I had been looking forward to this for months.
A beautifully sited dinner table winding into a vast landscape of rocks, fields, cliffs or even coves for an Outstanding in the Field dinner out in the middle of nowhere.
Outstanding in the Field is a series of "farm dinners" - getting people out into the land, the landscape, a farm ... the earth. Then getting a great local chef onto that land - and a team of cooks, servers and organizers - to prepare a multi-course feast for well over 150 people. Through this setting and the people and the food, you are reconnected with where your food comes from. This was Jim's founding vision. And it took years to catch on.
(Jim, the founder, talking about the tough beginnings, how a Range Rover commercial saved the concept (by providing a revenue stream for him) and kept him in it to try one more time ; years later, here we are)
Whatever. What I was looking forward to was a beautiful meal, in a simple, beautiful, tranquil setting with friends. And a lot of nice wine.
From Austin, we drive, and drive and drive. Finally there, at Jolie Vue Farms, the site for the dinner - and in not Brenham actually - but Independence, Texas. And our gracious hosts, who have developed this property into the organic farm and ranch it is today, are Glenn and Honey Ann Boudreaux.
The land was a mess when they got it. Torn up and dried out, worn down and out from decades of fertilizer, pesticides -- all the stuff of modern agri-business. They didn't want any of that. If God thought the sun and the earth were good enough to make food, why bother with all that extra stuff. So Honey said, or something like that.
So they brought the earth back to life. No more chemicals. No more artificial fertilizers. And the land rewarded them for the efforts. So many natural grasses came back to fill the fields they had to summon folks from Texas A&M to make sense of it all. All told, 16 native grasses: all gone before, all brought back to life now.
(Honey talking in the field of natural grasses about the history of the farm, farm/ranching life, and telling us about heffers and steers and what not)
We learn where the pigs roll around, and how the animals get rotated to different pastures to let the earth rebound in one pasture over enough time; how this summer and last summer went for them and how they and the livestock survived (barely);how the new water tanks/troughs for the pigs save water and waste less of this precious resource; how smart the pigs are, how they rolled around in the summer with the rain shower waterheads and made giant pools of mud that you can still see dented into the earth; how the water hole is so low now - but it used to be so much more and used for the kids' fishing and swimming - and for helping to catch their own food. Some weekends, the kids would be tasked with making do on their own: if you don't catch or find your own food, you don't eat.
Thus prepped with the idea of working for your food, we have to work to reach our food. The table, the hallmark table of these Outstanding in the Field farm dinners, is way up high on another hill. We would have to walk up there.
Clearly this is part of Jim's founding vision.
Jim surely wants us to walk up and honor the table as part of the earth we are walking on, earth that literally did produce some of the very food we would be eating.
Another ritual, or tradition, is the bringing of your own plate. You drop it off with the organizer upon entering the farm.
You retrieve it later up the hill, as you get closer to the table. There also was a pile of plates for those who had forgotten to bring a plate, a pile made up of plates forgotten at previous farm dinners. And then, the table.
Just out there. In a field. Just as they say. And then some food.
(the first course - including among other things scrapple, blue corn grits, a 63C egg, which I expertly, so proud of self, identified as sous-vide prepared and the 63C was the temperature, in celsius; on my blue Sasaki wedding gift plate (1 of 10) that I brought for the event)
And more food. And then more food. The bycatch fish - looking all prehistoric. I loved that the best perhaps.
And by now, with wine at each course, and the sun setting ever so slightly, and the chill of these cooler days descending, we start to get a little feisty in our well-fed comfort zone pf this community of a long long table.
We get up. We walk out and around and out into the vast field. The moon is starting to rise, just as the sun is setting.
Dessert comes.
Then it is over.
On the ride home, we talk a lot to stay awake. But back here, and even while there, I realize that what I expected was not what I got. Not exactly at least.
I expected a super high-end gorgeous meal, with exquisite wine, and maybe more than a little bit of food snobbery at the table, with carefree chatter of friends all around you. It was sort of that, and there were glitches to be sure. We almost got forgotten entirely, our group of 8, on that first course. The wine was a little skimpy on the serving sizes I thought at first. The courses came slowly. I almost had to whip out a protein bar.
But all logistical glitches faded - soon. And the most I got out of it was something entirely unexpected.
As Honey Ann was talking, without judgment for our wasteful ways in the city at all, I realized, as if a cow patty had been thrown at my head to wake me up, was how much my life affects what I eat. Duh.
The water I use to water my lawn is water that is not going to help keep the animals alive that are being fed on thriving native grasses nourished in only the old-fashioned ways. My choices to eat fruits and vegetables out of season only encourages the food system machine to spend more resources to produce an artificial food cycle that knows none of the ebb and flow of nature.
In the heat of the moment, on that farm among the people helping to bring back a more natural and normal way of living and eating, I vowed I would stop watering my yard. I hate doing it anyway - the cost, the waste.
I am back in Austin, and as it is fall I am not tested on the no watering rule. I only watered one a week anyway when I did water. But the farm dinner worked for me, and in this awakening way I never imagined.
Outstanding in the Field takes its show on the road - in Asia and South America, for example. It was in Brazil recently. But never France. Almost one time, but it did not work out. So I learned from Jim during the farm tour.
They wash all the plates by hand when everyone is done with the last meat course. It is there for you to pick up as you leave the table for your walk back down the hill and through the farm.
I chose to leave my blue Sasaki plate. I like the idea of it being used by some other haggard single working mom who barely got her act together to get her ticket and get to the farm site for the dinner and so forgot she was supposed to bring a plate.
I also like the idea of seeing my plate again someday at another Outstanding in the Field dinner...maybe in France.
(A bientot my blue Sasaki plate! ...Bon voyage, safe travels, and see you in France!)
