And what else: bread and olive oil and butter and olives. A weensy wedge of Dinah’s cheese, which I have to say was good, but just in a regular ol’ buttery brie way. Then the real business: grilled sardines with a walnut gremolata kinda thang. Sheesh, sardines, where have you been hiding? Meaty and fishy in a good way. And I secretly love eating whole bony fish…something nice about that weird little calcium crunch. Speck with ricotta and candied pumpkin and balsamic. Candied as in pumpkin candy, not as in sweet-ish pumpkin. Awesome. A salad of watercress and lardons and fried egg. Egg yolk, extra points. My favorite dish: raw prawns with their roe alongside their deep-fried shells. Raw prawn? Yes. Fantastic. Snappy roe, just-tough-enough shrimp, ultra salty crunchy weird shell. Da bomb. And then, just for good measure, two more oysters each for Dad and I, just to make sure we really knew our favorite. (Treasure Coves from Case Inlet.) Then dessert, because, you know, we’re on vacation here. A cherry clafoutis, which was good, but erm… ours was better that one time we made it. Not quite custardy enough. But hey, covered in creme fraiche so pretty durn good. And roasted dates, which somehow remained about two trillion degrees for twenty minutes. Really yummy, once they cooled to the temp of just molten lava, roasted and caramely in salt and oil–definitely stealing that one. Walrus: worth the wait.

The next day: well, I’ll lay it out for you. Macrina for breakfast, Homegrown for lunch, Sitka for dinner. And Le Pichet for dessert. Ok, here we go. Macrina: I had a morning glory muffin and two perfect sunnyside up eggs. Dad had yogurt and fruit and granola. (He hadn’t realized that he was indeed, on vacation, and should take advantage by having french toast and bacon.) Mom got the salmon bialy, hands down the best thing on the brunch menu. We had a great waitress who kept getting cursed with whiny (“Are the eggs cooked with oil? Is the toast buttered? Is there sugar in the chocolate cake? Could you bring me just one slice of cucumber and an ice cube?”) tables and I tried my best to send her good vibes. After that we moved north to the Seattle Center for the King Tut exhibit which should in fact be re-named “The Exhibit of Egyptian Crap that does not include King Tut. Or his sarcophagus. Or his mask that is on every poster around the whole city.” Ok, there was some good stuff, but there were also a lot of brats running around and NO KING TUT. No mummy. Nothin. Some fans and wicker chairs from his crappy little cave-tomb. I might be bitter. But then we went to Homegrown for lunch and things looked up. Dad and I got turkey avocado bacons and mom got a killer Reuben. And we each got a really yummy pickle. And then I bought an old wood heating grate at the market, which is cooler than any dumb ol’ mummy anyway. Then we had to go home and take naps because we had a big dinner ahead of us.

So Sitka and Spruce. I have been dying to go for, oh, like, a year. And Matt Dillon, the chef, just won a James Beard. (He also has The Corson Building, my number one dream must go to resto at the moment, and a farm and a cute little bar. And everything good.) I was not on top of things and by the time I called, we could only get in at 6. Which was fine. Because the light is better at 6.

S&S has probably the most open kitchen on earth. I literally could’ve reached over and snacked on their mise en place. And I was tempted. The two chefs have a big deep sink where the cold ingredients are iced down and a nice big workspace, which is just a continuation of the long table we were sitting at. And a big wood fire. As you do. We kicked it off with bread (thanks to them, foccacia has a new place in my heart) and salami and olives. Shortly thereafter a salad of bright little lettuces and shaved asparagus and carrots and the best sheep’s cheese I’ve ever had. Ever. See ya Manchego, I have a new best friend. And farm-to-table, fresh, blah blah; that salad seriously had that magic taste that only things from your own garden has. (The Dillon farm/resto family is in fact the creator of the best CSA ever created…and the most expensive, but now I’m thinking it might be worth it…)

Then the mains. Rabbit leg, roasted on that fire, and sturgeon. Both with emmer (a grain…I didn’t know either) and turnip greens and yogurt and maybe a little hit of mustard with the rabbit and paprika with the fish. So simple and SO perfect. Lord. Thoughtful and homey and good. Nothing out of place or over-reaching. Everything all nested together and good. Didn’t even cross my mind that maybe it was sad that the dishes had the same sides. Cause there’s the cook, right there, making it for you. Keeping it as simple and just right as they would in their own kitchen, cooking for their friends. Then, lord almighty, the desserts. I’ll ease you into it. A simple little Basque gateau. Almond crust, pastry cream, Drizzled with caramel and salty (the salty was the crucial kicker) almonds. Good, lovely, yummy, great. Then. THEN. Wild ginger ice cream with honey. Ginger but not even ginger. It sung of ginseng and brightness and earthiness and sunlight all at once. Drizzled with honey and a handful of slivered almonds. The best thing I’ve tasted in a while.

Then a walk up to the Elysian Brewing Co, then a trip downtown in search of a view, settling (“settling”) for Le Pichet on First where we drank cider and ate delicious cheese at 11 pm. Because we were on vacation.

Did you think that was all? Then we went to Cafe Presse in the morning with Logie, where we all ate variations on the omelette and pastries and delicious housemade yogurt. And I ate almost an entire baguette with butter and rhubarb-vanilla jam. Because….I was on vacation! Stay-cation. Then we popped up to Taylor Shellfish where mom packed up a few pounds of clams and oysters to take home and we went for a walk at the beach at Discovery Park then they had to go home before the oysters got tired and next thing I knew the vacation was over, dangit. But how lucky am I, to have these parents who’ll take me out to dinner (around the world) and put up with my food rambling and even join in the rambling with me, wondering how, how!? does a raw prawn taste so dang good.

