Setting a Big Table: Oregon Wine Comes of Age

In a recent edition of the New York Times, wine editor Eric Asimov waxes poetic about Oregon wine, saying that "Oregon is right now the single most exciting winemaking area in the United States," that "nowhere else does the level of quality seem so high, the perspectives so diverse or the experimentation so fierce as it is in Oregon right now." He goes on to extoll several of our best winemakers, especially Brian Marcy and Clare Carver of Big Table Farm. Here's an article I wrote about them seven years ago. Nice that Mr. Asimov has caught up!

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Clementine, the Catahoula leopard hound, has been anxious since dawn, not wanting to be too far from her owner, Clare Carver of Big Table Farm. Clare has been moody for the last couple of days. Even Clare’s husband, Brian, has been giving his wife a wide berth. When Clare goes up to the hill pasture to sit with her pigs, Picnic and Pancake, Clementine stations herself with a good view of the road. She knows something is coming, something that is making Clare sad, and she wants to be ready.

Clare Carver sits in the pen with her pigs, scratching their backs when they lean their 300-pound bodies against her, snorting and squinting in the bright sunlight. Like a couple of big dogs, they dash off to play with each other or to chase something in the bushes or to root through the grass in the pasture, but eventually they come back to get more attention from Clare. She's raised them from tiny weaner pigs, and today is their last day.

An inspired painter whose subjects are the cows, horses, chickens, goats, pigs, old trucks and tractors that populate the farm she owns with her husband, Brian Marcy, in Williams Canyon outside Gaston, Oregon,she also has a large vegetable garden that supplies most of the couple’s food and the large farm dinners they host for people who buy the wines Brian makes under the Big Table Farm label.

Growing up in a large Catholic family (she has eight brothers and sisters), Clare heard stories about the farm in upstate New York that her parents had bought in the late 50s. They sold the farm when Clare was seven and moved their large family to the suburbs of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

She carried those tales of the farm with her into her career as an advertising art director for an East Coast ad agency, and one day a consultant for the agency told her, “You need to go out and see the world. You shouldn’t be doing this because your life is going to look exactly the same in ten years as it does now.”


“It was a complete wake-up call,” Clare said. She sold all her belongings and moved to San Francisco to start her own business. Shortly after the move she began dating Brian, who was transitioning to making wine after working for several years as a beer brewer.

“With beer, the whole goal is to take varying inputs and make the same product year in and year out without considering season or ingredients,” she said. “In wine it’s just the opposite, where people expect the product to be affected by season and ingredients. It felt more creative to him.”

Their move to Oregon was prompted, oddly enough, by a season spent harvesting grapes in Australia.

“It was a really romantic time for us and we started looking around at the land,” she said. “Honestly, that was the first time it started to creep into our consciousness that we could have a farm as well as have a winery.”

Their requirements for their farm were fairly simple: It had to be within an hour of a big city so Clare could continue her graphic design business, it needed to be located in a wine-producing area so Brian could be a consulting winemaker while developing their vineyard and, of course, it had to be within their budget.

The farm they found in 2006 fit their list to a T: Close to Portland, it was in the middle of a burgeoning wine region. It had perfect southeast facing hills and a charming Victorian farmhouse. Their bid was accepted.

“We didn’t really know anything about farming, and we read ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ by Michael Pollan when we were closing on the property,” Clare said. “It totally changed the way we thought we were going to set up our farm.”

While the book is mostly about what Pollan believes is the broken food system in the United States, where people are disconnected from the sources of their food, he also writes about a visit to Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley and farmer Joel Salatin. Salatin calls himself a “grass farmer” and believes in rotating the animals on the land to keep the soil and the plants, and thus the people who eat the animals and plants, healthy.

With Salatin’s principles in mind, they’re transforming the nearly ruined hillsides and pastures of their Big Table Farm to an organic, balanced system. Brian made a trailer, called the “chicken bus,” to transport their laying chickens from one area to the next. Goats clear blackberries and scrub, watched over by a “guard llama” who challenges any predators who get too close. The cows, pigs and Clare’s beloved draft horses are confined by electrified tape that can be easily moved when the pasture needs a break from grazing.

When Salatain made a trip to Oregon, she asked him about organic feed, an important part of the system at their farm.

Salatin’s answer? “People can handle nudists and they can handle Buddhists, but they can’t handle nudist Buddhists.

“What he was saying is that people can handle the concept of pasture, they can get their head around that. But when you start talking about pasture and then you start talking about organic feed, they hold their heads and scream.”

She told Salatin that while that might be the case in his home state of Virginia, she felt that Northwesterners were able to handle that kind of information. Like the fact that she flat out refuses to send any of her animals to processing facilities to be slaughtered.

“The primary reason is because of the stress on the animal,” she said. “The stress and the adrenaline that goes through the animal changes the meat, and there’s hard science behind that.”

Take pigs, she said. They’re very smart and sensitive, so when they’re put into a truck for the first time in their life, it’s terribly stressful. And a pig’s sense of smell is even keener than a dog’s.

