What exactly is it that makes something a pagan event?
Does it need to be led by an established member of the community? Does it need to be attended mostly by people who would identify as pagan if asked? Does it need to make overt reference to religion? Does it have to be something that would deeply disturb your childhood friend's grandmother who used to teach Sunday school?
A few days before midsummer, I saw a sign in the Puget Consumer Co-op advertising a solstice fundraising dinner for the co-op's farmland fund at Café Ambrosia. The menu included four courses of local organic vegan food and the option of three local organic wines chosen to accompany the meal. Soon after, the aspect of fortune that looks after employment smiled upon us, and it seemed a good time to celebrate. Our solstice plans were not set in stone, and so we called the restaurant and found that indeed, they did have a few seats left, late in the evening.
Now, I hadn't been to Café Ambrosia before, and I'd been looking forward to the opportunity. For those of you haven't heard of the restaurant, this is an upscale vegetarian restaurant emphasizing fresh, seasonal, organic food, an approach that fits in very closely with my own magical practice around cooking, gardening and foraging. What I'd heard was that this was a restaurant to expunge from your mind any ideas that vegetarian cooking was gucky, coarse, lacking in flavor or unsatisfying either to the stomach or palate. What I'd heard was quite the understatement.
This event, was, of course, special. First off, the food was entirely from three local organic farms (most of which I was previously acquainted with, through the Tilth harvest festivals). The courses were set, leaving us unburdened by choices. There was live music, and the diners were greeted with organically grown irises to take home as a memento of the evening. And of course, this all was raising money to help preserve local farmlands that might otherwise disappear under the rising tide of development and move them over to organic production.
We entered with a little trepidation, wondering at the last minute if this was really such a good idea. But the view of the water through the windows calmed us, the staff was both friendly and professional, and by the time we found our way to our table, had a chance to peruse the evening's menu and nibble at the herb bread, our doubts had lightened. After one of the owners stopped by our table to discuss how the event came about and the philosophy of the restaurant, our doubts blew away altogether.
The meal was exquisite. The first course was a tricolored terrine, served on a bed of fresh greens and garnished with beets and sprouts. The food was fresh, achingly fresh, the beets still singing of the ground -- the ground so close to where we ate, the ground in which they had grown and from which they had been pulled. Each bite of the terrine was mysterious. I pride myself on my ability to replicate recipes from taste, and yet I could not identify the middle layer of the terrine without assistance (it was fennel, a vegetable with which I would have sworn intimate acquaintance) and still cannot wrap my mind around the delicacy of the flavors. I have never eaten anything else, I think, that was at once so obviously and completely wholesome, and yet so subtle, secret and perfectly delightful.
The second course was a salad that forever changed my opinion of turnips. They were tiny, raw, and marinated... I think. I could have eaten twice as many. The third was a baked pastry of richly spiced lentils, and a number of roasted vegetables. The wines chosen to match the first two courses, both whites, complemented and enhanced the food. The third wine -- a dark spicy red from China Bend, almost like molasses in its richness and depth, though not nearly as sweet -- was shocking and exotic, and I found myself slowing down even more, eating a tiny bite of my dinner and then a drinking a few drops of wine, puzzling out the ways in which the flavors played off each other. I am still not sure that it was the right wine for the food. But I have trouble imagining another food for the wine.
By the time the meal ended with a strawberry and rhubarb tart enclosed in a crust that could have stood on its own, we had reached a point of quiet contentment and said little as we watched the sky grow dark.
Last year for the solstice, I stripped down on the dock and swam out onto the lake near our house to watch the day fade into the year's shortest night. This year, I dressed in silk and jewels and watched the sun set over a different lake. I missed being in the lake, instead of nearly by it, and yet this, too was perfect, perfect for this night of the new moon, the fulfillment of spring and entrance into summer.
Café Ambrosia has a Web page at http://www.cafeambrosia.com. To find out more about the PCC farmland fund, you can check out http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/info/farmland.html.