The Big Day Arrives - Dinner!

by Gibsey Beckett

The weekend of our one block feast had finally arrived and along with all the preparations and last minute details, our neighborhood team collaborated on a timeline of the many events leading up to Sunday's big gala.  Sunset Magazine's photography team received our three day agenda and arrived early Friday morning to follow us on our adventurous weekend, beginning with photos of our team harvesting oysters in the bay.  With camera crew in tow, we biked around the neighborhood exchanging ingredients and helping with wheat berry grinding for the honey wheat bread rolls, sea salt making, whipping eggs for the Pavlova dessert, and harvesting of all the ripe fruits and vegetables in the children's garden.

Our families dispersed Friday evening to prepare for the next day's "Kid's Feast" as well as complete other tasks for the adult feast on Sunday.  My family arrived at the Ditmores' at sunset to help make the dessert for tomorrow's lunch.  We stuffed ourselves with pizza and then got down to the business of zesting and juicing fresh picked lemons for the kids' dessert, "Lemon Ice."  Our little ones were mesmerized by the efficiency of an electric juicer, their dimpled fingers gripping a lemon rind over the machine, smiling all the while.  When we had juiced every last lemon, they were equally pleased with the tiny slivers of lemon rind produced by a hand zester.  What a great treat, lemon ice!  Sweetened with sugar or honey, this tart and tangy dessert is reminiscent of a snow cone doused in syrupy lemonade.  The flavor is, of course, enhanced by perfectly ripened Meyer's lemons plucked from your own tree. 

Saturday kicked off the kids' feast, where children participated in a series of kid cooked recipes laid out in a beautiful spread of food and flowers on decorated tables in the children's garden. 

Edible flowers, giant cucumbers, and goat's milk were a few of the surprise ingredients all 17 children delighted in during the course of their meal.  Families biked to Chicken Dave's Coop mid-morning, where 17 little hands reached in and extracted their very own warm egg right out of the nest!  Each child scribbled their name on the egg, mounted their bikes, and paraded through the beach tract to the Johnson's kitchen where they cracked, stirred, and added the ingredients for their main course—personal egg pots topped with various vegetables from the garden (both my girls loaded up their egg with plenty of broccoli!).

The children gathered in the garden to churn cream into butter, a necessary ingredient for the adults' feast the following day.  The kids sat in a circle passing a glass jar full of cream, shaking and counting and giggling away.  Some children wandered the empty lot nearby, gathering wildflowers for table arrangements while others helped set out cloth napkins and pitchers of homemade lemonade.  Once the food was ready and everyone seated, the leadership team (a group of the oldest children in the group) stood and made toasts to the learning experiences and memorable moments they cherished during the garden project this summer.

Happy toddlers clinked glasses with each other and gulped down their lemonade squeezed from the very lemons in our yards and those nearby.  They munched on carrot sticks sliced from the carrots we had plucked the day before, potato fritters made and decorated into hilarious faces—tomato eyes and green bean mouths with beat earrings and carrot horns—all concocted from fresh homegrown garden ingredients the children had grown themselves. 

The dessert—the lemon ice—was a scrumptious icy treat molded into a half rind of lemon and garnished with a sprig of mint.  Kids and parents gobbled them up!

Sunday was D-Day for our team, The Beach Tractors.  The recently slaughtered meat hens were roasting in three separate ovens in the neighborhood, floral crews clipped and gathered from neighborhood gardens, a decorating team was gathered on the yacht, The Papagallo II, in Morro Bay's harbor, ironing linens and laying silverware. Families harvested all they could muster from their gardens for the enormous green salad and delivered ingredients to the Ditmore's house (home of the green salad making).  The minutes ticked by as we busied ourselves until the evening departure on the bay for our grand feast.

