If you’re driving the winding roads of Orcas Island in late summer, you can smell the ripening fruit all around. On one such morning last year, I stopped the car at my destination and met Audra Lawlor, owner of Girl Meets Dirt, who was surveying one orchard’s recent Italian plum harvest in tall rubber boots and a denim shirt. As we walked among the rows of trees with their full canopies spilling over onto the trail, Audra picked up a fallen plum from the ground and turned it over in her hand between us. “Before I got here, most of the fruit from these trees would have rotted on the ground,” she says. Lawlor and her team of five mighty women at Girl Meets Dirt harvested more than 2,500 pounds of Italian plums alone last season.

Some people leave their corporate jobs to rescue animals. Audra left Wall Street to rescue pink pearl apples and Orcas pears. Today, many of the island’s residents see her as the steward of the legacy fruit trees on the island, a 57-square-mile piece of the San Juan Islands, an archipelago that lies in the waters between Seattle and Vancouver, just barely on the U.S. side of the border.

Orcas owes its long history of orchards to the area’s unique climate. Known as Washington’s “banana belt,” and also called the Olympia Rainshadow Zone, this area is protected from excess rain by the Olympic Mountains, Vancouver Island, and the Cascades, and it enjoys more sun annually than mainland coastal Washington. Lawlor likens it to Northern California in its ability to sustain crops.

It was horticulturist E.V. Von Gohren in the late 1870s who first proclaimed the climate ideal for growing Italian plums, better known to the locals as prunes, because that is what most of them eventually became. The mild climate and rich soil encouraged settlers on the island to plant nurseries of these plums, along with apples, pears, and, by some records, up to 20,000 total fruit varieties, from apricots to cherries and berries. But the Italian plums had the prized seeds, the trees bearing them deemed to have the greatest commercial potential at the time.

By the end of the 19th century, many inhabitants had made their way over to work the plum orchards and operate the prune dryers (barnlike structures where the fruit was set to shrivel up), and the economy was surging. The success allowed the building of docks for steamships, as well as a boon for jobs sorting, grading, and packing fruit for transport. It also led to an island that became far more orchard than anything else. The country lane that runs through the center of Orcas Island’s main village is still named Prune Alley.

Many of the legacy fruit trees—entire orchards of them—fell into disrepair during a period of economic downturn around 1915. It was in part due to the rise of railroads, improved irrigation, and heavy planting in nearby eastern Washington, which became a fierce competitor. Islanders began to ignore the fallen fruit, and tree limbs weakened with overgrowth. Thousands of trees were left to die, and the plum industry collapsed. It wasn’t until decades later, when the island began attracting new residents—those who sought out the area for its bucolic landscape—that the trees gained new stewards. Today, Lawlor and her company are working with fellow islanders to revive and utilize those trees that remain.

Raised in Washington, Lawlor spent years working in New York City but always knew she would one day return to the Pacific Northwest. The San Juan Islands were her fantasy destination, but the move never seemed practical. That is, until 2011, when she left her lucrative but hectic job with her husband and two dogs to go full-on Green Acres. The couple bought a farmette on the secluded island, determined to live a simpler life. “I didn’t have a plan,” Lawlor says. “I just knew I wanted to get my hands dirty.”

It was in those early days that Lawlor found a passion for fruit. During her first fall season on the island, the seven fruit trees on her property bore more than 200 pounds of apples and pears. She began making pies and jams but quickly found her kitchen filled with yet more fruit—quince, crab apples, and plums—as her new neighbors welcomed her with edible gifts. “I fell in love with the sense of abundance on my property, and all around me on the island. I wanted to learn more,” she says. She turned to a local cookbook club for education, camaraderie, and inspiration.

Come Thanksgiving 2013, Lawlor found her kitchen filled with boxes upon boxes of homemade preserves she had taught herself to make. At the urging of family and friends, she created Girl Meets Dirt to do something productive with her newfound hobby. She began producing handmade, organic preserves from the island’s ­century-​old trees, and selling it locally under the small label.

As her business grew over the years, so did the need for more fruit and other flavors. But rather than purchasing it from commercial farmers, Lawlor decided to take a more community-minded approach and build win-win relationships with local residents. “Some people don’t even know they have [fruit trees] on their property,” she says. She didn’t have to go far to find her first stewardship arrangement; it was right next door. The 5-acre farm was covered with overgrown, untended Bartlett pear trees, prompting Lawlor to approach the farm’s owners, Dale and Marcia Gillingham, about helping. “It started with a casual ‘use our fruit’ relationship, and then over the years, I offered to start taking care of the pruning in winter just to give something back,” she says. “They were never farmers or commercial growers; they just happened to have bought property with a lovely old orchard on it and are glad to see the fruit being used.” Since then, a few local farmers have offered to sell her items—tomatoes, peppers, and local herbs, including sage and rosemary, and chamomile, which she uses in her jams and products.

Lawlor’s approach is “to make the most of what trees are still here.” She adheres to the practice—as in the nose-to-tail movement—of using all parts of the ingredient. This year, she began processing the pits, bark, and leaves of plum, apple, and fragrant peach trees and fruits (and a little alcohol) to create “tree bitters,” which she barrel-ages using either bourbon barrels from Washington distilleries or spent local apple-brandy barrels. The latter relationship led to her creating her first batch of apple brandy in 2019, in partnership with Orcas Island Distillery.

Lawlor trades with up to 100 people each harvest season, including those on neighboring islands, whose fruits arrive by ferry. “Often, people just show up at my door with boxes of whatever they have,” she says, “and sometimes they just want to trade it for some preserves.”

