13 minute read
EDIBLE NOTABLES
Feathers, pelts, acorns and abalone shells decorated the long table.
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EDIBLE NOTABLES EARTH CEREMONY
Esselen Tribe members create a feast inspired by their ancestors
BY MARIA GAURA PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL TROUTMAN
The newest event at this year’s Big Sur Food & Wine Festival was also one of our region’s oldest food celebrations—the local Esselen Tribe’s millenia-old Matsa Lelima, or Earth Ceremony.
Matsa Lelima, a groundbreaking collaboration between Big Sur’s Native people and BSF&W, was also one of the festival’s hottest tickets, selling out well in advance of the Nov. 6 event. Just 30 seats were offered to the public, allowing participants to join with tribal members in an ancient Esselen ceremony followed by a feast of foraged foods and creatively re-imagined traditional recipes.
The result was a beautiful and intimate evening full of heartfelt emotion and culinary revelation. And, of course, there was wine.
John Krasznekewicz hosted the gathering on the rolling cliffside meadows of his family’s K Ranch, a stupendously scenic oceanside spot regularly traversed by long-past generations of Esselen. Krasznekewicz has never hosted a public event at his home in the 34 years he’s lived there. But he wholeheartedly welcomed the Matsa Lelima celebration.
“This is an area where the Esselen would summer,” Krasznekewicz said, noting that previous owners had found Esselen artifacts on the property. “There’s an oak grove, strawberries growing back in the canyon and a natural spring. It’s a very spiritual place, where you can see the sun set and the moon rise.
“This event was special and compelling,” he said. “It had such good energy.”
Ironically, the impetus for the celebration sprang from a natural disaster—the massive Rat Creek landslide that plunged a 150-foot segment of Highway 1 into the ocean in February, stranding residents and businesses already reeling from the COVID pandemic.
Compounding the hurt, CalTrans needed to cut through an ancient Esselen site to fix Highway 1, and it had to happen fast. The tribe cooperated, with heavy hearts.
“We decided to hand-excavate everything,” said tribal administrator and secretary Jana Nason. “We had two weeks of 10-hour days, working with archaeologists and tribal members, and it was absolutely heartbreaking.” But the excavation turned up a wealth of culinary artifacts, including kitchen firepits filled with limpet, mussel and urchin shells—evidence of celebrations past.
“As we worked, we talked about recreating ancestral recipes,” Nason said. “We even joked about doing it for Big Sur Food & Wine.”
Inspired by the encounter with her ancestors’ kitchen hearths, Nason began pulling the threads that brought together the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County, festival CFO Elsa Rivera, chefs Nick Balla and Norberto Piattoni, the Krasznekewicz family, winemaker Gary Pisoni and Roederer Champagne.
Nason sent friends and family foraging for dozens of local ingredients—elderberries, herbs, acorns, bay laurel nuts, madrone fruits, mushrooms and hazelnuts—and embarked on the months-
Jana Nason and Tom Little Bear Nason, members of the Esselen Tribe, (top left) at the Matsa Lelima ceremony.
long process of making hand-ground acorn flour and blue corn polenta. Local venison was sourced, and plans were made to harvest seafood and seaweed the day before the feast.
On an improbably warm and sunny November afternoon, all those threads came together seamlessly.
Minutes before the guests arrived, tribal members and volunteers held hands and gathered in a circle to calm their jitters and set the mood.
“I believe all these guests are here because they have an open mind, an open heart, and are yearning to understand,” said Rivera, as sage and wood smoke scented the air. “This will be a nourishing, invigorating event for everybody.”
Arrivals were welcomed with a glass of elderberry and yerba santa tea made by a tribal elder. The cool, wine-colored tea tasted of sweet berry, followed by a hint of chaparral wildness, and a lift to the heart.
Guests then sampled vintage Champagne from Louis Roederer, the 242nd harvest from the historic Roederer Estate winery in France, perfect for savoring the incomparable scenery.
The ocean horizon, viewed from the K Ranch clifftops, appeared curved and iridescent as a vast abalone shell. As the celebration unfolded, Mother Nature provided shirtsleeves weather, a sun-halo light show and a spinetingling moment as scores of pelicans rose from the ocean in an aerial ballet and suddenly, apparently, vanished.
“The ancestors are here with us,” said tribal member Stephen Vicente Arévalo to silent nods all around.
Summoned into a circle, participants unleashed a coyote howl amidst a swirl of cleansing sage smoke.
“What an honor to be on this sacred land of Big Sur,” said tribal elder Tom Little Bear Nason. “Our tribe lived here thousands and thousands of years, continually. We buried our people and birthed our children here.
