Dear Feastlings,
I don’t know about you, but when the dark state of the world pushes its way into my awareness, I feel like I’m walking through maple syrup and mud simultaneous. The earth sucking at my feet and the slow swing of my legs combine to make me want nothing more than to stay in bed all day. It helps that those few drizzly days are behind us, but when external war, impending war, domestic war and ideological war all dogpile on top of us, it takes a while to get the cursor moving on a blank screen. Add to it the awareness that my emails tend to be- let’s just say not all that chipper- and I hesitate to write anything at all.
So many of you either reply or reference my notes when you come in that I feel a responsibility to keep sending them, and I feel a responsibility to the crew here at Feast to keep you all apprised of what’s going on here so that you drop by on occasion and keep us all gainfully employed. So for those of you who are the consummate Tucsonans, by which I mean, people who make no plans until the last possible moment, we’ve had a couple of cancellations for tonight’s wine dinner with Varinder and Anita Sahi of Copia Vineyards and Winery, so there’s room for up to four more of you if you need to treat yourself to an opulent bunch of wines from Paso Robles and foods that have been paired specifically with each wine. Varinder is scheduled to land in Phoenix at 4:00, so we’re hoping for an on-time flight and no accidents on I-10, but Anita is already here regardless so the show will go on whether Varinder arrives heroically midway through the dinner, or whether he’s already here with his feet up by the time you start arriving. If you want to snap up one of those recently opened seats, give us a call at (520) 326-9363 and we’ll set you up. Here’s the menu:
We’ve also got out end-of-the-month tasting set up, so if tonight’s dinner is rather more than you’d care to indulge, you can soft-pedal your self-soothing and join us Saturday afternoon for a Trust Your Importer tasting. There’s still room there if you’d care to join us as well.
In other news, I just got off the phone with the people who run our point-of-sale system, who’ve told me that we may actually be able to process the credit cards we ran three weeks ago now, so if you notice a charge from Feast this week but you haven’t eaten here since the first week and a half of February, just relax and look at your credit card statement and realized that you’d not yet been charged for the dinner you preciously enjoyed.
Meanwhile, if big, rich Paso Robles style wines aren’t your thing, there’s another wine dinner on the schedule as well, with Mark Vlossak, owner/winemaker of St. Innocent, with whom you’ll taste Willamette Valley’s subtlety, grace and guts, again, with dishes paired to the wines.
Last in the week’s news comes a thank-you and a better-late-than-never: With a handful of absences in the kitchen and a handful of technological glitches this past week, we were unable to get your food donations made and brought out to GAP ministries last Saturday, so we’ll be cooking all day tomorrow to get another 150 meals out to them on Friday, or, if we’re lucky, 210, which will get all of your donations utilized- 450 meals so far over the past few weeks- as well as all of the meals we donated alongside you- 150 so far. When you’re walking through mud and maple syrup, there’s nothing to lighten your load like helping someone who’s walking through cement and carpenter’s glue.
We’ll send another email next week with the March menu, a reminder of the St. Innocent dinner, and a progress report on the briskets we’ve been corning for St. Patrick’s Day.
Thanks, kind friends.
Doug