The Girl Meets Dirt commercial kitchen is more reminiscent of your grandmother’s kitchen than that of a finely tuned business that sells and ships handcrafted preserves around the nation. In summer and fall, dozens of rustic crates teeming with reds, purples, and greens are stacked ceiling high, creating a maze of narrow passageways for Lawlor and her team. Large copper pots sit atop expansive burners that line an entire wall. There’s little prep work required; Lawlor boils the fruit with the skin still intact to take full advantage of the peels’ natu­ral tannins, pectin (which thickens juices so they set into jams), and full flavors.

The team uses a classic French confiture technique to create their spoon preserves. It starts with a quick, high-heat cook in broad-bottom copper pots to remove water from the fruit as quickly as possible to fortify the fruit’s essence. The cooks will then macerate the fruit with sugar for 24 hours to concentrate and sweeten the flavors. Finally, they’ll cook the fruit slowly until it’s broken down into pieces and suspended in a clear, thickened syrup. Some preserves are inspired by Lawlor’s travels. In Spain and Argentina, she encountered dulce de membrillo (a prized quince paste), and now makes a plum version inspired by it. Once the ripe, purple fruit—some from trees nearly 100 years old—is cooked, it’s hand-milled and simmered slowly into a concentrated spread, perfect for cheeseboards or slathering on toast.

As we talk over the sounds of the busy kitchen, Charles West of Orcas Island Distillery stops by to check on a recent collaboration. “How is the pear situation going?” he asks. Lawlor responds: “I can’t process them fast enough. But what’s urgent right now is rotting plums,” she says, indicating her need to get back to her kitchen. Before long, the copper pots are gurgling with deep-purple juices.

Her relentless, ever-growing enthusiasm for the region and its community, and for putting its bounty to use, is as pure as the products Lawlor makes. “The very challenges of the island,” she says—of its particular weather, the island’s rhythms, and keeping up with fruit bursting from tree limbs—“are also the things that make it romantically ideal, and intriguing. Our difference is the fruit we use,” she adds, pausing, “and all the ways we get it.”

The post This Orcas Island Jam Company Transforms Local Plums into Vibrant Seasonal Preserves appeared first on Saveur.

As curious as the tiny cake Alice ate during her adventures in Wonderland, wagashi seems to beckon: Eat me. Look closely at the bite-size Japanese confections’ intricately sculpted exteriors, and you’ll see more than 400 years of history painted into the delicate folds of a chrysanthemum petal or the dimple of a peach so lifelike, you expect juice to drip down your chin upon biting in.

Wagashi—intricate, miniature, Japanese sweets traditionally served with tea—are thought to have been developed during the Edo era (1603–1867), after sugar had been introduced by the Portuguese but was no longer confined to the upper class. Created to complement tea ceremonies, which draw inspiration from the seasons, wagashi commonly have names and designs that reflect the ephemeral qualities of nature. In the West, you’d be hard-pressed to find a donut crafted to resemble the gentle bend in a stream or the delicate burst of pink in a cherry blossom. But at Tokara confectionery in Seattle, you’ll see this reverence exhibited in chef Chika Tokara’s Spring Under Snow kinton, a walnut-size tumble of white-bean-paste threads made to resemble a mound of snow melting as the sun ushers in a new season. Her Uzu—an ocean-blue sphere covered in a fondant-like bean paste, with a pearl-size pink flower and swirls etched across the top—is meant to evoke a lotus petal floating serenely on the water.

Tokara, who studied wagashi and pastry-making in Kyoto, Sendai, and Tokyo for more than seven years, is one of the few wagashi artisans in the U.S. To follow a traditional approach requires sharp attention to detail, a commitment to seasonal ingredients, and crafting sweets that also tell a story. She uses wooden molds and tools rather than machines to shape her designs, which sometimes require several hours for a single recipe. She also makes wagashi’s foundational ingredient—­anko, a sweetened paste of boiled and mashed red beans—by hand, a process that takes 10 to 12 hours per batch.

Though there are dozens of wagashi varieties, Tokara offers a smaller collection to the local restaurants and shops to which she sells wholesale, as well as those who visit her studio during tohryanse (which means “come in”) on the third Sunday of each month—the only day her shop is open to the public. Though her offerings change monthly, based on nature’s cues, her lineup often includes the gelatin-like yōkan; the cookie-like manjū; the marzipan-like konashi; and the light-as-air sponge cake ukishima. The most familiar by name are mochi, but hers are petite rice-flour parcels of anko—nothing like the ice-cream-filled mochi most Westerners know.

Tokara says that in Japan, wagashi artisans study or apprentice for at least five years, and most start out washing dishes before they are allowed to touch a single sweet. Though some of that rigor might be relaxing now that technology is making trade secrets more accessible, she is doing her best to keep the tradition of meticulous design alive in her corner of the world.

She has no online store and doesn’t advertise, and visitors must make a reservation for tohryanse by phone. Arriving at her door, with people lined up in the courtyard of the 540-square-foot culinary studio, you immediately become part of the community her efforts attract. In Japan, community is built around a cup of tea. In Seattle, it’s built around a tiny confectionery run by a woman who has the tools and know-how to keep us awestruck.

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Pat’s Place in Neah Bay, Washington sits on Makah tribal land at the edge of the bright blue Strait of Juan De Fuca, essentially the Northwestern-most point of the continental U.S. From the outside you might mistake it for someone’s home; inside, family photos and Seahawks regalia line the restaurant’s walls. The sounds and smells of bubbling oil fill the room. When you walk in, a man greets you with a smile as he furiously writes down orders. Pat’s Place makes fry bread: a fried, slightly sweet dough about an inch thick, with the chew of a yeast donut.