“The land of Big Sur is the end of the universe,” he continued. “Tribal people know this is the western edge of the universe. A mystical place and healing place. We are honored to have you here.”
A tall talking-stick topped with a carved coyote was passed around the circle, and Krasznekewicz, visibly emotional, took the opportunity to speak.
“It’s an honor to share my property with the Esselen, because I believe they have shared it with me,” Krasznekewicz said. “I’m so honored to be here.”
And then, it was time to feast.
Appetizers of venison meatballs with madrone berry glaze and mussels with wild-herb chimichurri were followed by a sit-down meal harvested from the surrounding fields, woods and shore.
A long table for 60 was quickly piled with tender acorn flour rolls, spreads of porcini mushrooms and hazelnuts, squash and wild fennel. A green-herb salad came alive with briny shreds of seaweed and pine nut-herb vinaigrette.
The Three Sisters Seafood Stew paired impeccably fresh rock cod with beans, squash and cubes of blue corn polenta in a savory herbaceous broth.
The courses were accompanied by a trio of outstanding pinot noir and a golden chardonnay from Pisoni Vineyards, with winemaker Gary Pisoni generously holding court.
Dessert was a showstopper, with intensely flavored elderberries wrapped in crumbly hazelnut pastry, astonishing bay nut brittle and creamy bay nut chai that felt as invigorating as espresso but without the caffeine.
Not to be outdone, Mother Nature accompanied dessert with a simultaneous sunset-andmoonrise that literally stopped people in their tracks.
As the sun sank behind a flaming orangeand-purple horizon, a gleaming crescent moon reached toward sparkling Venus, across a blue sky veiled in vaporous pink clouds.
As darkness fell, cleanup crews went to work under bright stars and light beams from multiple iPhones, footfalls hushed by the meadow grasses. After an absence of many decades, the Esselen had returned to feast, pray and celebrate on this sacred land.
Maria Gaura is a lifelong writer, journalist and gardener. She lives in downtown Santa Cruz with her family, two elderly cats and an ambivalent garden that can’t decide if it wants to be a vegetable patch, a flower bed or a miniature orchard. @BLADETECHUSA
EDIBLE NOTABLES ORGANIC ODYSSEY
Watsonville’s Lakeside Organic Gardens celebrates 25 delicious years
BY KATHRYN McKENZIE PHOTOGRAPHY BY GENEVA RICO
Dick Peixoto had already dedicated himself to farming the conventional way when he became intrigued by organic. His motivation at the time was more about making a smart business move than saving the earth.
Peixoto, founder of Lakeside Organic Gardens in Watsonville, recalls that in the beginning, it was only “crazy hippie farmers” who were growing and selling organic produce. “But I went to the farmers’ markets and got to know a couple of them, and they were making money,” he says with a laugh. And that was enough to set him down a path that would lead to creating the largest family-owned and operated solely organic vegetable grower-shipper in the United States.
(l-to-r) Operations manager Juan Gonzalez and harvest manager Jorge Romero Hernandez walk through a lettuce field with Lakeside founder Dick Peixoto.
On a recent afternoon, Peixoto climbs into his mud-splattered pickup truck and tours the fields next to Lakeside headquarters, waving to workers as he inspects celery that’s being grown for Thanksgiving, as well as several varieties of kale, collards and other crops due for harvest in late autumn.
Lakeside employs around 350 employees, “some of which have been with us since the company started,” says Peixoto, which includes a handful of his family members. “Everyone’s important, they’re all part of the chain that makes it all work.”
Lakeside is now celebrating a quarter-century in business, fostered by innovations and creative thinking that have allowed it to scale up and become a produce powerhouse. “It’s good for the community and it’s good for the Pajaro Valley,” Peixoto says, both of the business he’s carefully nurtured as well as his advocating for organic agriculture, noting that “millions of tons” of potentially harmful pesticides and other chemicals have been kept from the valley’s fertile soil over the last 25 years. “I have a lot of pride in that.”
In the early 20th century, Peixoto’s grandfather immigrated to California from the Azores (Portuguese islands in the Atlantic Ocean) and made his living growing potatoes. Peixoto’s father took a different career path—as an agricultural pesticide salesman. It’s a small bit of irony now that Dick Peixoto spent much of his youth riding around with his dad on pesticide sales calls.
On their 15-acre farm, his family grew a little bit of everything for their own use, and while still in high school, Peixoto leased 40 acres and started growing produce. “I bought my first tractor at age 16…I didn’t even know how to start it,” he recalls. His high school ag teacher helped him out, and before long Peixoto was supplying iceberg lettuce to Dole and pickling cucumbers to Del Monte.
