Tyee Wine Dinners at GTF!
Join us for our first Wine Dinners of the year! We’re excited to have Tyee Wine Cellars offer their exceptional, local wine to accompany our farm-fresh cuisine.
Special Dinner for Kitchen Staff
All year long, Chef JC is the top dog in the kitchen. He makes all the big decisions, sets the menu, and makes sure the restaurant is running smoothly. When newer kitchen staff have ideas, they don’t always make it onto the menu. But when the last dinner of the season has been served, JC lets the new staff run their own dinner service. They can create the menu and serve whatever they like. The chef doesn’t even show up usually.
This year, by the end of a tough season, we didn’t have many newbies left. Even so, Ricky, Shea, and Olivia created their own menu, and JC helped out by washing dishes. This special dinner was already sold out over a week beforehand from word of mouth. The staff had told all of their friends and family about it, and the reservations flowed in. Hence why we didn’t advertise it.
The dinner menu was:
- salad with grapes and beets
- celeriac soup and curry eggplant
- black pepper salmon terrine/corn/fennel capellaci of kabocho and kabocha
- mozz stuffed pepper with broccoli puree
- larded pork loin with cavelo nero and polenta
- quince galette and buttermilk foam
Below is the photographic story of our end-of-the-season Special Staff-Made Meal, a creative detour from the typical Farmstand fare.
Shea writing out the menu.
Habanado peppers stuffed with mozzarella.
(A habanado pepper is a habanero with the heat bred out of it.)
Grilled pork-belly-larded pork loin.
Shea skillfully making her delectable pasta.
Delicata raviolis and cubed kabocha squash. Mmmm.
The special menu of the night!
Salad greens with golden beets and a grape vinaigrette.
Creamy celeriac soup with curried eggplant.
Stuffed habanado pepper with broccoli sauce.
Delicata stuffed ravioli with browned butter and thyme.
Bacon-stuffed larded pork loin.
JC washing dishes. As usual. You can see he’s in this for the glamour.
Black pepper salmon terrine a la Gentry.
Quince gallettes for dessert, served with buttermilk foam. Beautiful.
May 16-28: Featuring Oregon Trail Brewery
During the remainder of May, we will be highlighting a couple of beers brewed by Oregon Trail Brewery and bottled especially for us.
The Oregon Trail Brewery is located in downtown Corvallis, right inside The Old World Deli. The deli is a long-time establishment in this town with a loyal following and was one of the brewery’s first draft accounts. Oregon Trail has been brewing for nearly 30 years. In 1992, the company nearly foreclosed, but was revived by new ownership in 1993.
Now they are alive and well, and their beers have won several awards since those days. Check out the Oregon Trail Brewery website for more information about their history as well as what they’ve got brewing now.
We are happy to feature Oregon Trail Brewery at the GTF Farmstand this month. If you order one of their beers while you’re here, we’ll throw in a free salty-crunchy snack to go along with it. What will that snack be? We’re not sure yet, but JC will come up with something to satisfy…could be pork rinds, could be fried something-or-other. Either way, it will be a tasty complement to your cold one, and that’s what matters most.
May 1-15: Special Menu featuring Mosaic Farms Meat
It’s that time of year when we like to feature some of our local vintners, meat suppliers, specific regions, and special items created at the farm. Starting us off is our neighbor, Mosaic Farms. Just up the road from GTF, Mosaic Farms provides us with as local, sustainable, and delicious pig meat as we can get. The farm’s owner and operator, our friend Chris Hansen, describes his holistic farming practices in this video, where you also get a chance to see his pigs roaming in their happy home.
During the first half of May, JC has hams and shoulders, which he will embellish our daily menus with. His grand plan includes the following:
- polpetti en brodo (meatballs in pork broth)
- paté
- rillettes
- pork cracklins
- ragu
- salt pork
- copa involtini (butterflied pork sholder)
- …and maybe even sausage
Back in 2012, chef JC broke down a whole pig for a similar special feature – check out the entire process documented at our Flickr photo set here. Below is one of those photos. Fair warning: we believe people should know what their food looks like at all stages, however some of the images are graphic. 
The moral of the story is this: if you like pork even 1% as much as JC does, you’ll want to make a special trip out to the GTF Farmstand in early May to try out these mouth-watering morsels.