We asked four Island foodies to talk about an ideal holiday meal this time of year, curious to find out what might whet their appetite. Not surprisingly, each approached the interview quite differently.
Two of them, George Page and Karen Biondo, dived right into the subject at hand and waxed poetic about ravioli, turkey, squash, pie and the most essential ingredient of all, butter. Jasper Forrester, who is grieving the loss of her beloved dog Wolfgang, talked about the friends who would gather at the table and her personal feelings of gratitude. And Adam Cone went back in time to his grandmother’s kitchen in Seattle — to the days when roasted yams topped with mini-marshmallows were a heavenly treat.
We hope their ideas about food, their thoughts on friendship, their humor and sense of gratitude will enrich and inspire you as you sit down to a holiday table, whatever it may hold.
Karen Biondo: It’s all about butter
Asked what she considers most important at a holiday meal, Karen Biondo doesn’t hesitate. First, she wants to be surrounded by people she enjoys. Second, she wants a meal that pays homage to butter. But not just any butter. Raw butter. Vashon-made butter. Indeed, contraband butter.
She won’t reveal her source, but she will own up to the fact that she buys butter not sanctioned by the federal government.
Biondo is a foodie through and through. She owns K-Jo Farm, where she raises goats and pigs and sells vegetables from her small roadside stand. She’s known for her fantastic desserts that she frequently contributes to the many Vashon auctions. She recently won the Island pumpkin pie contest, held each November at the farmers market.
And she loves butter. Lard, too. “Your life will be much better if you acknowledge the fat in your life,” she says.
How will she use this butter? First, she says, she’ll walk into her expansive garden — a lovely, tangled affair behind her brightly painted home in Paradise Valley — and look around to see what’s growing.
“This time of year, it’s most likely going to be pumpkins, sweet potatoes and apples. You can put butter on all of that,” she notes happily.
The main dish will likely be a standing rack of pork loin from one of her pigs, glazed with herbs she’s found in her garden — thyme, rosemary, sage and oregano. She’ll add butter, of course, to the herb mixture before slathering it onto the pork.
Very likely, beets sauteed in butter and caramelized in brown sugar or maple syrup will be part of the spread.
Pies will also adorn the table. She has cherries in her freezer that she’s saving for a holiday pie, bringing a hint of summer to the autumn repast. She also plans a pumpkin pie, apple pie and pecan pie. The crusts will be made with butter.
The table will be laden with lovely items and surrounded by her many dear friends, she says. Butter, meanwhile, “is going to get its own little throne.”
Jasper Forrester: Giving thanks
Jasper Forrester, an Island farmer, musician and chef extraordinaire, is entering the Thanksgiving week with a heavy heart. The beloved dog she and her husband Will Forrester owned — a Samoyed-malamute mix named Wolfgang — had to be put down earlier this month. He was 14.
But her dog’s death has also deepened her appreciation for Thanksgiving. “Really, it’s so obvious to me. It’s about giving thanks for what we have,” she says.
And what she has — besides a bountiful farm still sprouting chard, bok choy, squash and kale — is a fine Thanksgiving tradition. Every year, she and Will gather with several other friends who don’t have family in the area and enjoy an enormous potluck. The host makes turkey and each guest brings a side dish. The spread, Forrester says, is remarkable.
As they sit down to the table, they take a breath before digging in, a moment of profound appreciation for their bounty. They then go around the table and tell the tale of the dish they brought.
“It’s not a recipe exchange,” she says. “It’s a story exchange.”
Last year, she brought her ricotta cheese pumpkin pie — the 2009 winning entry in the pumpkin pie contest. And she told the story not only of the pumpkin that she grew but the cheese that she made with milk from their jersey cow Hazel.
Hazel is now in retirement, but Forrester has a stockpile of Hazel’s cream and cheese in the freezer. She suspects that she’ll bring out some nicely aged cheddar for the gathering.
