This week the Feast is in McMinnville, Oregon, for the annual International Pinot Noir Celebration. The IPNC is three days in Oregon wine country–an event based at Linfield College that regularly sells out of the 1200 tickets available. People come from around the world to try hundreds of wines and eat meals pared with the wine from top regional and national chefs.
I’m working in the kitchen, trying to keep the knife wounds and burns to a minimum.
A friend, Anne Nisbet, who is a chef and food event organizer from Seattle invited me to be a culinary grunt for the weekend and I agreed. Today this meant dicing and slicing hundreds of potatoes, plating smoked salmon for 400 in a frigid walk-in, roasting massive trays of hazelnuts and then rubbing them for an hour and a half to get the skins off, slicing zuccini, garlic and 25 lbs of onions.
Already I’ve met 30+ chefs, line cooks, culinary students, and locals who love food and volunteer year after year at IPNC. One of the chefs, Adam Bernstein from Eugene, Oregon, suggested that an intriguing series of pictures would be shots of the Mixed Glass recycle dumpster behind the main campus kitchen.
Here is a picture of the dumpster today before the first Pinot bottles arrive.