The menu is short: You can have your fry bread plain, with homemade jam, vegetarian, or supreme. The obvious choice is supreme. Diced tomato, shredded cheese, iceberg lettuce, beans, ground beef, black olives, and jalapeños are precariously placed on top of your bread, hence the common monikers of “Navajo taco” or “Indian taco.” Behind the counter, a woman mixes fresh dough to order, already sold out at half past noon, and carefully pats it out on the countertop, creating flurries of flour with each gentle palming. The recipe is deceptively simple—just flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and lard or shortening—but fry bread is not a simple food.

Fry bread began inland, far from the water and evergreens, with the Navajo and their forced relocation from Arizona to Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 1864. The 300-mile march is known as the ‘Long Walk’ and relocated over 9,000 Navajo to arid desert where water wasn’t potable and traditional food staples like corn, beans, and squash couldn’t grow. The U.S. government provided rations, mostly canned and processed foods including the white flour, sugar, and lard that would ultimately become fry bread. While the Navajo were able to return to their land following an 1867 treaty, they returned to find their existing crops and orchards completely destroyed, a result of the American ‘Scorched Earth Policy.’ In the decades of replanting to come, fry bread would continue to supplement the traditional foodways that the Navajo, even at home, could no longer access.

As other tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations and given the same rations, fry bread spread throughout the West. “It’s a food that shows our resiliency,” says Andi Murphy, of Toasted Sister, a podcast based in New Mexico that explores the origins of indigenous cuisine. “A long time ago it was something we survived on. Today it is something that has so much food memory, it reminds people of their mom, their grandma.”

But on a nutritional level, fry bread is more akin to a doughnut than a dietary staple, consisting of fried bleached white flour with added sugar and high amounts of fat. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates one paper-plate-sized piece of fry bread, without toppings, is 700 calories with 27 grams of fat. This complicates the dish’s symbol and tradition, as health among indigenous populations has long been disproportionately poor. The Indian Health Service found that heart disease and diabetes are among the leading causes of death for Native Americans, who, on average, have a life expectancy of 4.4 years less than the rest of the U.S. population.

This is a result of high poverty levels on reservations, lack of access to healthful food, and discrimination in the delivery of health services. About 25% of Natives struggle with food insecurity, and are on average twice as likely to lack access to healthy foods. Of course, fry bread is not solely to blame, but its consumption is representative of the ways in which indigenous cuisine has been redefined post-contact as knowledge of older foodways has disappeared. This is what projects like Toasted Sister are trying to recapture—and she’s found that she’s not alone.

She recently interviewed Sean Sherman, chef and owner of The Sioux Chef, an Indigenous catering and education group. His cookbook, The Sioux Chef: An Indigenous Kitchen, recently won a James Beard Award for best American cookbook for its important work on reclaiming the Native culinary history that has long been buried. Murphy has also interviewed Mariah Gladstone, a home chef, using her kitchen to share indigenous recipes that extend far beyond fry bread.

Gladstone, of the Blackfeet in Montana, created a cooking series called Indigikitchen with recipes and instructional videos that teach people how to cook and eat a pre-contact diet. This means exchanging processed foods for ingredients sourced from the edible landscape, such as wild game or local berries that are traditional diet staples. Her project was “hatched out of the food sovereignty movement,” says Gladstone. “Because of the systemized colonization of our diets and this multigenerational shift from traditional foods, a lot of people no longer know how to prepare healthy food. That’s where Indigikitchen comes in.”

She sees that the missing link in the food sovereignty movement is knowledge, because better access to fresh produce won’t help if people don’t know how to cook with it. Combining “indigenous ingredients and the modern kitchen, it brings a relevance to ancient foods in ways that foster a sense of connection, but with the nutritional benefits as well,” Gladstone explains. “There is room for fry bread, but I want to provide people with a ton of other options.”

With grocery stores often sparsely distributed on tribal land, Gladstone has sought to revive traditional food knowledge as a means of providing alternative ways of sourcing fresh food, which can include everything from hunting and fishing, to farming, and foraging for edible wild plants. “On my own Rez,” she notes, “my dad’s house is about 40 miles away from a grocery store.” Beyond nutrition, her mission is also about recognizing where food comes from, promoting a stewardship of the land that goes hand in hand with healthy food and healthy people.

Murphy shares a similar experience: She grew up in the Southwest on the Navajo reservation, which has an area of about 27,000 square miles and, according to Murphy, “there are only 10-13 grocery stores that have fresh food, everything else is like a convenience store.” On the stretch of coastal road leading to Pat’s Place, there was similarly only a convenience store or limited general store for groceries. A proper grocery store required following that one road into another town.

When Murphy began talking to local Native chefs, she says, “I was surprised to learn how much of the environment is edible here in New Mexico. Now I’m thinking more about what my ancestors used to eat and it’s not just fry bread, it’s not just the commodity foods everyone talks about. It goes back much further.”

Murphy also explains, however, that “you can’t just turn away from fry bread and never it eat again.” Gladstone echoes this, saying, “We owe our lives to fry bread.” But both believe that it’s best enjoyed in moderation, emphasizing the historic importance of the food, but also the importance of their people’s health, focusing on other traditional and healthier foods that have been erased. As Murphy point out, “It’s kind of like making doughnuts. Are you gonna make doughnuts every day?”

The post Redefining Fry Bread appeared first on Saveur.

“We have to do it before someone else does,” says Yenvy Pham of building out the new restaurant, Phở Bắc Súp Shop, she owns with two of her siblings. As gentrification and big developments rapidly eat up the land around Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, the Pham siblings look to fend off the loss of their cultural enclave to newer, shinier restaurants by opening one themselves—and, they hope, showing others in the community how they can, too.