Sunday arrived so soon and I can honestly admit that we all reveled in our duties for the day as we anticipated the evening's event.  We certainly kept Sunset's photography team busy as they shuttled their cameras from house to house, snapping photo after photo of the different foods, houses, families, and efforts made towards this fantastic feast.  There was something so validating about having a professional photographer recording each moment, every effort in the perfect shade of sunlight, turning his lense on my daughters as they cracked eggs, cut arugula, and washed onions.  For a few slow moments, the presence of those cameras reminded me that this was a priceless moment worth savoring, something I should cherish forever.  Getting wrapped up in the stress and bustle of all the preparations was easy to do, and impossible to avoid when the neighborhood team was counting on you, but this was a weekend for the history books, something I will never forget and I owe it all to those cameras constantly reminding me how precious this event really was.

We commenced our duties and arrived dockside in our Sunday best, nervous and excited to taste our summer's efforts.  A few Beach Tractors shucked oysters on the dock before  presenting them on the bow of the yacht with a medley of homemade sauces alongside fresh ceviche served in giant oyster shells. 

We mingled and tasted and rejoiced when our guest of honor, Sunset's Food Editor, Margo True, arrived on board.  She systematically made her way through the crowd with a notepad, a broad range of questions for each of us and an excitement we could all share about this grow -our-own food project.  Making her way around the party, Margo inquired about all things gardening, brewing, and baking.  The photography team craftily boarded another boat alongside the Papgallo II and photographed us as we toasted each other with oysters and beer on the deck of the yacht.  We all raved about the homebrewed beers— a whit beer and a lemon ginger beer—and delighted in the details of their origin. 

We spent the evening exchanging memories and tidbits of information about the whereabouts of ingredients and resources, happily feeding both Margo and her notepad.  The banquet was a feast for the eyes—a rich green salad garnished with purple and orange edible flowers and various other bright vegetables, perfectly braised chickens glistening with garlic sauce arranged on a bed of spicy greens, and dense wheat rolls topped with sunflower seeds. Yum! 

We loaded our plates and fell to the task of tasting the many fruits of our labors.  I was astounded by the flavors of this food!  It was unlike any other meal I had tasted.  Not only did I savor each delicious bite, but with every mouthful arrived the insight and appreciation for each ingredient added to create the food.  The garlic and onions swollen in the soil, plucked and dried in our kitchens, potatoes dug from the earth, vinegar-fed and tended for months, wheat flour ground in a coffee grinder that very morning, moist chicken that began and ended in our neighborhood, tomatoes sweeter than candy, and goat cheese made from the milk our team collected!  As our tasting and swallowing pace slowed, several members of our party stood and acknowledged all the hard work we had contributed, the memories we shared and the many accomplishments we had managed over the course of this five month adventure.  Even Margo raised her glass and graced us with a toast of praise at our success in this project.  The photographers snapped away—click-click—and I reminded myself again to savor these moments with my friends and family.

Along with the food lessons I've learned, my newly acquired green thumb, a family of avid gardeners (who recently reseeded all of our garden beds), I take from this experience the friendships my neighbors and I have grown this summer and all the precious memories we have shared. 

Respect is not something that sprouts and flourishes alone.  This project afforded me a greater measure of love and respect for the many talents of my friends and neighbors.  I learned about the people in my world who are master gardeners, amateur beer brewers, inspiring parents, wheat harvesting engineers, fantastic leaders and fabulous teachers, marketing masterminds, great fish fillet-ers and graphic design artists extraordinaire. 

I cherish the memory of that silly Saturday I spent with my husband and kids armed with stalks of sugar cane, a 1940s washing machine and a centrifuge.  Let's just say we had a good time and learned that sugar is not so easy to come by!

I have a new found appreciation for the foods we eat, how they are made and come to arrive on my table.  I will never again complain about the price of flour or the quality of an ear of corn, for I can now truly appreciate how it came to be—from the seed to my table, the sweat and toil, the unpredictability of nature.  

At the end of the day, and in the final moments of this incredible weekend, I am overjoyed to reflect on a summer filled with countless hands-on learning experiences, a greater appreciation for those around me and the foods I eat,and the beautiful memory of our feasting weekend together as friends and neighbors.

Miniature Nubian Goat Image on Banner by Tricia Hulse