A Recipe for Community

This month we present an essay by Salmon Creek Arts SF-based admin assistant Halden Willard, who shares a bit about his week on the land during the most recent session of our Seasonal Cooking Arts Workshop with Gerardo Gonzalez. The summer session ran from June 15 to June 21, and is a staple in our annual rotation of Workshops, Skillshares, and Retreats. Here at Salmon Creek we believe cooking is a lived practice, and a primary way that we engage with our environment, our daily routines, and our community. The upcoming fall session is fully booked, but stay tuned for future offerings. Subscribe to our email list to receive first word of future programming.

This was Gerardo’s third offering of the Seasonal Cooking Arts workshop and my first time joining. Gerardo and I stayed at the communal cabin Dawn, the heart of everything, where we gathered, prepared, and ate most of our meals. I had been on the land the week before for our annual community week and it was incredibly special to be around for the transition from one week to the next, with the quiet day in between when no one but the banana slugs are still on the land.

Seasonal Cooking Arts, like all workshops at Salmon Creek Farm, is integral to the rhythm of this place. It underscores many of the core values here: self-sufficiency, sustenance, nourishment, community, and abundance, and it emphasizes a seasonal and shifting relationship with the garden, the orchard, and the forest. This plant-based cooking program is for the SLUGS: those who appreciate Succulent, Luscious, Unctuous, Gastronomies in Season. SLUGS is an acronym created by Gerardo, Salmon Creek culinary director, to describe the philosophy of the program. It’s an acronym in constant flux, with the core words frequently changing, echoing the adaptability of the program.

Monday rolled around and participants began arriving from all over - from just down the road in San Francisco to as far east as New Orleans. All seven arrived gradually, one by one. James Lewis Tucker, the Salmon Creek property manager and host, greeted each of them and walked them to their cabins to get settled.

The general structure stayed the same throughout the week: breakfast, lunch, and dinner were shared, with pockets of time dedicated to instruction and rest. We started with breakfast each morning around 9 am; lunch was often reworked leftovers; and we gathered again for dinner around 7 pm. In the moments in between we found time to head down to the creek, walk along the coast, and wander into town to pay visits to favorites like Corners of the Mouth, Fog Eater, and the Mendocino Art Center.

We met at Dawn cabin that evening for our first meal, and again the next morning, where we were greeted by a continental breakfast of fresh cherries, lemon blueberry jam, toast, apples, bananas, eggs, and goat’s milk overnight oats. Afterward we met James in the parking lot for an orientation and a tour of the land.

Eventually we made our way to the garden and orchard where Gerardo showed us what was growing and what would be available for the week ahead. The garden was lush and green, in its early-summer cycle — not the beginning, nor the end, but happily in the process of becoming. As we toured, we nibbled on chive blossoms, strawberries (the few that were ripe), arugula, borage, ground cherries, thyme, Mexican marigolds, and nasturtiums, appreciating the subtle differences in flavor between each component: petals, leaves, and stems.

Throughout the week, Gerardo provided insights and guided us through all sorts of recipes, from focaccia to sopas, to buckwheat crepes and laver bread for breakfast, to making goat’s milk ricotta for the ravioli at dinner, to infusing oils and learning the basics of an amaro. We were also lucky to enjoy a meal prepared by chef and Salmon Creek resident Jessica Dean Harrison : white beans with Fresno chili toum and crème fraîche, served with a fresh greens salad and focaccia.

A special throughline, and something many of the workshop participants echoed in their own styles of cooking, was doing our best to prevent waste and use ingredients wholeheartedly: using carrot tops for pesto, saving avocado pits for natural dyeing, using leftovers in inventive and sustainable ways, and saving vegetable scraps throughout the week to build a stock.

One of my favorite meals of the week was a baked California rock cod, sourced from a local and favored market, Princess Seafood Market. The fish was wrapped in fig leaves and a thin layer of clay before being baked in an open-fire stove. This was my first time cooking with clay, and the entire process was so wonderfully tactile: rolling the clay out into slabs, eventually encasing the fish, and finally embellishing the exterior with clay replicas of little fish, flowers, and leaves — little insignias of abundance and gratitude. I should note that the kitchens at Salmon Creek are historically strictly vegetarian, so this meal was an exception, and truly a special one.

For this meal, we gathered at the Outdoor Kitchen (OK), where redwoods shoot high overhead looking over the triangle dance deck. The OK with its long redwood table milled from lumber on the land and its outdoor pizza stove is an exciting and welcoming place to cook and gather, especially on a summer evening, when the sun sticks around for a few extra hours. Final touches were added, and the fish was placed into the roaring hot stove. The fig leaves steamed the fish, while the clay became baked and sealed in additional moisture, imbuing it with an aromatic, sweet flavor. We enjoyed it alongside roasted beets, bread, garlic confit, drizzles of tomato leaf oil, and a hearty potato and greens salad.

As the meal went on, the table became a mess of broken clay, fig leaves, and fish bones. Naturally, we all found ourselves craving something sweet and were disappointed when we realized that we hadn’t planned to make anything for dessert (every dinner at this point in the week had been followed by dessert). So, in a moment of desperation, a group of us drove down the road, 10 minutes to the nearest market, and picked up as many It’s-It ice cream sandwiches as we could carry. The craving was satisfied.

After we returned with ice cream sandwiches in hand, twilight settled into dusk and then into night, and dinner had found its end. Plates were gathered, conversations dwindled, and hushed voices headed back toward the kitchen. It was time to clean — which had become an easy routine, especially with so many hands. However, I won’t lie — after a week of what felt like continuous cooking and ergo continuous dishes, I found myself feeling a bit like Sisyphus pushing his rock up that hill... but I chose the Kate Bush mindset and imagined myself running up it instead. Another essential part of the ritual of preparation, cooking, and cleaning was, of course, ambiance and music. A couple of standout songs in rotation for the week were “Running to Pain” by Kelsey Lu, “Dance II” by Discovery Zone, and “Losing You” by Solange. It’s best to dance through certain things in life and cleaning is one of those things.

By the end of the week, the group that had started shy and reserved found itself in community. From shelling fava beans and ground cherries to rolling out pasta and pizza dough, we laughed through it all. After a week of living and learning alongside one another, we found that good cooking isn’t about culinary expertise, but about working with what you have, what you love, and doing it in good company. Gerardo’s generous and inventive style of cooking perfectly complements the culinary playground that is Salmon Creek and the region of Mendocino at large, with its abundance of seasonal produce. At its core, the ethos of his gastronomic style seeks to conjure whimsy in places you might not think to look for it. Though everyone eventually left for home, they carried bits and pieces of the place with them: recipes they’d written down, memories of meals they’d eaten, and even a couple of ground cherries in their pockets for the road.