after the second World War ended, when Bresson was, in his own words, “completely lost,” he threw in with fellow photographers George Rodger, Robert Capa and David “Chim” Seymour” to found Magnum, “ a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually."

It seems to me, even If you never pick up a camera, that these are words to live by today ~ curiosity and respect for and about the human condition, fueled by a desire to create a community of thought based upon shared human values. Decisive moments occur in all of our lives, you don’t need to be a Magnum photographer to find them. You do need the time to look and process, in your own mind, the meaning of what you see. You need time to find the artists out there who are still committed to telling a human story of struggle, for only in that kind of story will we also discover the tools to survive.

The technological sensory overload we all suffer from does not encourage this process. Just having more information at our fingertips does not make us smarter. And we need to get smarter, really fast, because what all our wonderful social media and popular entertainments aren’t telling us is that the bear is gaining.

RESOURCES Museums, libraries and bookshops with more re-prints than top sellers are still the best places to experience art that has transforming powers. Dance and Opera are two art forms which, for very different reasons, have both proved artistically resilient and deserve your patronage. Both are great value (Opera only if you watch it via satellite feed).

To watch great cinema, which is still being made (but you won’t find at your local 12 plex) check out www.filmmovement.com. Not a bad film in the bunch, join or risk them being checked out at Blockbuster.

To hear stimulating music and life affirming conversation, check out programs offered at the Herbst Theatre, especially the City Arts and Lectures Series. One of the best nights I had last year was sitting with Geoff and Lukka, listening to Wendell Berry talking with Michael Pollen. Two human beings sitting on a stage just having a chat and it was riveting. How about that? I missed Frank Rich and Mark Danner in April and I’m still kicking myself.

Intersection 5M- a satellite art space, screening room, and event space in SF worth keeping track of. 5M features local exhibitions focused around arts for change. The inaugural gallery exhibit includes our friend Laura Parker: Let's Talk of a System