“Can you imagine what a processing center smells like to a pig?” she asked. “It makes my hair stand up just to think about it. Those poor animals.”

Because strict federal regulations require any meat that is sold to the public has to be processed in a USDA-approved facility, the meat from her pasture-slaughtered pigs can’t be sold in supermarkets or at farmers' markets. This is despite the growing demand for just the kind of pasture-raised meat she and other small-scale farmers in the region are producing.

With small processing plants closing down because of the recession, it’s hard for small producers to get their animals into larger slaughter facilities. With just a handful of USDA-approved mobile slaughter trucks in the entire Northwest, there isn’t one available for Clare’s farm.

Which brings us back to Clementine standing watch and Clare waiting with her pigs in their hillside pasture. When the truck from Frontier Custom Cutting finally pulls into the driveway in the late morning, Clemmie starts barking. She won’t stop until it leaves.

Richard, a burly man wearing orange rubber overalls and carrying a black rifle, walks up the hill. While Clare distracts Picnic with some fresh eggs, Richard puts the rifle behind Pancake’s ear and pulls the trigger. Then he walks over to Picnic munching on her egg and does the same.

Clare feels it’s the most respectful way to kill them.

“The bullet goes right to the spinal cord, but their heart is still pumping, so they’re essentially brain dead,” she said. “It’s a little violent but it doesn’t last very long. That part is the part I hate to watch, but dying is dying and it’s not pretty. It is what it is.

“I really hope when it’s my time I get afforded a respectful, quick death,” she added. “That’s what I would want. So I do the best I can for my animals in that sense.”

And each time she allows herself to feel the loss.

“It’s the way you feel when a human dies. They’re gone…really gone,” she said. ”I go out to their pasture the next day and I’m like, oh, they’re gone. It’s a reminder of how much power we have and how careful we have to be of that power, that we just created and took this life.

An observer could note that, in the way they run their farm and raise their animals, she and Brian haven’t chosen an easy route. And, like the move to Oregon and buying the land, it’s all been done without a business plan.

“If we had a business plan some things might be smoother for us,” Clare said. “But, like anything in life, it’s like, ‘Well, I’m going up that hill and maybe I’m not going to take the straightest path. But maybe I’m going to see some things I didn’t expect if I don’t have an exact map of how I’m going to get there.

“Sure, if we had a business plan we might get to the top of the hill faster,” she continued, “but we’re still going up there because we have the same goals and that hasn’t changed. Or if it does, we talk about it and we change it together.”

Asked about the best part of their lives on Big Table Farm, she thought for a moment, then answered.

“Almost every morning when I do chores I look around and this incredibly deep sense of satisfaction strikes me,” she said. “Being deeply happy with this path we’re on now.”

Top photo by Amanda Lucier for the New York Times.

A Pig Named Roger: Getting to Know My Food

Two years ago I met a pig named Roger. This is the first in a series of three videos that was filmed at that time. Here are the initial paragraphs of my first post about the project.

 Can I eat an animal I've played tag with?

It's a question I've been struggling with since committing to buy half a pig from my friend Clare Carver at Big Table Farm. Twice a year for the last several years, Clare has bought two organically-certified weaner pigs from her friends Amy Benson and Chris Roehm at Square Peg Farm, and I'd promised myself that someday I'd get one.

This spring she got two Berkshire Cross pigs, a heritage breed known to thrive on pasture and whose meat is darker and far more flavorful than store-bought. Named Don and Roger after two of the main characters from the TV series Madmen, they're being raised inside an electrified tape corral on grass pasture. The corral is moved every few weeks in a process called rotational grazing, an especially good idea since young pigs like to root around, roll and generally tear up the ground. Their diet consists of grass, organic grain, occasional treats of the farm's organic eggs and scraps and vegetable trimmings from the kitchen.

Clare doesn't believe in moving her animals off the farm for slaughter because of the stress it puts on them and the effect that can have on the quality of the meat (see previous story here). So when Don and Roger reach 270 pounds or so they'll be killed in their pasture on the farm.

Read the rest of the post at: Thinking of Eating: Roger and Me.

Watch the other videos in the series, Learning to Butcher and Celebrating a Life Given.

A Fine Vintage? Only Time Will Tell

Harvest 2013 is winding down. The last of the grapes are picked and heading into the wineries to be sorted, crushed and made into…well, whatever the winemakers decide they'll be. This photo of the final white grapes from the Wirtz vineyard is by my friend Clare Carver of Big Table Farm.

Of this vintage, she said, "We are in the final weeks of harvest now. It has been a 'tough harvest,' not for lack of quality in the fruit, only because it hit hard and fast and required quick and flexible movements on the part of the whole team in the winery and the picking crews.

"Fruit had to be picked and processed at a moment's notice, as mother nature was particularly fickle this year. Though with all that I think the wines will be beautiful and elegant," she wrote, then added the usual winemaker's caution, "but of course only time will tell."