In a poached egg the white gives up its ambitions and resigns itself to its true function as yolk-envelope and becomes simply the perfect pocket. For a long time I used an egg poaching pan, which produces tight little poached pucks, nothing like the light poached eggs you find under a little Hollandaise blanket in your order of Eggs Benedict. Plus the ease of the poaching pan lends itself to forgetfulness, and too often the goodness of the yolk gets lost to overcooking, the magic hardening into a light yellow chalk.

I tried to learn how to poach an egg properly, I tried in a shallow pan, in a deep pot, in rolling water, in just-boiling water; but I always wound up with a pot full of whirling wisps of eggs and a lonesome yolk, hopelessly overcooked and lost without his jacket of whites. But. I found the trick. One little pot of water. Boil. Stir stir stir, creating a little vortex. Egg (already broken into a bowl) slips into that little vortex. Keep stirring. The spinning water holds it all together and in a couple minutes you’ve got a nice little egg, white solidified protectively around the riches inside.

And this pizza, it too is now a part of my own dreamy version of Vancouver. All Neapolitan pizza is amazing. This was really amazing. For one, the place was toasty, which only seemed appropriate as there’s a 900 degree oven smack in the middle. Sweaty pizzaiolos throw together the pies and slide em in for 90 seconds a piece, the pizzas reemerging like phoenixes from the fires, ashy and amazing. We got: one with cheese, cherry tomatoes, and basil, a margherita plus broccoli rabe, and a fantastic one with spicy Italian meats. Yum. The crusts were maybe the best part, dipped in spicy oil… Yes. We ate the leftovers with much much joy later on.

The next day: brunch at Dunlevy Snackbar. Mother’s Day brunch traffic? Not an issue here. Too hip for regular moms. A rad little Chinatown storefront (Note: Vancouver’s Chinatown is not like Seattle’s “International District” where takeout boxes blow down the street like tumbleweed and the same Peking ducks have been hanging in the windows since 1995. Vancouver’s is bustling and lively and full of shocking dried things and pungent fish shops and old ladies haggling.)

And then Dunlevy Snackbar, full of true Van Hipsters. But in a good way. It still feels like a “find,” like you too are awesome for being there. The owner, Theo, is running around the place, making coffee, taking orders, and giving you the verbal menu. Three choices. Euro Brunch, arepas, or baked eggs. What a rad idea. Only one meal a day, only three things a day. Makes picking easy, makes prepping easy. Makes changing the menu really easy. Keeps things interesting. For us: one Euro brunch, one arepa. Do you loyal readers remember arepas? The dance party break snack of Florida, bought from a young couple frying up masa with one hand and feeding a baby with the other in a dorm kitchen. Arepas, griddled corn cakes topped with a slice of guava paste and a slice of white cheese and a big dose of pure joy. Dunlevy of course did it differently: topped the corn cake with chipotle black beans and potatoes and scrambled eggs, accompanied by a bright little carrot slaw. Yum.

And the Euro brunch. Ok, so my favorite part of Germany is frühstück. Breakfast. At the oddball little hotel we always stay at in Frankfurt (frequent flier miles get you to Frankfurt…) theres this glorious place called the fruhstuck raum. Fruhstuck fairies fill it every morning before dawn with baskets of fluffy white buns covered in seeds, platters of holey cheese, plates of smoky meats, soft boiled eggs, joghurts of all varieties, a tray of sausages, and all the teeny Nutella containers you could ever dream of stealing. You fill up a plate (or three, if you’re me. Hey, you don’t get a trip to the Fruhstuck Raum too often) and sit down and delight–delight–in the German version of breakfast.

Dunlevy’s take was pretty darn similar. A soft-boiled egg (which I am going to make a part of my life, if only for the ultra cute egg cups,) rye bread, a croissant, jam, cheese, ham, fruit, almonds, olives, and hummus. Inclusive of all the EU nations. Delicious. And we had a good chat with Theo after, and what makes you feel cooler than a chat with the owner. Dunlevy Snackbar, also now a part of my version of Vancouver. Then we spent the afternoon at the beach in Kitsilano, my old ‘hood, making bracelets and saying over and over how good the sun felt on our cold little northwestern bodies. After a delicious little front porch barbeque to round out the day, I headed back down to Seattle, dreaming of Vancouver the whole way back.

