Remembering July 26 – the Table Champêtre at Tannadice Farms

by hanspetermeyer

It’s mid-August. I’m sitting in my garden, looking through some fotos of the hottest part of the summer, July 26th to be precise. The afternoon and evening of the first on-the-farm Table Champêtre hosted by Tannadice Farms and Chef Ronald St. Pierre and his crew at Locals Restaurant in Courtenay. Here’s a pic of what the site looked like in the heat of the afternoon when we arrived.

I’m not going to talk about what a Table Champêtre is here. I interviewed Chef Ronald several times prior to the event, and he does a great job of describing why he wants to do these events, why they’re important to the local economy, why they’re important from a flavour perspective. These interviews are posted as text on the Locals blog, as an audio interview on my tumblr blog, and as a video on my YouTube channel.

What I am going to talk about is the feelings this event generated. There is an economy around food, but for most of us – and especially with the very low cost of food that we’ve been enjoying for at least a generation or more here in North America – what matters is taste, and all the other sensual pleasures that can be rolled into the taste experience.

I’m a Comox Valley boy. Black Creek actually. A 1930s German-speaking Mennonite community that was, and still is, very agricultural in its sensibility. Our family wasn’t on the farm, but extended family still held hundreds of acres of former Douglas fir forest-cum-farmland. I grew up feeding chickens, ducks, and rabbits on our Miracle Beach Road lot, and threw thousands of hay bales in my pre-teen, teen, and young adult life. Later, marrying into a farm family, I got to do it all over again with my sons. For me this is very cool stuff. I like being part of the food (provisioning) chain.

Stepping out of the car into a hot, scorching hot, recently hayed field was the beginning of a bit of romance for me: the smells, the heat, the vistas – and so much better to be looking forward to a feast, rather than thousands of bales to be thrown on the wagon!

A short walk away, on the crown of a hill overlooking Tannadice Farms (where they raise the best pork I’ve ever tasted, and some pretty fair beef and fowl as well), and out onto the Beaufort Range and Mount Washington, was a large tent. Relief from the sun. Respite for close to 100 gathered there to revel in what the Locals team (and numerous other flavour providers) had to offer.

It was hot. The humidex reading was 36. ¡Muy calor! Diving into a cocktail of Bluemoon Winery Soleil (fruit wine, from apples) with soda, and some delicious ice-cold mouthful oysters from Cortez Island… in the shade of a tent… very refreshing, very “restorative,” as a friend of mine used to say.

Next, many appetizers. I liked the stuffed squash flowers, but most of all, I liked the ribs…mmmmm. Here’s me liking my chops!

After that… more great food from Tannadice Farm and a host of local growers, Vancouver Island wines from the Cowichan Valley, sweets that put the icing on the cake. In the midst of it all, my foodie friend (who is also a dance floor friend) and I shuffled through a rhumba to “Begin the Beguine” played by a jazz trio giving the scene a surreal acoustical beauty.

In the end, my friend was near to tears, she was so moved by the combination of food, setting, music, and people. The moon had risen, the cattle had moved out of whatever shadowy spot they’d been hiding in and, in the cool of the evening were doing what beef does when it’s still on the hoof: eat, chew, reflect on the quality of grass, low a little, go back to chewing.

We walked off the field, out of the purpling sky, and back into the car. I was thinking of how much I’m looking forward to what Chef Ronald and his co-conspirators are going to do next year…