The traditional restaurant review reviews, well, restaurants. Yet to confine the search for good food to four walls is to miss one of the most exciting trends in food today: the profusion of outdoor, farm-to-table dinners that have sprouted up across the country like morels after wildfire.
Photo by Guy Hand
An offshoot of the local food movement, these harvest-season dinners shorten the farm-to-table distance from the thousand-mile-plus average of most commercially grown foodstuffs to something more intimate – and appetizing. Some dinners eliminate that distance altogether. Peaceful Belly Farm and Boise Urban Garden School (BUGS) set tables over the very ground where your meal grew. You may, for instance, find dessert hanging from the fruit tree that shades your head. Now that’s local.
The annual City Harvest Wine Dinners are set not on farm dirt but on the brickwork of The Grove Plaza in Downtown Boise. Still, the food and drink is locally grown and showcases the labors of about 20 area farmers, ranchers and winemakers -from Rice Family Farms in Meridian to Bitner Vineyard in Sunnyslope to Cloverleaf Creamery in Buhl.
Accompanying the food and wine are live music, guest speakers, and auctions to support Boise’s farmers market and other local causes.
Last year’s City Harvest Dinner, as well as one at Peaceful Belly Farm that same fall, were two of the most memorable meals I’ve had in Boise ever, restaurant or otherwise. The food at both was superb, pressed firmly into memory by the subtle shift in emphasis from chef to less-celebrated farmer.
For full story go to: http://www.idahostatesman.com/204/story/500549.html
|
Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture.
|
