Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [30]
Photographs by Sara Remington
At first we were worried about selling enough seats—we’d made the mistake of putting the price on the flier but no menu, and right up until a week before the event, the locals didn’t bite. It’s a bad feeling to think that you’re going to end up with pork confit for fifty and no one to eat it, and we couldn’t change the quantity of meat because we’d already paid for it. But a few days before Sunday, people started signing up, and by the time we got ready to serve the first course, we had sixty-eight people at the restaurant, eighteen more than we’d aimed for. There were friends and acquaintances, neighbors and former employees—practically no one that we didn’t somehow know.
That Sunday was a perfect night, fogless and warm, and the temperature stayed in the seventies all the way until nightfall. We sat outside at long redwood tables with cloth draped overhead for shade and strings of white lights to illuminate the scene as the sun went down. When the meal began, Jim got up and described his farm and how he raised his pigs, and each chef talked about what they’d made. Then came the food—and music, provided by one of our favorite local bands, a group called Sex Farm that includes a couple of tattoo artists and is led by a guy named Rosebud. They played old-fashioned rock and roll outside as we ate, changing some of the lyrics and song titles to include references to pork.
As the band performed and food was served, kids ran around wearing plastic pig noses that we’d bought as favors, and Bill and Danielle poured glass after glass of beer—we had two varieties for each of the four courses. Soon the tabletops were covered with mismatched glasses and plates of food, with all our friends gathered around laughing and eating. Despite the fact that we were at our restaurant, it felt different from even our best and busiest nights. Surrounded by friends, it was as if we’d invited people into our home to cook and eat and have fun together. And even though it was stressful—worrying about selling the seats, preparing and plating food for sixty-eight people at once—everything worked out. But that’s the thing. Somehow, it always does.
Photographs by Sara Remington
TLC Ranch
Jim Dunlop and his wife, Becky, run the TLC Ranch in Prunedale, where they raise pigs, chickens, cows, and lambs on organic pasture. We already knew about the farm—Justin had been giving us sausage made from their pigs as he developed his recipes, and we order their organic, pasture-raised eggs for the Bakery. But we’d never been to the farm ourselves, so when Jim invited us to check it out in person, we jumped at the chance.
When we arrived, Jim greeted us at the ranch house and led us off into the fields so that we could meet our sausage firsthand. Unlike pigs at typical commercial farms, Jim’s pigs are pretty much free-range (he keeps different groups in different areas of the farm, but other than that, they’re free to roam), so you never know when you’ll turn a corner and find a huge sow rooting around in the dirt, or a lost piglet squealing for its mother. Following Jim, we hopped into a fenced-off area where fifty or so young pigs were grazing. Once they’d noticed us, several came up to investigate, but they quickly got distracted by food and let us pet their heads as they nibbled on the greens near our feet.
Jim introduced us to the pigs’ parents—they’d all been produced from one large boar and a huge sow who lived in her own pen and had ears that smelled, no joke, like sweet caramel. Then we walked on dirt roads through fields of artichokes and blackberries, stopping to check out the chickens and pointing out pigs along the way. It was like Wilbur-gone-wild—pigs roamed all over the place, munching on crops and cabbage heads, and scratching their heads on wooden posts. And they weren’t all your stereotypically pink piglets, either; some had spots that made them look like somewhere along the line they’d crossed genes with a Dalmatian.
Jim’s ranch is actually owned by a nonprofit organization called ALBA that