Pioneering new ideas in the mini-neighborhood of Little Saigon, sandwiched between the Seattle’s Central and International Districts, runs in the Pham family. In 1982, Yenvy’s parents changed their sandwich shop, then called Cat’s Submarine, into Phở Bắc, the city’s first phở shop. Now that her parents are retired, the business is run by three of their five adult children, Quynh, Khoa, and Yenvy, and finding phở in Seattle is about as easy as finding a slice of pizza in New York (and nearly as essential to the city’s identity).

“There was nothing there,” says Yenvy of when her parents opened the red, boat-shaped original shop at the corner of 14th and Jackson. “It was a really blue-collar area.” On weekends, the crowds would spill out of the Vietnamese Catholic church two blocks away and pack in for phở. The community—Washington has the third-largest Vietnamese population in the country—came to shop at the Asian grocery stores and stopped in for soup. Soon, a whole neighborhood sprang up, an unofficial “Little Saigon,” centered on “The Boat.”

Less than a mile north, Capitol Hill’s dense population of hipsters and wealthy new arrivals fills up luxury apartment buildings. To the east is the rapidly gentrifying Central District, once a hub of African-American culture, with its jazz clubs spilling down Jackson and extending into the beginnings of Little Saigon, now filling up with multi-use new developments as the city scrambles to house the tech-boom employees flooding the city.

Today, 40 years after the first Vietnamese businesses opened here, more than 100 small, family-run businesses crowd the micro-neighborhood. A half-dozen bánh mì, or Vietnamese sandwich, shops circle the busy intersection of 12th and Jackson; low-rise buildings hold layers of restaurants boasting their offerings in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Among the three-table noodle spots and two-dollar sandwich counters, the Pham’s Súp Shop sprawls. The space, an expanded remodel of Phở Viet, formerly another of their family’s restaurants, includes a full bar, a coffee shop, an area for people to settle in and do work, and another for hosting events. “It’s the Central Perk of Little Saigon,” jokes Quynh Pham.

One corner holds a surprising mini-business: a natural wine shop called Vita Uva, run by Suzi An, whom Yenvy calls her “Korean-American sister.” The décor is at once modern and, it seems, a little bit of a throwback to the rickety tables and plastic chair style of their parents’ original shop.

Yenvy laughs at the question of how she decided to follow in her parents’ footsteps, “I was tapped,” she clarifies. Like so many children of restaurateurs, she grew up in the kitchen of her parents Vietnamese restaurant, working since her pre-teen years before joining full-time after she graduated from college. Each time one of the five Pham kids graduated, their parents would encourage them to travel and see the world. “But when we got back,” says Yenvy, “they’d buy us a restaurant and make us run it. Just throw us right into the fire.”

A post shared by P H Ở B Ắ C (@phobacseattle) on Jan 12, 2017 at 4:19pm PST

Today, she runs the three Phở Bắc locations and the Súp Shop with two of her siblings (the other two, she says, “have real jobs.”) But running a restaurant in today’s Little Saigon is a little different from three decades ago. The Vietnamese church moved to Tukwila, as did much of the community, priced out of Seattle’s hot housing market: Little Saigon sits just minutes from Downtown, with easy access to the latest improvements to the city’s public transportation system.

“The demographic kind of changed.” Now, says Yenvy, the area attracts a mix of customers: those who have been coming for 25 years and young people taking the brand-new street car over from trendy Capitol Hill. She and her sister Quynh both serve on the board of the Friends of Little Saigon, a community non-profit advocating and acting on behalf of local businesses fearing displacement in the face of the incoming developments. With at least three of those large developments slated for the next few years and a strong possibility of more, the younger generation of Phams wanted to open a place that would serve all parts of the community, and they knew just where to do it.

“We were tired of leasing other buildings,” says Yenvy of their thought process. “Why not just improve what we have?” Even as more people moved into the neighborhood, nothing around stayed open past nine, and nowhere sold cocktails. “We felt like the neighborhood needed something different: that was our motivator.”

Something different, yet quintessentially the same: Súp simply means soup in Vietnamese. The same phở their immigrant parents first brought to Seattle forms the backbone of the menu, with the addition of a few small bites and, of course, the full bar. Weekly soup specials, a short-rib phở, and what she describes as “satisfying comfort food” round out the offerings. What the Phams want to change most are minds, not menus. “We want to set an example for the rest of the community.”

The siblings hope, through their own business and through Friends of Little Saigon, to promote the area as a Vietnamese cultural center. “We hope it will be multicultural, that people of color can live, work, and stay in their neighborhood.” Many of the Vietnamese own their business’s properties, but that’s no guarantee they’ll be able to flourish in the impending onslaught of development. With Phở Bắc Súp Shop, the younger Pham generation hopes to set an example of how Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the heart of Seattle’s Little Saigon can leverage their businesses to help retain the culture and tradition of the neighborhood. It’s no different, says Yenvy, from what their parents did in 1982, when they plunked down the first Vietnamese restaurant in the city before anyone else did. “We’re just optimizing on the opportunities we have. We want to inspire others to do the same.”

The post How the Next Generation of Seattle’s Little Saigon is Keeping the Neighborhood’s Culture—and Food—Intact appeared first on Saveur.