Another highly satisfactory market experience was in Bethlehem. We arrived in the renowned little city after an interesting trip through a border checkpoint and a drive along a very high concrete wall. I had this strange realization that I was in, you know, Palestine, which somehow seemed totally strange. The strangeness only continued when we ducked through the four-foot-high humble-door and entered into the giant Church of the Nativity, the whole chapel empty aside from the decadent altar, all star-spangled and lantern-light. The real bit of this church is down below, where a star marks the birthplace of… Jesus. Hordes of tourists funnel down into this cramped little space, all trying to get a breath of air above the others’ heads jammed together in the holy little basement, waiting their turn to kneel down to the spot. Another strange non-religious religious experience for someone whose closest thing to church is Sunday brunch. Then we left the church (one of the oldest on earth) and made our way into the non-Christmas Bethlehem. First stop: falafel.One young guy angstily grinding up cooked chickpeas and herbs in a very heavy looking meat grinder inside, one old guy plopping little chickpea orbs into a big buzzing oil-filled pan outside, being very zen about it. Three falafels and three Arabic coffees for us. (We are Arab/Turkish coffee addicts. Teensy cup of strong, sweet, cardamom-ed coffee. Don’t sip to mightily, there’s a half-inch of coffee mud in the bottom of the cup.) Soon our falafels came: pita stuffed with hot green fried balls, the ever-present tomato-cucumber chop-chop, and a creamy drizzly yogurt sauce. And a little bowl of some respectably spicy chili sauce. Five shekels a falafel. About a buck and a quarter. Sweet. Next stop: the market. Met a woman on the steps up to the market proper selling boxes and boxes of green things. Grape leaves and raw garbanzos and… two things that I ate, and still haven’t a clue what they were. She handed me a fuzzy little green orb, saying insistently “Almond!” Erm… no. Fuzzy shell, bitter white bit inside. Maybe… a raw, unripe almond? Unclear. Then teeny little green berries that looked like tomatoes and tasted a lot like unripe tomatoes. I bought five shekels worth of them, because I felt like I had to somehow repay her for the little experience. Not because I was really diggin’ on the unripe tomato berries.

Then into the market, where we were definitely the only awe-struck aliens there that day. One of my most favorite and most mentally-revisited markets was this market out in the west part of Bali, where there are not so many tourists. I was there with Habitat for Humanity and we went to this local market… oh my god. Other-ing heaven. We looked at them and they looked at us, and I said “Hi!” in a perky over-excited American way and everyone echoed it right back at me. There were all kinds of weird vegetables and awesomely bad knock-offs and incredibly foul-smelling fish. It was not a market for tourist to come peek at, it was for real and it was awesome. This Bethlehem market was like that. Old junk for sale on one side (Would you care for one well-worn men’s dress shoe?) and produce on the other. Oh, joy. Bliss and excitement and heart-beating-faster.

Then out of the market and on into the town, where it only got better. Middle Eastern chaos, more people than you can imagine, weird little food carts boiling beans and shops with bejeweled t-shirts hanging from every little bit of ceiling. Loudness: people talking, cars honking, shoes shuffling, falafel frying, babies crying, kids shouting.

While I was wide-eyed-ed-ly wandering, thankfully Mom was being a rational human and  actually paying attention to where we were, and called attention to the fact that we were hopelessly lost. We asked a garden store guy for help, the map got turned over and upside down and around about twelve times before he admitted defeat. We went to one of the bejeweled shirt shops, no dice. Finally the shopkeeper took the map out to the little gaggle of Muslim school girls outside, who instantly sorted it out and circled around us like sheep dogs guiding their sad little American herd. We had a Lonely Planet moment. They asked me in English what my name was, I asked them theirs. “Is this your mom and dad?” Yes! Look, we are different but we are connecting! Lonely Planet moment! And that is the joy in markets; those little moments where I’m somehow excitedly connecting with some person (even if I’m the only one in the connection that’s excited.) Because, here: I am an amazed American girl, you are a cranky old almond-monger. But we both understand commerce and food and the exchange we’re making and we are having a moment. Whether you like it or not. And can I take your picture?

After an arduous journey (two red eye flights, a nap in a park hobo-style in New York, a day in Frankfurt walking up and down the one hip street, and a mentally ill cab driver) we arrived in Jerusalem. Hallelujah. (Everyone claps when you land in Israel on El Al… back in the holy land!) We arrived on Friday… Shabbat. Jerusalem grinds to a halt. (At least in public. Challah and good times behind closed doors…) From sundown (…more like 4 pm) Friday to sundown Saturday, no restaurants, no shopping, no people. Mostly. Thankfully we had a reservation at an unholy restaurant that stayed open. Our first meal: we were introduced to gigantic Israeli portions and “really good” Israeli wine. (They’re still kinda figuring out that wine thing. The beer though, Dad’ll tell you, Gold Star is a fine He-brew.) We sort of wandered back home wishing there were people out and about and wondering if Jerusalem was really populated… 8 o’clock the next night, Yes! Streets and restaurants packed with people excitedly re-emerging from their day of rest. It seems somehow a little weird that in Jerusalem, this very old very holy place, regular life goes on. Like… people go to coffee shops and out to dinner and like… buy groceries at grocery stores…

We spent Saturday (and a good part of many other days) in the Old City. Old as in ancient, pre-Jesus, pre-Romans old. In the Old City: the place where Jesus died, the place where Mary’s parents died (did you know Mary’s mom’s name was Anne? Yes. And is there a rad little St. Anne altar that’s all gold and Russian Orthodox-y and rad? Yes. Did I light a candle? Yes. I have a gigantic soft spot for that over-the-top, gold plated icon stuff. Chapels full of lanterns and paintings and drippy candles, yes please.) Also the Temple Mount, which was magical and peaceful and maybe even a little other-worldly. You wait in a long line, squeeze through a well-trafficked metal detector, wind up a stairway above the Western Wall, and emerge in this quiet place, elevated and removed from the rest of the city. The golden dome sparkles at the center, and little shady patches of grass and stone ledges perfect for resting on surround it. Men and women are gathered in little rings of plastic chairs studying, ignoring the tourists milling around about them. As a non-religious chick, some of the religious sites felt a little uncomfortable, like I couldn’t understand the significance, like I was missing something that everyone else was getting. We all agreed that we’d expected to maybe feel a little glimmer of some kind of spirituality amongst the pilgrims, but it never really happened until we went to the temple mount. And still, it wasn’t so much a religious feeling as just a good feeling of history and permanence and calm sweetness.