After graduating from Watsonville High School in 1975, Peixoto continued to farm conventionally until the early 1990s, when organic began to intrigue him. It takes three years to convert conventional farmland to organic, and eventually 1,000 acres in the Pajaro Valley were transformed under Peixoto’s direction. When some of his farming friends teased him about his “garden,” Peixoto in 1996 turned the
A field crew makes quick work of the rows of green leaf lettuce using short but sharp harvest knives.
jibe into his new company’s name, Lakeside Organic Gardens.
Figuring out how to grow crops with organic fertilizers and beneficial insects wasn’t that hard, Peixoto says. The real challenge was selling organic. Peixoto couldn’t get into the farmers’ markets—well-established local organic farmers already had their spaces staked out—so he began forming alliances with natural foods grocery stores like Staff of Life and New Leaf.
There’s the story that Peixoto simply walked into Staff of Life one day, carrying a box of produce that he had grown, and the produce manager bought it right then and there. To this day, the relationship between Lakeside and Staff of Life is a close one, and the company “is still a big supplier of our produce,” says Staff of Life co-founder Gary Bascou.
Peggy Bascou, Gary’s wife, says Peixoto told her the story of that first encounter, and praised him for the extra support that was needed to open the new Staff of Life store in Watsonville this past March.
Over the years, Lakeside continued to add to the stores it was supplying and enlarging its acreage, ending up with its current 2,500 acres in the Pajaro Valley and another 1,200 in the Imperial Valley, which was added to ensure a reliable year-round supply of produce. Peixoto also found profit was leaking away in shipping charges, so Lakeside started its own packing and shipping department.
Four years ago, the company built a new cooler, a 50,000-square-foot warehouse with the capacity to make 100 tons of ice a day, and provide seven different cooling methods that are used for the various kinds of produce—important because Lakeside grows some 50 different crops.
Peixoto took his organic advocacy in a delicious direction when he purchased the California Grill seven years ago. The Watsonville restaurant showcases Lakeside produce on its menus, and highlights a cornucopia of other local products, including Martinelli’s cider, Gizdich Ranch pies, meats from Freedom Meat Lockers and Corralitos Market, seafood from Stagnaro Bros. and freshly made bread from Golden Sheaf.
He’s also proud of the company’s legacy in protecting the Pajaro Valley from conventional pesticides. One way in which that’s being done is through partnering with other agricultural companies to create buffer zones around schools, with Lakeside farming closer to the schools to protect children from harmful effects of pesticide drift. He also created an agricultural land trust to ensure that the acreage near Lakeside headquarters will always remain farmland.
During the past 25 years, Peixoto says one of the biggest shifts he’s seen is simply in respect for what organic farmers do. “When I started, organic was seen as hobby farming,” he says. Now, there’s a general respect for organic farming and an acknowledgement that organic produce should be offered whenever possible. “Everyone,” says Peixoto, “should have a choice.”
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Kathryn McKenzie, who grew up in Santa Cruz and now lives on a Christmas tree farm in north Monterey County, writes about the environment, sustainable living and health for numerous publications and websites. She is the coauthor of Humbled: How California’s Monterey Bay Escaped Industrial Ruin.
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EDIBLE NOTABLES Celebration PUNCH
Make our spicy and boozy drink for your own festivities
RECIPE AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY JESSICA TUNIS AND AMBER TURPIN
It’s time to celebrate! Edible Monterey Bay enters its 10th year with this edition. So to commemorate this special occasion, we raise a glass to you, dear readers. Ten ingredients—one for each year we have been bringing you stories about our local food community—combine to make one truly delectable beverage.
Flavors warm and spicy, crisp and cool, all at once. In keeping with our ongoing kitchen pantry preserve/ cocktail experiments, we use fig jam here to special effect, a subtle note that captures the essence of the season, and lingers on the tongue with a silky mouthfeel.
Celebration Punch
½ gallon unfiltered apple juice 6 cardamom pods, crushed 2 cinnamon sticks 2 star anise pods 2 tablespoons fig jam 2 cups bourbon 2 12-ounce bottles ginger beer 5 oranges (use 4 to make 2 cups freshly squeezed orange juice and slice 1 into wheels for garnish) ½ cup crystalized ginger, sliced 10 dashes Angostura bitters
Pour the apple juice into a large pot. Add the cinnamon sticks, cardamom and star anise and let simmer for about 20 minutes. Add the fig jam and stir to dissolve. Remove from heat and let cool, then transfer to the refrigerator to chill for several hours or overnight.
Pour the spiced apple juice into a large punch bowl or pitcher, using a strainer to remove the whole spices. Add the bourbon, ginger beer and orange juice and mix well. Top with the crystalized ginger, orange slices and bitters. Add ice to serving glasses if desired. Serves 8.