I couldn’t move my vineyards out of Walla Walla,” says Charles Smith as we stand outside his new 30,000-square-foot winery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. “But I could move my winery here,” he says, as he gestures to Seattle’s clattering urban landscape. A former Dr Pepper bottling plant redesigned by acclaimed architecture firm Olson Kundig, it’s all modern layers of steel, glass, and concrete with two glass-walled tasting rooms inside. With his new building, Smith is making a point: Good wine can be fun, and not everything has to be yoked to tradition all the time. Smith even plans to display a massive sign on his roof as a call to would-be visitors flying in planes overhead—not exactly the demure overture you would expect from a respected winemaker.

Smith, a former rock-band manager, is recognizable by his headful of long, silver curls. Though he identifies as a classical winemaker, he has long been stylistically at odds with the industry’s rural romanticism. He started making wines in Walla Walla in 1999, plumbing the rich and gamy depths of Washington syrahs in high-end, vineyard-specific batches. His success with the Rhône grape helped propel the great Washington syrah rush. But years ago, Smith saw the need for good casual wines, too, and he turned out to be one of the great populists of the wine industry. He put punky black and white graphics on his bottles and gave them names like Boom Boom Syrah, Velvet Devil Merlot, and Kung Fu Girl Riesling, a $12 crowd-pleaser. There is plenty of cheap wine sloshing around on the market today. But Smith’s dedication to making wines with varietal character and traceable vineyards at a lower price point was at the forefront of a push toward great, affordable wine.

As we walked through the winery, Smith excitedly showed off the looming presses and fermenters. “It’s all about the wine,” he said. Smith may not want to be known as a marketer, but he’s used showmanship—from rock and burlesque shows at the winery to his bold labels—to market his brand in a way that reaches drinkers who might not otherwise find serious wine. “Sometimes people can’t access great wines because the labels are impossible to decipher,” he says. “My wines communicate in a contemporary style; they tell an American story with straight talk.”

We polled our readers and consulting experts, determining that these people, places, and ideas exemplify the highest quality in food, travel, and big thinking. See all of the 2015 winners »

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Somewhere on a small and placid island at the edge of America, two men in an octagonal wooden house are drinking vintage port and discussing Trinidadian steel drums, Alain Passard, and the taste of wild salmonberries.

“Don’t mention the drums,” Blaine Wetzel says. His meditative hobby, he’s aware, too perfectly completes the portrait of the crunchy young foraging chef who lives in an octagonal house equipped with a woodshop and cider press, kombucha fermenting in casks in the greenhouse, and a sauna out back.

In truth, Wetzel’s not much troubled by the image. He landed on Lummi—which rhymes with “tummy” and is named for the native tribe that no longer inhabits these eleven square miles of towering firs and cedars, hilly microfarms, and shingled cabins, ringed by a single main road and finely pebbled beaches—five years ago. Coming off a three-year stint at Noma in Copenhagen, he was eager to move back to his home state and figured he would work one season at The Willows Inn (a place he’d never seen before answering an online want ad) and then move down to Seattle to find a “real” job. What happened instead was that he fell instantly in love with the place. Fell for the apples that tasted like apples. The sensitive pork farmer who bought five handles of vodka and got his hogs sloshed and happy before slaughter. The wild salmon that swims into the reef-netting of fishermen down the hill. The bushes thick with found berries—wild thimble berries, currants, gooseberries, black raspberries, and tart, blushing red salmonberries so delicate you had to have “butterfly fingers” to pick them.

“There’s a connection here I’ve never felt anywhere else,” Wetzel says. “When you’re working at top restaurants you get quality ingredients delivered to you, but that’s so different from really knowing your neighbor, who’s just some passionate dude who loves to raise sheep, caring for a few animals in a pristine pasture on an island. Here you can pull vegetables out of the ground and the taste is just mind-blowing. Coming here, cooking here—it’s been like discovering food for me. It completely changed how I think about food, what I think food is.”

Wetzel pours us a little more port, which, for obscure reasons, he’s decanted into an elegant Japanese teapot. His house, a five-minute walk from Willows, was hand-built in the ’70s and exudes eccentric homesteader charm. There’s a freestanding Scandinavian fireplace in one corner, an upright piano in another. Cookbooks piled everywhere. Passard—the stylishly neckerchiefed chef of Paris’ famed L’Arpège—looks down somewhat incongruously upon this woodsy nest from a black-and-white framed photo hung above a magnetic knife rack in the kitchen. Through the kitchen window, a bald eagle can be seen circling low over West Shore Drive. The bird casts its regal gaze across dandelion-dotted lawns and the dappled blue waters beyond. I nibble on some heartnuts. What’s a heartnut? Good question. Native to Japan, it’s a variety of walnut with a delicate, twin-pronged kernel that resembles a tiny wishbone. Raw, they’ve got none of the bitterness you associate with a standard walnut, plus they look pretty. A perfect nibbling nut. Wetzel sources his heartnuts from a man known to him as Gurubani, who runs an off-the-grid farm collective near the Sauk River on the mainland.

“I went to see him one day and he’s got this compound of huts in the woods, an awesome shanty town he’s built, staffed by interns,” Wetzel says. “The first thing that struck me was he was wearing giant wooden shoes.”

Now Gurubani and his interns drop by the kitchen once a week with a carefully curated and cleaned haul of wild berries, barks, bog plants, perennials, and weeds, many of which Wetzel has never seen before: a leafy green named Good King Henry, breakfast kale, beach cabbage, Bishop’s Weed, yarrow, a tart succulent called sedum.

Once smitten with the bounty and rhythms of life on the island, Wetzel decided not just to stay, but to double down. He built a farm up the road to supply the restaurant with all the beets, exotic cabbages, delicate greens, bright little radishes, and sunchokes it can use, every vegetable tailored and grown to his own exacting specifications. He brought in a partner to buy out the owner of Willows. And he set himself the slightly nutty goal of turning a century-old, wisteria-enveloped inn with a 26-seat dining room on a sleepy island most people have never heard of into one of the most exciting places to eat in America.