And then there’s the secular (ish) Old City, which can be divided into tourist-land and legit-land. Both are tinged with the other; the touristy bits are full of trinket shops (but the trinket shops are run by real-live people, smoking cigarettes and yelling across the way at the other scarf-hawkers) and the more real-life bits have Lonely Planet-ers wandering around in them, pretending to blend in (aka, us.) My favorite parts of the old city were in the Arab quarter, where there were dimly light butcher shops with whole goats (fluffy tails included) hanging in the windows and stalls selling mounds of gummi candies and little electrical appliance shops and shops selling cheap kids’ toys and underwear. And masses of people; ladies in their headscarves and long colorful trench coats, old men with their cool little knitted caps clinging onto their skulls, kids running between everyone with melting popsicles.

One of my favorite bits of the trip was walking up Saladin street, just outside the old city and named after one of the Muslim dudes who took Jerusalem a long time ago (that is how history majors talk about history), a crazy busting street jam-packed full of people. Old ladies buying coffee makers, school kids getting lunchtime shawarmas, guys sipping their teensy but strong cups of coffee, sitting on teensy but must-be-strong little stools. And just people, tons of people running around and hurrying around and shopping and talking and yelling. Anne crack. My heart beats faster and I see a zillion photos to take and a trillion things to taste and a billion million people to look at. Thrill thrill thrilling.

More soon.

The restaurant is in an old house, the main area shared with a mini-market, where produce from the farm and meats from the charcuterie guy associated with the farm and honey and jam and salsa are all for sale. The dining room spills out into a warm green house-y space, filled with big tree-slab tables topped with flowers and kitschy saltshakers.

Logie, Tayler, and I sat down at the sunniest table, but got right back up when the waitress told us the pastries were inside. Rhubarb gallette… croissants… chocolate croissants…doughnuts…lord. Swoon. Wound up with a doughnut (Me: “What kind do you want?” Log: “Well…the kind covered in sugar…obviously.”) They were potato doughnuts though, so healthy for sure. And a blueberry almond Danish. Danishes…usually not ym favorite. This Danish: just sweet and doughy enough center, ringed by a halo of crispy, burnt-sugar-y, cinnamon blessed pastry.

Okay, then brunch. Log got eggs benedict (with farm-y sausage subbed for ham) and Tayler and I got omlettes: she a yummy bacon one, me a yummy mushroom one. Lots of kale on everyone’s plate. Delight. Lots of chatting and catching up and having just one more tiny bite of Danish. Then Tayler and I went on to the Corvallis farmers market, the last winter market of the season before it moves back to its usual place by the river (dang it.) Lots of beautiful produce (the drawback of going to markets while traveling, want to buy vegetables…) like chard rabe, collard rabe, every rabe ever, and gigantic leeks. And lots of handicraft type things; soft scarves and verrry stylish barrettes made out of pine needles. And charming beeswax candles in all kinds of shapes (from om to asparagus) and …hazelnut brittle. Best ever. Also: crepes. We walked around the market enough times to earn ourselves a marionberry crepe, which we enjoyed in the sunshine, delightfully catching up and making plans to see each other so soon. Then Tayler headed back to Eugene and I headed up to Portland. Where Logie and I (and Hayden, old friend #4) ate at a McMinnamins then got a pound or two or three of Whole Foods fruit gummies for dessert. And played with the Redmonds’ impossibly sweet and cute new puppy, Soleh.

Then woke up to a sunny, warm Easter Sunday with the Redmond clan, aka old friends #5, 6, 7, and 8. Kicked off the morning by eating a couple seriously just-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls (…crack) and dyeing eggs (with natural dye- onion skin brown, red cabbage blue, and tumeric yellow…all with pretty little flowers and ferns pressed on them) then headed over to the neighbors’, where we kept on eating. German bread with a thick layer of blueberry jam, fruit kabobs (fruit made fun), and baked eggs filled with everything good (kale, mushrooms, creamy creamy cheese.) We had a whole brunch of our own waiting back home… but who can resist a big slice of braided bread or colorful fruit on a stick… Really. No one. So we walked for about fifteen minutes (fifteen very strenuous minutes) to work up some hunger for the real brunch. Joy:more cinnamon rolls, a big bowl of berries, ham, and caper-ed asparagus. Sweet sweet, salty salty. Yum. And then much lounging and chatting and belly rubbing, and eventually even sunshine napping. Then sort of happy-because-we-live-so-close and so-full-of-cinnamony-goodness goodbyes and off we were, back on the road for three hours of old family favorites sung fantastically well by two full happy girls.

Katherine, head flower honcho, started thing off by throwing together an arrangement as an example for us beginners. (And telling us about her flower farm out in the Snoqualmie Valley…can I live there? In a little tent made of petals?) Flower Arranging 101: Start with thick branchy things, then get progressively lighter. Make a little nest for the later, lighter flowers to snug into. Fellow florist Brita (name envy…pronounced all rolling R-y, not like the filter) showed us how to add just one orchid to an arrangement. Another florist, Ayako, told us about branches, spare little branches that can be so beautiful. (Reminded me of this.) Katherine talked about the current trend in the flower world of loose arrangements, kinda thrown-together looking bouquets with lots of airiness and gentleness and nonchalant-ines, as opposed to the 90s flower-ball style where blooms were squashed up against each other in tight little symmetrical bouquets.

