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August 12, 2008

Stephanie Salter: Eight courses under the stars whet appetite for Valley foods

By Stephanie Salter The Tribune Star Tue Aug 12, 2008, 11:33 PM EDT

Viewed from above, the field-to-fork fundraiser last weekend for Terre Foods Cooperative Market must have looked like a scene in an Italian movie — or at least a cinematic travel commercial that’s meant to invoke, “great food, great wine, great company, great times.”

As the summer light began to fade at Sycamore Farm Bed and Breakfast on East Poplar Street, and votive candles all along a 100-foot serpentine series of tables glowed in the soft night, laughter and animated conversation rose and fell on the lawn.

White-clad serving staff from the inn’s ButtonWoods restaurant cruised around the tables tending to empty wine and water glasses and sliding heaping bowls and platters of various ambrosia between diners with the welcome instruction. “Please, serve yourself and enjoy.”

But the accents rising from the Old World scene were primarily Hoosier, not Tuscan or Abruzzese. And the food — all eight courses of it — came from growers with names like Fischer, Kelly, Weber and Royer, almost all of whom live and work the land within easy driving distance of Terre Haute.

For people who prefer to stay in their automobiles and trucks as they crawl from speaker-phone to money window to dinner-in-a-bag, the ButtonWoods field-to-fork event likely would have been hell on Earth.

After all, it took three whole hours for us diners to make our way from course No. 1 — wheat and walnut crostini with herbed goat cheese and strawberry reduction — to the grand finale — peach, blackberry and blueberry pie with cardamon whipped cream.

In between were tomato and watermelon gazpacho, a crabcake-like whitefish round, a nine-greens mixed salad, black and red currant sorbet, pork osso buco, green beans in ginger and soy glaze, and red and white potatoes au gratin.

But one person’s hell is another’s heaven. Advocates for several culinary movements that have taken hold in the United States of late — “slow” food, eco-friendly and locally produced — were in the upper realms of heaven.

There were 64 of us in all. Our attending angels were about 20 staff, family and friends of ButtonWoods’ executive chef, Kris Kraut, and his innkeeper wife, Gretchen.

If anything this ambitious has ever been attempted in Terre Haute, I haven’t heard about it: Eight labor-intensive, deliciously coordinated courses prepared in a Victorian farmhouse kitchen and served outdoors on linen with china, glassware, stainless steel cutlery and wines paired to each dish.

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