Everyone waves to everyone else on Lummi Island. “You gotta wave,” Wetzel confirms. “If you don’t wave you’re a dick.” A sign at the ferry dock says: “Slow Down.” So I coast slowly around the island, saluting each car I meet, which isn’t many.

A soft carpet of pine needles and fragrant, freshly cut grass lines the looping road around town. I follow it past the reef-net fishing pontoons and the tidy post office and town store, past mossy Volvos parked in steep driveways, driftwood fences festooned with buoys. A sign says “Golden Retriever X-ing.” Another: “Parking for Norwegians Only.” I take Seacrest Drive up into the mountainous, mostly unpopulated southern end of the island, the car radio tuned to bad pop floating down from Vancouver. It doesn’t take long to get the full tour and soon I realize I’m passing familiar landmarks. Driving in circles suits me fine. One day in and I have acclimated fully to the drowsy tempo of life on Lummi.

I head over to Willows and find Wetzel and his team prepping for dinner. It’s late afternoon. The sun is high and benevolent. There’s a fire in the grill outside by the parking lot, the crackle of birch and alder harmonizing with the sound of water lapping at the shore far below. The phonebooth-sized smokehouse is full today: black cod, salmon, trays of tiny mussels, and cured lamb belly, all bathing in the cool smoke of wet green alder.

At the grill, a cook named Nick is rolling turnips directly in the embers. Once they’re nicely charred and cooked through, the roots will be peeled—leaving a few sticky burnt bits around the edges for character—then halved and marinated in lovage-infused whey. Then five hours in the dehydrator and, just before they’re served, the withered turnips are slaked with a grilled shiitake broth and garnished with toasted mustard seeds and tiny marjoram leaves.

I laugh—because of course it doesn’t sound simple at all. Later, though, encountering this dish at dinner, I see what he means. The taste is clear, dazzlingly direct, the essence of turnipness expertly coaxed forward by all this burning and slow-drying and careful reconstituting. Who knew a lowly turnip could possess this meaty depth of character, such goddamned swagger? In course after course I saw this: Through rigor, patience, dutiful attention, and plain smarts, Wetzel finds ways to accentuate the nobility of pedestrian-seeming ingredients, to make them sing. A single shiitake, the mushrooms collected twice a week from a farm in Bellingham, is dunked in shiitake broth, dried in the sun and then grilled at high heat. Shrimp toast—a trio of wobbly fat wild spot prawns set on toasted rye bread—couldn’t look simpler, and in a way it is just what it seems. The only “trick” to getting food to perform this way is knowing what to do: Get all your seafood from a one-boat “old-school burly-assed Irish fisherman” who knows all the spots around Orcas Island and beyond and who carries his catches directly from the boat up the beach and into your kitchen. And what not to do: Don’t fuss with the good stuff once you have it. Brush the raw meat of the prawns with a simple prawn butter made from their shells and then let them relax for a spell at the mouth of the bread oven, just enough to barely warm them and give them a louche, buttery sheen.

One of the ways coming to Lummi has changed him, Wetzel says, is that he’s no longer turned on by luxury ingredients or showy technique. “What I want to do is just share the tastes of this place with everyone who comes,” he says.

“I don’t need to be a technical or creative genius. I just want to show people real food, to share the experience of what we’re lucky enough to get to eat here.”

He used to want to be the fancy chef in a fancy restaurant. This was his training. Now he is the champion of unheralded strains of chicories and cabbages, poster boy for a kind of American cooking that is unique, naturalistic, stripped of unnecessary frillery. He’s intense in a laid-back sort of way. He won a James Beard Rising Star Chef award last year and promptly lost the medal. (“We found it later that night on the dance floor, being danced on.”)

The accidental innkeeper, Wetzel finds himself the ringleader of a tightknit brigade of utterly earnest skateboarding, foraging, tinkering young cooks, servers, and farmers feeding two dozen people a night in a little dining room floating above the Rosario Strait like the prow of a ship.

There’s a moment at dinner when the sun gets low and the light pours through the windows with blinding intensity. After the snacks in the lounge (kale chips dotted with Olympic peninsula truffle, a warm donut-type thing filled with meltingly soft black cod), it’s salmon time. The fish has been lounging in the low heat of the smoker all day. The bite is small, sweet, and rich. And there squinting into the honeyed light, I hear myself murmuring. Out loud. Talking to my food. And I’m not the only one. The low hum of contentment spreads across a roomful of people drinking tea made of birch bark, wondering at the ethereal intensity of a single mussel (smoked over alder, brushed with mussel stock and seared on a hot plancha, then paired with a bit of creamy, roasted sunflower root), unable to think of another place in this big country where we’d rather be right now.

“We’re just throwing rocks off a mountain,” Wetzel observes, throwing a rock off a mountain.

“Throwing rocks into the sea? That’s a real thing up here. That’s a nice way to spend your day.”

For once the sea is out of sight. We’re spending part of our day hiking through Baker Preserve, a lovely fern-filled sanctuary near the center of the island with a slightly prehistoric feeling.

“This island was the historical berry-picking grounds for the Lummi tribe,” Wetzel says. They fished these salmon-filled waters, harvested the fruit of the land. “Generations and generations of natives helped the berries grow by picking some over others, spreading seeds, pulling out what they didn’t like—this is why we’ve got such a variety here now.”

Wetzel talks regularly with culinary historians at the Northwest Indian College, looking for insight and clues into traditions and secrets of the culinary topography of this edible paradise.