Can’t help but make a correlation to food trends there, especially when I was looking over her shoulder at the Sitka chefs doing Sunday prep at the big long kitchen table the whole time. There’s definitely that same feeling in the (un-)composition of plates these days. Kind of, you know, rustic and simple and “Oh, it just happens to be lovely, I didn’t work too hard.” That look. You know. Anyway, turns out flower arranging is indeed hard work. Challenge #1: Starting. Choosing blooms from the dozens of vases set out for us. These bunchy little roses are nice… these big weepy purply ones are so very nice… these teeny waxflowers are so so very pleasing… oh, the teensier rice flowers though…. Then you have a colossal pile of branches and stems and leaves and blooms and an empty vase. Start shuffling them together, layering branches, weaving in little sprigs of whatnot. (All the while eating very many very good little slices of sesame seeded baguette with creamy cheese from the shop down the way and dreamy jam made by one of the sweet florist teachers.)

Then, challenge #2: Stopping. Cannot stop. One more daffodil? Oh sure. One more purply thing? Well of course. Little holes show up in our arrangement every time you look down at it and there is a compulsion to fill. them. immediately. The other five students all  carefully made lovely arrangements with just one or two main colors, with a perfect little frond drooping over one side, a couple tall blooms reaching upward… Mine was an explosion of ruffage. Pinks of all shades. Big blotches of purple. Little spots of yellow. Thick branches reaching out in every direction. I love it. (It is filling my house with JOY, capital letters joy right now.)

Best part of all: carrying it next door to be my dinner companion for a half-dozen oysters at Taylor Shellfish. Not unlike flowers, oysters fill me with delight and love for the world at large. How could anything bad exist in the universe when something this good exists too? I think as I slurp a teeny Shigoku, grown north of here in bags slouching around at the bottom of the sea, attached to buoys, getting tumbled around with the tide. Two little ridge-less shigokus, two small Pacifics, and two something-or-others. Flowers and oysters, solid Sunday. (And did I have a Besalu brioche for breakfast too? And maybe wood fired pizza for dinner? And maybe a smidge of rice pudding for a midnight snack?)

Five days later, I’m back on Vashon, after a 7 am wakeup and 8 am ferry, driving south on the main road, going way past the tiny little town and the turnoff for the farm where the pigs were raised and slaughtered. The road curves through the ferns and mossy trees and pops out along the eastern coast where it clings to the rocky little shore for a half-mile or so. The highway heads back into the trees and I almost miss the turnoff to the Farmstead Meatsmith headquarters, a big A-frame house that they’ve only just moved in to. The raised living room and bright sunroom serve as a makeshift butcher shop. Today every surface will become home to pork products: the dining room table is covered in white paper, the stainless steel prep table in the sunroom is covered with wooden cutting boards. The best surface of all is the incredibly solid butchers block that Brandon got from some woman in Reno who got it from her dad, who got it from a closing grocery store. He’s got the old-school three pound cleaver to go along with it—the woman of the butcher block ran after him with it, not wanting to separate the block and the knife after so many intimate decades together.

There are six of us today—two middle-aged Seattle guys who want to keep it real in the city and have big charcuterie plans. Another two have come in from farms near Port Townsend, and are dressed in that way that young farmers dress, in holey shirts and practical pants, leaving a little trace of dirt clinging on everything as a badge of honor. One, a girl with rimless glasses, is in the middle of raising eight (“Eight?” Andrew asks then tries not to look too shocked) pigs on the farm she works for, and is here to really learn what to do with them. The other farmer is just about to be a father, and has plans to live with no income in a little house near the sea, working on the farm for produce and collecting oysters from the ocean. And raising pigs.

Sometimes I think of myself farming, spending a summer working on some little organic farm, sleeping in a farmhouse and eating what I’ve picked—then I meet farmers and I realize that I am a sissy little girl and I like croissants and cozy beds. I’ve volunteered on a couple of those sweet little organic farms and it was not sweet. It was novel for about 35 minutes, then I was just squatting in the dirt and getting bit by ants and sweating.

And one other classmate, a woman from Bellingham who’s preparing for the apocalypse. She’ll be the one who can kill the pigs and provide the pork chops in the midst of the collapse of civilization, she said, and I don’t think there was that much kidding. And why am I here, in my white shirt and yoga pants, possibly the worst outfit choice for cutting up a pig. Because I’m a little-bit-lost college grad trying to find something interesting to do, and I feel like I’ve poked around in lots of aspects of food and this is one area that I’ve missed. Because, mostly because, it’d be cool to butcher a pig.

We go outside to the “USDA certified slaughter truck” and start hauling the pig sides in. Three halves of the pigs killed last weekend come in from the truck—one half is saved for the charcuterie class in a few days. The dining table gets a whole pig, the silver prep table a half. We all naturally find our pig half and start fondling knife handles, anxious to start. We start by quartering the pig: the leg, the shoulder, the belly, and the loin (the back.) There are already some recognizable cuts—you can see the stripes that will become bacon on the exposed side of the belly, the leg looks like prosciutto, the ribs; pork chops to-be. And it’s hard work, butchery, transitioning from knife to saw, knife to saw—slicing carefully through flesh and sawing frustratedly through bone—and it’s wholly satisfying. There are things that feel especially good, especially tactile and right, like peeling the skin off the belly, wedging your thumbnail in-between the soft fat and the harder fat that lies just underneath the skin, peeling it off in a thick white waxy layer.

