Traveling Feast

What more needs to be said?

Thursday: Today in the kitchen at the International Pinot Noir Celebration is both a ramp up to a weekend of fine dining and a reunion as the kitchen crew alumni arrive with their knife kits and chef whites.  Preparation begins for meals throughout the weekend and the first headliner chefs arrive to work.  Chef Mark Hosack hands out kitchen assignments as people arrive:

Snap these beans.

Zest these limes.

Shuck this corn.

Pit these olives.

Do whatever Chef Priest asks.

Press these tortillas.

Cook that octopus.

Bias cut this celery for a potato salad.

Other chefs filter in: those with their names in the weekend’s program next to the course at one of the lunches or dinners that they will prepare… often with our help.  More prep tasks are handed out.

My intimate companions for the day were yellow beans, limes (and my Microplane), olives, four types of beans for a salad, and Mexican chocolate for Molly’s Mole.

The theme for the staff dinner tonight is Mexican and Molly Priest is in charge, and her instructions to me as I incorporate the chocolate at the end is definitive: “Don’t waste a drop.  That stuff is gold.”

I take just a nip once the chocolate is melted it.  It doesn’t look like gold, but I agree.  It is.

This is only my second year, but in addition to plenty of work, the kitchen is also full of welcome smiles.  I suspect it is the smiles as much as anything that keeps the crew coming back: smiles, some great Pinot, and time working alongside some of the most creative culinary figures in the Northwest.

Melissa has a great smile...

Last year a friend who calls herself a “chef and food wrangler” invited me to spend four days working in the campus kitchen for Linfield College alongside some of the best chefs from around the Northwest.  “We don’t pay you, but we give you room and board.  The wine is not bad, and you’ll get to meet some amazing chefs.”

I went.  The event is called the International Pinot Noir Festival and for the better part of the week each summer the IPNC folks take over the college in the heart of Oregon’s Williamette Valley.  The wine is excellent and the food is as well.

Today I’m headed back for more 10 hour days in a hot kitchen for no pay and I’m looking forward to it.  My friend describes it as “summer camp for chefs” and most of the other volunteers in the kitchen (who actually are chefs in their own right) agree.  They keep coming back because it is fun.

Last year I kept a running record in pictures of the bottle bin in the back.  I might do so again.  Over the course of the long weekend it goes from empty to overflowing.

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.