“What we cook is a reaction to what’s happening here on the island. A reaction to people you meet, to what grows well here, to the experience of tasting things as they were hundreds of years ago. All of that culminates in the food of the Willows.”

Tonight the restaurant is closed, so the kitchen crew plan to cook dinner for themselves on the beach. It’s a not uncommon occurrence: Life on a small island means you hire people you like to cook with on your days off.

As the sun begins its slow descent over the gulf islands of British Columbia, the merry band—boys in hoodies, girls in big nautically themed sweaters—sets to work on a casual weeknight feast. Shigoku oysters are shucked and set on ice. Cold bottles of Oregon white are opened, drained, replaced. Wetzel improvises a grill by the water: a rough circle of lanky, gnarled gray logs in the sand, a small grate set over burning wood. He pokes it with a found branch that looks like a shepherd’s walking stick. The fat chops of those happy drunk pigs that the chef helped to butcher have been marinated in verjus and juniper berries. Leeks are tossed with oil and thrown on the grill in foil packs. Someone’s brought frilly horsetail stalks, plucked from the roadside, curious to know how they taste. Potatoes confited in oil, then smashed flat, are set to crisp on the grill. More wine. Some beer.

It’s dark now. Another lovely Lummi sunset come to a close. The coals of the fire glow red in the gentle, cool breeze. The name Lummi is thought by some to have been coined by Spaniards who approached by these seas and witnessed bonfires like this on the shore: Luminara.

Wetzel places a dozen wavy-lipped oysters in the fire. As they pop open and release a burp of steam, he pulls them out and we eat them from the hot shells. The meat is plump, full of smoky juice. Again a chorus of contented murmurs.

Wetzel smiles. “The idea of putting oysters right into the coals and just forgetting about them and eating them as they are?” he says. “I don’t know if that translates to a magazine, but in real life it’s awesome.”

Recipes

Verjus-Brined Pork Chops with Marinated Leeks

Marinated and Grilled Shiitakes

Grilled Rockfish

Flaxseed Caramels

Getting to Lummi Island and The Willows Inn

Lummi Island is accessible from the mainland by a five-minute ferry ride from Bellingham, Washington, which is a three-hour drive north from Seattle or a two-hour drive south from Vancouver and is home to an international airport. The Willows Inn comprises seven guest rooms in the main building, where the restaurant is located, and eleven freestanding units. It is closed in January and February.

Willows Inn
2579 W. Shore Drive
(360) 758-2620

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The first time I went to Edison, Washington, was out of desperation. I was with my husband Brandon, our two-year-old June, our dog Alice, and our friend Ben, on the way back from a day trip to Bellingham, a coastal college town ninety miles north of our home in Seattle. Ben, who is an opera director, was holding an audition in Bellingham, and it happened to coincide with our day off, and because Brandon and I like it up there—so much so, in fact, that we were married there—we invited ourselves along. It was a great day, unexpected and unplanned. But by the time we got on the highway to head home, it was late evening, our afternoon ice cream snack was long gone, and we were hungry. It was almost June’s bedtime. We had to act fast. Brandon had heard about a bar, he offered, called the Old Edison, about twenty minutes south of Bellingham, an old dive selling fried local oysters and burgers made from grass-fed beef. We took the exit for Edison and arrived at the bar in high spirits, only to notice the NO MINORS sign on the front door. Ours being a properly impromptu road trip, with its requisite carefree spirit and cheerful canine mascot, we had forgotten that in Washington State, one cannot legally go into a bar with a two-year-old. We stood beside the car, trying to look nonchalant as we starved to death.

Edison is a small town by any definition: its population was 133 at the 2010 census, and its main street, Cain’s Court, is roughly two blocks long and two narrow lanes wide. (Edison isn’t technically a town, if we’re really getting down to it; it’s a “census-designated place,” an unincorporated community within the largely agricultural Skagit County.) Most of the dozen storefronts along Cain’s Court were dark, but the lights were still on at Breadfarm, the bakery at the end of the block. We’d first heard of Breadfarm when we got married—at our rehearsal dinner, the caterers served sandwiches of beer-can chicken on their rosemary-sea salt buns—but we’d never been to the shop itself.

So Brandon hoisted June onto his shoulders, and we walked down the block, catching the bakery ten minutes before closing. We bought a loaf of Samish River Potato Bread and the last of the pastries in the case, and I noticed a glassine bag of graham crackers and added it to the heap. Back outside, Ben tore into the bread. Brandon reached for a pastry. I ripped open the bag of grahams and stuck my nose in. It smelled like browned butter and cinnamon and comfort. I took a bite, and it melted on my tongue like a spiced shortbread. I passed one to Brandon. His eyes went wide. I gave one to Ben, and he threw his head back and moaned. We stood in the street like that, on a cold March night, quietly freaking out. By the time we got back to the car, we were halfway through the bag.

The second time I went to Edison, Washington, was because we’d run out of graham crackers. For efficiency’s sake, I went alone this time, though I brought Alice for company, as well as another old friend, my checkbook. (Most of Edison operates on a cash-or-check basis.) It was an overcast morning, and because I sometimes—fine, always—like to live the Seattle stereotype, I queued up some Mother Love Bone and early Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog (young Chris Cornell! So much hair! Marry me!). Sixty-five five miles up I-5, just past the charming town of Mount Vernon, I took the exit for Washington 11 North / Chuckanut Drive, a two-lane road that cuts northwest across farmland toward Edison and its neighboring community, Bow. There are two roads that lead to Edison, and you really can’t go wrong with either. Take Farm to Market Road from Mount Vernon, and you’ll pass verdant fields dotted with sway-backed barns and bordered by mountains half-hidden in fog; or take Chuckanut and get all that, plus the delight of hearing the Google Maps lady try to pronounce “Chuckanut.” This particular morning, Alice and I saw fields thick with potato plants, quarter horses grazing on kelly-green pastures, Victorian farmhouses wearing wrap-around porches like hoop skirts, and, not ten feet from the road, a great blue heron standing elegantly in the mud. I hung a left at Bow Hill Road—note that perfectly tiny post office!—and, watching the Edison Slough zigzag past the window, we arrived shortly in Edison.