Cutting the spare ribs off the belly is nice too, carefully picking the knife in-between the bone and the fat, hugging the bone with the blade to keep as much fat on the belly—on the bacon—as possible as you cut the ribs away. The loin gets gently pulled out from under the spine by hand. The pork chops are hard to do and I swear off of them after doing only one. They stand in a row, all attached, and have to be first sliced, then cleavered apart. The slicing, fine. The cleaver action, terrifying. I do one shoddily and slink away, hands shaking a little. The shoulder gets cut in half, into the picnic and the Boston Butt, cuts I’ve heard of and seen wrapped in saran wrap, but would never have been able to point out on the pig. The thick legs become roasts, hams if they’re brined. I realize that that bony little circle that’s so good for gnawing is the pig’s real-live leg bone, not just decoration. The feet come off, the back one sawed and the front one just kind of worked off, a knife pushed through all the connective tissue till suddenly I had a little pig paw in my palm. There are different ways to cut up the animal; the American cuts generally symmetrical, with no consideration of bones or curves. The French cuts work more closely with the way the animal is built, Brandon says. He explains that as much as they do their best to let the pigs be pigs when they’re alive, they want them to be able to be pigs when they’re dead too. There’s no sense in making difficult cuts that the flesh and bones don’t want you to make. We finally finish the pigs, after three hours of cutting and sawing and peeling and pulling and pushing.

Andrew’s been in the kitchen the whole time, making lunch, and I’ve been peeking over the whole time, almost more interested in what he’s making that smells so good than the animal in front of me. Our final task before lunch is reassembling the pieces, putting them back together into a pig. It’s harder than it sounds—the original position of the pieces forgotten after we successfully divided them from the rest of the body. But the dining room table soon holds a Franken-pig, all its pieces shuffled back together in a close-enough way. Each half gets heaped into a bus bucket and we clear the table for lunch.

We have brown bread, baked while we butchered, spread with soft sweet butter and sprinkled with salt, while we wait for the hunk of pork to finish roasting, a sirloin roast, a cut I don’t think I’ve ever had before. When it finally gets pulled out of the oven its inch and a half of fat is browned and crackling, dripping its essence backs down into the meat. We fill up plates with hot potato gratin, the top crisped like the pig skin, cauliflower dressed with ribbons of balsamic reduction, and a raw salad of kale, apples, carrots, and cabbage, a welcome crisp freshness next to the fats and carbs and heavy, now very familiar, protein. I sit next to Wallace, Brandon’s two and a half year old son and we talk about what we do and don’t like. “Do you like the meat?” he asks me with his adorable little man cuteness, “I do, do you?” He grins and chews on a crispy little piece of skin. “Do you like carrots?” he asks me, and when I say yes he takes a little orange piece out of his mouth and offers it to me, “This one is really good.” I ask him what he likes to do and he says, “Eat!” and pops a little piece of fat into his mouth. Brendan and his family are way more comfortable with fat than most of us. He worships pig fat, reluctant to lose even an ounce. The difficult process of scalding and scraping preserves precious back fat; the butchering techniques leaves no fat behind. Andrew has followed suit—I see him squish big slices of fat onto bread like butter. It is good fat, and I do try a bit of the fat I’ve been fondling for the past three hours, but one bite is enough—it takes practice to eat that much pork.

After lunch I wash my hands, but they wont really get clean, they’re so saturated with fat. They feel smooth and they look a little shiny, and I strongly shove lurking germ fears away. Waiting in line to get on the ferry back to Seattle, I look through my pictures, making my way backwards from butchery back to evisceration, scraping, hanging, dragging, killing—all the way to photos of three live pigs rooting around a their familiar dirt, Brandon and Andrew’s hands rubbing their heads. “The first step in any pig recipe,” Brandon had said when he got ready to kill the pigs. The butchery was difficult and interesting, the bones and muscles no longer really animal. The organs were vaguely gross but mostly fascinating. The killing was the most uncomfortable part, watching something slump into something else entirely, its systems breaking apart and becoming materials–but those pigs had been raised for pork their whole lives. Their birth was the first step in the pig recipes; in the bacon and eggs, in the seared loin medallions, in the creamy pate to be slathered on good bread. Most of all, these two days showed the incredible amount of work that goes into meat. If all pigs were raised, killed, and processed in this way, pork would be astronomically expensive. So there’s ways now to raise them and kill them and turn them into meat for far, far less money.