She’s also considering baking a savory tart with an heirloom pumpkin called a Musque de Provence, a deeply ribbed pumpkin that is dark green when harvested but turns a rich, mahogany color as it cures.
“The flesh is so sweet, you can eat it raw,” Forrester says. “In France, they slice it up like cantaloupe.”
She’ll likely make it with prosciutto, contrasting the melon’s sweetness with the meatiness of the ham, all of it layered in a butter-infused crust.
For Forrester, this time of year — when the dawn-to-dusk demands of the growing season are behind her — is especially sweet. “This is the season where I feel like we have time to sit down and really savor food,” she says.
Adam Cone: Childhood memories
Ask Adam Cone about Thanksgiving, and he immediately goes back in time to his unorthodox childhood: He was raised in a cabin by a pair of hippy artists who opted not to have running water or electricity. Milk was kept cold in the stream behind their cabin. Meals were hectic affairs where no one sat down.
Contrast that, he says, with his grandmother’s kitchen in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle, where she cooked old-fashioned meals over a white enamel stove — a civilized place, Cone says, where he discovered the joy of cooking.
And though he now runs a restaurant that boasts creative vegetarian fare, he finds he longs for the stuff of his childhood — yams topped with mini-marshmallows, lime Jello with cottage cheese and pineapple chunks — items one would never find on the menu at the Monkey Tree.
“We did a lot of cooking in her little Ravenna apartment,” he recalls.
His parents, however, were not without their culinary traditions, one of which stands out — something they called Candy Bacon.
His father Fred would fry bacon over their pot-bellied stove, then add an assortment of hard candy to it, which broke up in the grease and then became brittle specks of color. It resembled a Jackson Pollock painting, Cone recalls.
“Until I grew up, I thought it was a completely normal thing to eat.”
As for his holiday spread, what matters most to him will be the people gathered around it and the eclectic beauty he and his friends are able to create. He envisions a collection of charming, mismatched chairs and candlesticks with what he called “a nice attention to some details.” Like what?
“Bringing in some plants from the outdoors and putting them on the table — branches and cones. … Not unlike the Monkey Tree,” he says, adding, “It doesn’t have to look like Martha Stewart.”
George Page: Ravioli and Brussels sprouts
George Page has given his life over to gourmet food production. He owns Sea Breeze Farm, now in its 10th year, a small spread on the suburban north end of the Island, where he and his 10 employees raise grass-fed cows and sheep, turkeys, chickens and pigs. He also owns La Boucherie, an intimate, acclaimed cafe and butchery, with a menu that includes such items as white pumpkin and foraged yellowfoot mushroom risotto and pink lady apple and chevre salad.
Little wonder, then, that he’s gotten beyond turkey and mashed potatoes when it comes to the Thanksgiving spread (al-though he loves mashed potatoes, he acknowledges, as long as they’re generously laced with raw, organic butter and served a la minute — or at the moment).
Topping his list for a fine holiday entree, he says, is pumpkin-filled ravioli, “a classic Italian recipe.” The pumpkin is mixed with finely chopped hazelnuts or walnuts and diced onions sauteed in butter. (Like Biondo, he sees butter as a critical ingredient.) The homemade ravioli is simple: egg yokes — a brilliant yellow from his grass-fed chickens — and flour.
His extended family is large and includes some who don’t eat meat, so he often serves salmon alongside the traditional turkey. And while he realizes there’s a certain beauty to a whole bird pulled from the oven, Page doesn’t think roasted turkey ever turns out very well. As a result, he says, “I prefer to deconstruct the bird,” roasting the dark meat and pan-searing the breast.
As for vegetables, this time of year he relishes Brussels sprouts — a delectable food if cooked well, he says. For him, that means par-boiling the sprouts for five minutes, quenching them in cold water, then sauteing them in butter until they’re just starting to brown. Small sprouts are the best, he notes.
He, too, has wonderful memories of Thanksgiving, centered around the pies his mother would make. She often baked 20 pies, he says, including his father’s favorite, praline pie.
“There were always way too many pies,” he recalls.
