Making Other Arrangements
Stories for a sustainable future
DINNER FARMSIDE
boulder, colorado — China Tresemer
grips the wheel of our 1995 Thomas
International school bus, and with a confidence that seems surprising for someone
who has never driven such a rig before,
steers us westbound along the snow-covered highways of Indiana. I’m tucked
into one of the seats a couple rows back.
Across the aisle, Nate Ready rummages
through our cooler: he’s making sandwiches of pickled vegetables and potted
chicken—an evening snack to sustain us
during our journey.
We are on our way home to Colorado,
in the twenty-four-foot bus we purchased
on eBay. It’s impossible to carry on a conversation above the roar of the diesel
engine, but undoubtedly our minds are
occupied with the same question: what on
Earth have we just done?
The three of us have vastly di=erent
backgrounds—China is an artist, Nate a
master sommelier, and I’m a biologist—
but we share a love of food and wine, and
the belief that the rituals of the table hold
great potential for building communities.
Our common desire is to draw connections among taste and place and season.
We’ve talked at length about creating a
small business to cook dinners—simple,
uncomplicated food—on local farms, right
beside the rows of crops. And now, this
school bus is to become our kitchen.
All winter and well into spring, we
puzzle over water pumps and holding
tanks, flow rates and BTUs. We scour
antique stores for silverware and porcelain, snoop around restaurant equipment
auctions, and splurge on a work-top
refrigerator. We track down organic cotton
for table linens, and custom-order a woodburning grill built onto a trailer. By May,
we have a licensed kitchen on wheels,
a website for taking reservations
( farmdinners.com), and a name:
Meadow Lark Farm Dinners.
At last, it’s time to cook. Our
hosts for the first dinner, Anne and
Paul Cure, wave from the fields as
we maneuver our kitchen bus
around the hoop houses and
chicken coops of Cure Organic
Farm. It takes us all morning to
unload our equipment and stoke a
fire in the grill. Anne arrives with a
wheelbarrow full of rhubarb stalks,
bunches of baby turnips, and
heaps of sorrel. While I wash the
crops, China checks on several
shoulders of pork—from a local pig
farmer—that she has begun slow-roasting
above the glowing embers.
By late afternoon, the smells of roasting pork and simmering rhubarb are
wafting through the fields. Our table for
thirty guests, set alongside rows of blossoming fava beans, is draped in fresh
linens and sparkles with silver and porcelain. Nate inspects each wine glass by
holding it up to the sun, and Paul comes
by to inquire if there’s anything else we
need from the fields—a few more heads
of green garlic perhaps, or another bunch
of chives?
Despite the months of preparation for
this first dinner, we cannot escape the tingle of suspense as our first guests arrive.
Have we forgotten anything? Will the food
turn out all right? It’s hard to go wrong, we
remind ourselves, with ingredients picked
at their peak just hours before dinner.
We greet our guests with miniature
radish-and-butter sandwiches, and Anne
and Paul lead a walk through their fields.
Some visitors have long been patrons of
the Cures; for others this dinner is a
first opportunity to set foot on a farm. As
the sun disappears behind the Rocky
Mountains, our guests settle in around the
table for a celebration of the harvest and
our brief yet bountiful growing season.
Over the course of the summer, we are
hosted by seven farms around Boulder
County. Our menus are inspired by their
diverse and exquisite products, from
tangy fresh goat’s milk cheeses to fragrant
charentais melons. Although we prepare