And I think it’s interesting that we’re wanting to go back to the slow, painful, expensive way. Farmstead Meatsmith put out a video about butchery last summer, On The Anatomy of Thrift, and it got over 25 thousand hits. And it’s not a video for old farmers just sorting out the internet—it’s for young people in cities wanting to get a taste of that oldness, of this trend of simplification. It’s tempting to belittle this trend—the obsession with the artisan, the hand-made, the curated vintage—and call it just a trend. But I think it comes out of a really complex desire, some weird need that our culture is developing as we forge onward. I think its comes from something deeper than trendiness—we can feel a need for change in our world. The earth is crowded and tired. We have been going upward for ages, and I think maybe we’re needing a little break.  But it’s not possible to put civilization on hold while we all move to the woods and start raising pigs and kale. So we’re funneling that slow-down, good ol’ days desire into things like food and shopping—things that are both enjoyable and easy to change. Choosing local apples, buying a handmade bag from a local shop, going out to a farm to watch a pig get killed and helping butcher it by hand—these kinds of things let us feel that we’re slowing down, even if we’re not. Andrews’s blog describes itself: “We intend to serve the needs of the burgeoning agrarian renaissance by producing dynamic media for agricultural enterprises and organizations.” And this is why this neo-back-to the land thing is so interesting. Because it seems like it’s a turning away from technology, from all that’s modern and progressive, but we can’t really leave all that behind, can’t forsake our iPhones for hatchets. Like me, most people wouldn’t last long on a farm. So, instead, we’re blogging about pigs.

Clean and white and looking much more like something belonging in a butcher shop, the pig hangs upside down, feet splayed out on the bar above. With a not-so-big knife, chosen for its blunt tip to avoid nicking the organs inside, he starts working a slit down the center of the pig. Thick fat parts around the knife; fat that will become bacon and piecrusts. The two sides peel apart around his hands and he tells us all to come sniff the air coming out of the pig. Beef has a very specific smell—a hamburger and a steak have something in common scent-wise. But a singular pork-scent is harder to identify, a loin and a strip of bacon don’t smell a lot alike—I can’t think of what “pork” smells like. This is what it smells like, says Brandon.

First whiff is nothing really, maybe a little bit of unpleasantness. Second go-round is this weird, pungent, bodily smell that does somehow bring the taste of a still-pink pork chop into my mouth. After we all get our sniff, Brendan furthers his slice, unearthing the secret insides of the animal. I was surprised by how clean and pale it was. Up until this part it’d been a bloody process, with the knife to the neck and continual dripping of red blood from the nose and mouth as the pig hung. Now, headless with gaping belly, all clean and dry inside. The cut about halfway finished, Brandon piles the organs that once lived in the hind end of the pig out, all of them slipperily falling over one another into his hands. The ballooned bladder, the bloated rope of the intestines, the dark brown-crimson liver. They flop into a bus tub and Brandon cuts a little further, getting closer to the headless neck. The lungs come out, the esophagus, the caul fat and spleen, the heart.

Having thought of the mysterious organs as a system for years, I was surprised to see them all come out individually. The heart is related to the whole body, but it easily slips away from all the rest.

All of this is food, and emerges from the pig with a recipe from Brandon. Spleen: to be butterflied and filled with sautéed onions, steamed over rillettes. Lungs, chopped and sautéed with wine. “The heart has the perfect sized cavities for dates and pine nuts,” Brandon says as he wiggles his fingers into the holes that once served arteries. The liver seared or made into paté. An abundance of guts, a feast of offal. He puts his hand on the end of the esophagus and fills the lungs up with air and they massively expand and I think of the living pig, its body full and taught.

The body is empty now and Brandon finishes the cut. The pig hangs like a book, one side splayed open. The saw comes out, and there seems to be a transition from slaughter to butchery. No fur, no head, no life-giving organs; no longer really an animal. Flattened, its legs pointing in opposite directions. Andrew pulls the feet apart and Brendan settles his saw into the very center of the spine. The halving is tricky business, trying to saw through the exact center of tiny featherbones that extend up from the spine. Slowly the sides come apart and two separate halves hang from the tree. Their hands bloody, sleeves dirty with organ phlegm and fat, Andrew and Brandon release the pork from the hooks and ease it down onto a wood pallet. I rub the finally exposed pork—familiar, pink meaty protein pork—with my index finger and think about washing my hands. I’m really cold and wet. And thrilled.

At the pig’s little corral, we learn a little about the pigs—Tamworths—one of the only remaining pure heritage breeds. They look more like boars than pink county fair pigs; they’ve got  prickly fur and a little hint of that ridgeback at the top of their necks.  “They’re foragers,” Brandon tells us, pointing to the totally bare muddy mess of a plot where they used to call home. He steps over the foot high electric fence powered by a motor boat battery hidden under an overturned plastic box and the three fuzzy pigs flock to him like overgrown puppies; Gary, Sary, Milly, and Dilly, all the size of fat dogs, with bristly golden hair the color of old pennies. They’re more interested in the food he carries in a five gallon bucket than they are in him—a salmon skin flops out of the bucket and the pigs dash for it. Brandon has a matte black Magnum 22 with him—I don’t know a thing about guns but it looks serious, and totally out of place here in the muddy field, in the hands of a bearded guy wearing a wool vest over a long-sleeved flannel. Brandon kneels down in front of the giant slop bowl one pig’s face is buried in and steadies himself on one knee, the gun hiked up to his shoulder. He uses hollow bullets so they explode into the brain the instant the make contact. He looks right at the pig, gets still, and then gets up. “Once you realize you can take your time, it’s the most relaxed process in the world,” he says to us. “It’s more painful for you.” This is true—my whole self is cringing, has been since we walked over to the pigs area with a gun as part of the group. Brandon explains that pigs have thick skulls–miss the right spot and the bullet will just drive into an inch and a half of bone and the pig’ll keep on eating. The sweet spot is right where you’d imagine it to be, just above the middle of the eyes. Just as easily as he bailed the first time, Brandon kneels down again and shoots Dilly, the littlest pig. She doesn’t squeal—but the others do, as Andrew instantly swoops down with knife and shoves it right into the carotid artery, pushing till the tip just touches the spine.