Edison feels like a farming village turned artist colony, salty and smart. There’s a sense that things are happening there, and I don’t just mean a shuffleboard tournament or the Sunday night live music and dancing at the Old Edison (“the Old E,” if you’re in the know). Before I hit Breadfarm, I stopped for a coffee at Tweets Café, where peeling pink deer statues lead the way to the door (“You can make your check out to Tweets,” says a barista in a newsboy cap. “That’s spelled P-A-T-R-I-C-K.”); and I did some window-shopping at Hedgerow (vintage tableware, handmade leather goods) and Shop Curator (giant sea stars, bones, strange and beautiful objects under glass). I perused an exhibition of textile work at Smith & Vallee Gallery and bought some local Gothberg Farms goat cheese at Slough Food (“Edison is centrally isolated. We’re close to Bellingham, close to Mount Vernon, but out here on the back roads,” owner John DeGloria tells me. “Do you dance? I don’t dance, but I dance on Sunday nights at the Old E.”).

Breadfarm sits next door to Slough Food, and when I walked in around eleven, there was a line. Opened in 2003 by husband-wife baking team Scott Mangold and Renee Bourgault, the operation looks small from the outside but churns out an impressive variety of naturally leavened breads and handsome baked goods, using mostly ingredients from Skagit County farmers and producers. I bought another potato bread, and because it was Saturday, there was Cinnamon Twist Challah, so I got one of those, too, along with two packs of the graham crackers I came for. Renee, whose province at Breadfarm is cookies, pastries, and other non-bread items, was out working their stall at the Bellingham farmers’ market, but the woman who rang me up saw my bag from Slough Food and smiled conspiratorially, confiding that her favorite use for the grahams is as a vehicle for fresh goat cheese: “It’s like eating cheesecake!” I decide that I am never leaving—except that I have to be back in Seattle by four, to take over childcare when my husband leaves to work at our restaurant.

Luckily, there is cell coverage in Edison, and I caught up with Renee a few days later to beg for the recipe. I can’t take a road trip every week, but at least I can have graham crackers.

See the recipe for Breadfarm’s Graham Crackers »

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Tonic water derives its bitterness from quinine, a purified substance derived from the bark of the cinchona tree. Paired with gin, tonic water makes for one of summer’s most refreshing cocktails. At Bar Code in Bellevue, Washington, the gin and tonic is made in a unique manner: The gin itself is infused with cinchona bark, citrus, and other aromatics. Then, rather than tonic, soda water is added to make the drink. This recipe first appeared in our June/July 2014 issue with Camper English’s story “Miracle Cure.”

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Writer Sarah Manyika was working on a novel about a woman pining for Nigerian comfort food, so we made jollof, a West African rice dish loaded with tomatoes and peppers. That’s the kind of connection we relish as cooks at Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island in Washington’s Puget Sound. We love our jobs. And we love our kitchen, a jam-packed but highly efficient space. It’s got oodles of drawers, shelves, and nooks: Its revolving corner cabinets hold Dutch ovens and mixing bowls; blenders and measuring cups go in deep drawers beneath the island where we do prep work; and pots hang right next to the range, their lids propped on a pegboard. Along one wall, there’s a baking area with a granite countertop, wall oven, and pull-out shelves for storing bins of flour. It’s opposite the farmhouse sink and a wide picture window; while cooking, we watch eagles diving in the marsh. Afterward we sit down to a family-style dinner with the writers, who by nature, happily, are verbose in their gratitude.

The Dynasty range is quirky — it’s hotter on one side—but it’s great for fast cooking: The oven is wide and has a convection setting, the gas burners are really powerful, and there are warming lights set into the hood.

The kitchen is open to the dining room, where dinner is served at a 19th-century French farmhouse table, and a snack nook holds jars of house-dried fruits and vegetables for residents to nosh on.

The island in the center of the room is incredibly functional. A large cutting board is set on top of it, and all sorts of storage spaces are tucked beneath. An additional leaf adds more working space when we need it.

The refrigerator in this kitchen contains just lunch and snacks for writers. We keep anything of volume outside in the longhouse by the garden. The freezer here, for the most part, holds ice cream and breads.

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When I eat bread, I want to taste the grain. That’s why I’m happy so many North American bakers are embracing flavorful heritage grains and stone-ground flours that produce complex, character-driven breads. For this I thank the Kneading Conference, annual gatherings in Maine and Washington state where bakers, millers, scientists, and farmers come together to celebrate traditional baking.

The conferences draw some of the continent’s finest bread makers to impart their techniques and wisdom, including Barak Olins of Zu Bakery in Freeport, Maine, who mills rye flour for a dense Lithuanian peasant bread, and Dawn Woodward, who sources local stone-ground heritage grains to make richly flavored crackers at Evelyn’s Crackers in Toronto. They, along with many others who attend these conferences, embrace age-old traditions, while introducing a whole new world to bread lovers in the U.S., Canada, and beyond.

Naomi Duguid is a SAVEUR contributing editor.

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