In This Edition

Fresh Blueberry Tart

Customer Profile: John Platt of St. Clouds

Sustainable Food celebrated at Ray's Boathouse

Split Farro NOW Available!

Notes from a Farmer    

Good and not so good news from the fields of Bluebird as we head into September, usually the mellowest month of the year weather-wise.  However, Mother Nature sure has this farmer guessing this year.  In a valley I once lamented didn’t get enough weather…!

Indeed, we harvested the first of this year’s emmer on the 24^th-25^thof August.  Although it was only one small field, we had an excellent yield and quality and tried to get the kinks worked out of the combine and other equipment for the real harvest.  Whether or not this small field is a harbinger of the rest of harvest I cannot say, but I am certainly anxious to find out!

Unfortunately, right after feeling confident in our crop stands and overall pleased we’d grown about as good grain as ever, the last day of July kicked off some violent thunderstorms that I hope are not repeated again anytime soon.  The good news: we dodged most of the hail.  The not so good: the combination of wild winds and heavy rains flattened the heaviest stands of grain.  The weather did not kill the grain, but now that a fair bit of it is lodged, it will slow the curing cycle some and certainly will slow the actual harvesting.  Not only will it spread the harvest out more, but picking up the lodged grain with the combine header isn’t nearly as pleasant as cutting the grain two feet off the ground.

I’ve already installed lifters on the header and we are prepared to peck away but are waiting on, guess what, THE WEATHER.  I never thought I’d worry about warm, dry conditions in this valley but we sure need a month of that now.  The encouraging history, of course, is that September generally has the ideal harvest conditions if any month does.  I’ll let you know in the next news…

Meanwhile, I feel we still have a better than average crop.  And I’ve really enjoyed working with my latest right-hand-man Joey Beck who joined us back in late July.  He has been a big help in the granary and I can’t wait to get him hauling and dumping grain!  Then, onto fall field work as we prep, already, for next year.

Good luck to all for the first week of school and welcome to my favorite time of year. 

 Cheers, Farmer Sam

Bluebird News

Local Food Celebrated at Ray's Boathouse!

Bluebird was fortunate enough to be included in Ray's Boathouse sustainable dinner series last Thursday night.  I joined Keith Swanson of Thundering Hooves.  We spoke to Ray's staff about sustainable farming and had the pleasure of meeting some of Ray's customers.  Thank you to executive chef Chef Peter Berk and Ray's for a splendid meal, perfect atmosphere,  and for promoting local foods on your menu.


 Split Farro is now available on our WEB Store in 1.3 lb packages.  This coarse crack of  Farro is a more nutrtious substitute for bulgur wheat.  Cooks in about 20 minutes.

Recipe of the Month:  Fresh Blueberry Tart

 Customer Profile: St. Cloudsrestaurant co-owners John Platt and Paul “Pablo” Butler were colleagues at a Seattle-area high school when they decided to unite John’s restaurant dreams with Pablo’s entrepreneurial spirit. John had spent the first decade and a half of his professional life working as a teacher and administrator at independent high schools and while food was always an important part of his life, he hadn’t yet taken it seriously as a potential profession. “Fantasies about owning a restaurant were always percolating,” muses John, who regularly cooked for students and faculty. “Then finally I decided to act on my dream and Pablo was right there with me.”

St. Clouds—which earned both its name and its mission from the John Irving novel “The Cider House Rules”—opened in Madrona in 2000 as a welcoming place with comforting and contemporary food, live music, and a commitment to building community.
Food plays a vital role in sustaining community, says John, which is what excites him about owning a restaurant. “We get together around food; it’s the thing we generally don’t do by ourselves,” he notes. “Fundamentally it’s a gathering and connecting experience.” In the restaurant John sees food helping create intimacy and joy every day. “Sometimes you watch a haggard family come in,” he says, “and everyone is tired at the end of a long day. Then they start to relax and enjoy the food in each other’s company. And there are these moments of joy, and you realize that you helped in some small way to make them happen. That’s what really jazzes me up about this work.” “It’s secular communing,” he adds, “breaking bread together.”
John and Pablo extend their philosophy about food and community to the Homeless Cookingprogram that St. Clouds started in 2001, when 125 newly homeless people were living in “Tent City” in Ballard.  St. Clouds reached out to church members and others in the restaurant community to provide home cooked meals to Tent City’s residents. “It was an amazing experience,” John says, “to be able to do what we do well—cook good food—and apply that to making someone else’s life more comfortable.” The program gained momentum and rhythm and St. Clouds now provides a monthly meal to hundreds of homeless people, created from scratch and prepared by a cadre of volunteers.

While great food and the success of St. Clouds are central in John’s mind, they remain inextricably linked to his business’s ability to do some good in the world and he encourages other restaurant owners to do the same. “We’d love to help someone else set up something like our homeless cooking program. It took some work to set up, but we’ve got all the details worked out now and it really runs without an undue amount of extra effort. We’ve got a great group of enthusiastic volunteers, we all show up at the restaurant early on the homeless cooking day, there’s a flurry of activity, and by 1pm we’re done.” And the result?  A fresh home-cooked meal for 400 people.

St. Cloud’s relationship with Bluebird Grain Farmswas both serendipitous and inevitable. John’s good friend Jonathan Sundstrom at Lark regularly uses Bluebird’s whole emmer farroand John said when he first tasted it, he had never had anything like it. “It was so good,” he said, “so unique—you could tell it could be used in so many ways.” Then one day John’s dentist, Chet Woodside, mentioned that his step-daughter and her husband farmed organic grains that Seattle restaurants were beginning to feature. “It was two forces at work,” laughs John, “and the next thing I knew Sis [Brooke’s mom] was bringing me bags of farro to try out.”

St. Cloud’s restaurant format coupled with its primary clientele of dedicated regulars doesn’t allow for many menu changes, but farro side dishes give the chefs room for creativity. “Farro allows us to put a signature on the plate,” says John, “whether it’s a cold Asian farro salad, or a risotto—a farrotto!—it gives our customers the comfort of the predictable menu items, the ones they want to see every time they come in, with the thrill of something new, more adventuresome.”
“We also really like that Brooke and Sam are owner-operators,” adds John, who feels a particular kinship with those who own a business and work it themselves. As he’s cooking, bussing tables, or engaged in other restaurant tasks, he likes to imagine other business owner-operators going about their own tasks, doing whatever it takes to make their business thrive.
St. Clouds recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary and John says as he was giving a little speech thanking his customers and staff, people started chanting “Ten more years! Ten more years!” And he looked around, at his business partner Pablo, at his excellent staff, and at his loyal customers, and he thought to himself, “Yeah, I could go for ten more years of this.” Let’s hope he does.