The pig thrashes under his weight like a big mammalian fish, Andrew’s hand massaging the blood out of her neck. The other pigs keep eating, looking over at their dying pen-mate with only mild interest. For maybe three very long minutes Dilly’s legs shake and blood streams continually out of her neck. She finally settles, head in a pool of her own pretty red blood, her ears soaked in it and her tongue hanging out, dipping into it. “Good job,” Brandon says, to Andrew or the pig, I’m not sure. “The pig at the bottom of the hierarchy is always the most personable,” he says. “She’d always come up and lean against your leg,” adds Andrew, a strange farm eulogy. They respect these pigs, view them as creatures to be cared for, but ultimately, pigs are food. Their animalness gets stripped away layer by layer, first with the bullet exploded into the brain, making it a carcass, then the knife to the neck, draining it of its blood and its fullness.

Andrew takes the same bloodletting knife and makes two slits on either side of the tendons at the backs of the ankles, revealing thick ropes that will hold up this pig’s entire weight. The strange metal bar with a dip on each end and a loop in the middle that he’d carried over gets slipped behind the tendons, the pig’s feet resting in the grooves. The two men grab hold of the bar and start dragging the 200-pound body back to the tree where the work will really begin.

The six of us trail behind quietly, gawking at her bloody head, her comically piggy nostrils leaking strands of gummy blood. I remember Wilbur, fainting at the very mention of bacon. We come back to the tree where we met and they start adjusting the chains rigged around the sturdiest branch, getting ready for the next step. Brandon explains that while cows and other ruminants have hides, pigs just have skin, like us. This means that skinning them—which is the way they’re processed on most industrial farms—means losing edibles. The skin can become cracklins’ or chicharrones, depending what continent you’re on, and the fat just under the skin is precious flavor. So instead of skinning the pigs, they “scald and scrape”—scald the pig then scrape off the fur.

Andrew lights the little propane burner under the giant 55-gallon drum filled with water—a farm-ified lab setup, thermometers tucked into the two men’s vest pockets. While the water warms, Andrew and Brandon hook a sturdy chain into the loop on the metal bar still held by the pig’s tendons. They hoist her up, Andrew pulling on the other end of the chain, Brandon holding her front feet as she swings up into the air. We’re waiting for the water to reach 145 degrees—the perfect temperature to scald the pig for five minutes, just long enough and just hot enough to loosen the top layer of pigmented skin and the bristly hairs. A shoddy scald means impossibly sealed-on hair and a bad tasting outer layer of skin left on the pig. So there’s definitely a sense of urgency as they dip her in, doing “the pig waltz” with her hind feel that stick out of the top of the barrel. Brandon’s watch calls time and they start reeling her out, scraping every inch that emerges from the water with an aptly named “hogscraper,” a shallow metal bowl with sharpened edges, a wood handle emerging from the middle of the convex side, like a flattened bell. The thick bristles come off in reddish clumps along with thin sheets of skin. Brandon takes her feet, yanking off her toenails with another well-named tool: a “nail puller,” then scrapes between her toes and around the bumpy backs of her ankles while Andrew tackles the head. There are a few pig processing places that employ this method, but it’s done mechanically, the pigs’ bodies dunked in massive tanks then tumbled around in giant nubbly cylinders to burnish all the fur off.

After they’ve scraped this end clean, the let her down, hook into the tendon of one of the front feet, nd do the whole process over again on the other end. When they’re done the pig is mostly bare and the men’s forearms are speckled with blood, their chests matted with pig fur. They get out their knives and start shaving the tricky spots. Brandon buys almost all antique knives, prowling eBay for sturdy cleavers and beaver skinning knives that have been used for half a century or more. “New ones are more expensive, and they don’t work as well,” Brandon says. There’s clearly a dogma of nostalgia at Farmstead Meatsmith—when one onlooker, a mostly silent maybe-Russian, asks if its possible to kill a pig without a gun Andrew cites a book published in 1833. They wear wool vests and flannels—and they’re killing pigs by hand. These are not modern men, in the city-dwelling, suit wearing-sense at least. But I’m thinking that maybe they are a super accurate reflection of something we’re collectively pining for in this moment. The world keeps on getting more complicated—and the old school keeps on getting hipper. DIY is cool, riding single speeds is cool. Farmers markets and patio gardens are cools. We love “artisans.” Southern food, the staples of a place that has long been the least progressive part of the nation, is cool. Menus are stuffed with fancy comfort food—mac and cheese, burgers—and restaurants are full of exposed beams and mismatched silverware and mason jar glasses. This, raising and killing and eating pigs, is cool. Andrew has a blog, Farmrun, that often showcases Farmstead, that’s designer-y and cool, with lots of white space and well-chosen pig photos. But I’m having a hard time imagining him hunched over a MacBook now, as he shaves bristles from bloody pig cheeks.

Soon enough, the pig is bare, spare a few stubborn bristles. Next up is the head. The line where the cut will be made was started with Andrew’s stab this morning—Brandon takes that mark and follows it around the neck, cutting through all the different tissues in the head. The head comes off without much of a fight, and Andrew grabs it by the ear and sprays the bloody side down with a hose. The anatomical-cut-away side gets hidden, the head plopped onto a cafeteria lunch tray, and the barber shop routine continues, Andrew puling the flesh taught to finish the shave.