Big Table Farm: Crowdsourcing a Winery

Call it a 21st century barn raising. Winemakers Brian Marcy and Clare Carver of Big Table Farm are not known for doing things in the traditional manner, from the way they farm to the wines they make. So it didn't come as a surprise when they announced that they were turning to friends and fans to help finance their new winery, to be built on their farm in Gaston.

You see, Brian and Clare believe in growing and producing what they love to eat and drink, from the eggs their chickens lay to the pork from their pigs to the award-winning white, red and rosé wines that they serve on their table and offer to their buyers. It's a hard-won and not-very-lucrative life, which doesn't always neatly fit the forms used by big banks and lending institutions, but their passion shines through in the quality of their labors.

And it's not just their exuberant fans who think so…Big Table Farm wines have received high scores from the biggest noses in the wine world, from Robert Parker's Wine Advocate to Wine and Spirits magazine to Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar.

To accomplish the next step in their dream of making their own wines on their own land, they've created a Founder's Circle for folks who want to help. For a donation of $1,700, Founders will receive a six-pack of magnums from the 2012 vintage and an invitation to a Big Table Farm Feast in July of 2014 to celebrate. To me, that sounds like a dream worth investing in.

Photo of rainbow and magnums by Clare Carver.

Meeting My Meat: Portioning Petunia

I'm not big on rituals. Though I certainly grew up on them, from going to church on Sundays to having tuna casserole on Fridays to going out in the woods in December and cutting our own Christmas trees—the plural because there was the formal tree in the living room and a second, smaller tree in the family room that my brothers and I would decorate with our own homemade ornaments.

Chillaxing in the garage.

But to get back to the point, it looks like I'm launching into a ritual of my own these days. You may remember the series of posts from 2011, "Thinking of Eating: Roger and Me," where I committed to buying half a pig from Big Table Farm and following it from piglet to plate, including attending the slaughter, doing the butchering myself and then recording the meals that were made from the various cuts.

I did less of that last step than planned, but the meat fed my family (and many friends) well for a year or so. It was always referred to as "Roger" as in "We're throwing some Roger on the grill, want to come over?" (I remember some giggling but never being turned down.)

Butchering head to head.

When Clare announced she'd brought two more piglets onto her farm last spring, my friend Linda and I immediately signed on for one of them. Named Rose and Petunia, the piglets fed on the lush grass of the farm supplemented with organic corn, no-soy organic grain and spent chestnuts from a gluten-free brewery. They were switched to chestnuts for the last two months. By late November, just after Thanksgiving, they'd reached their finish weight of more than 300 pounds.

Working the ribs.

Rose and Petunia's last day was spent in the pasture where they'd lived their entire lives, basking in a rare blast of winter sunshine on a bed of fresh hay. The pasture kill that evening was swift and painless, delivered by Richard with his rifle. His knife worked in long, skilled strokes to remove the skin, then he expertly gutted and halved them, saving the head, trotters, kidneys, heart and liver for us to process later.

We transported our halves to Ayers Creek Farm, hanging them in the garage overnight to cool. In the morning, armed with knives and a saw, we began the process of breaking down each half into three large sections called primals, which were in turn cut into roasts, chops and the smaller bits that would be made into bacon, sausages and stew meat.

The head ready to make into scrapple.

As we women butchered, the menfolk worked in the kitchen grinding the scraps of meat and fat to make into sausage. The head went into the oven to roast very slowly until it was fall-apart tender, with the brilliant idea of combining it with Ayers Creek polenta to make scrapple.

Since this was the second time I'd stood in front of half a carcass with a knife in my hand, I found it was a little easier to know where to start. It helped that Linda had done this several times and could guide me back if I lost my way. The first task after cutting the primals was to get the shoulder meat to the kitchen for the sausage, and after that was separating the belly from the ribs and divining the perfect ratio of rib roasts to chops.

Fresh belly, left; bacon-to-be, right.

While we butchered, a cut-and-wrap operation was set up in the garage. Keeping the meat cool during this process wasn't an issue, since the temperature in the Wapato Valley that day hovered in the high 40s to low 50s. Fortunately some bourbon was poured to keep the blood flowing to our fingers. Once we'd worked our way through the leg roasts and Petunia was all wrapped and stowed in our coolers, we went inside to warm up, have dinner and recount our labors over several glasses of Big Table Farm wine.

Petunia, or at least my half of her, is now resting comfortably in the freezer. Dave has smoked the nine pounds of bacon we got from some of the belly meat. The thicker end of the belly we're saving to use for braising and big pots of beans, the jowl will be cured and made into guanciale and there's much discussion over what to do with the rest of the meat in the coming months. And, as with Roger last year, this year we'll be talking about having Petunia for dinner.

To watch an expert butcher break down half a pig and narrate the process, watch this series of short videos from Food Farmer Earth. To take a hands-on class that teaches how to butcher a pig, check the schedule at Portland's Culinary Workshop or Portland Meat Collective. To buy a pasture-raised pig for your freezer, contact Kendra at Goat Mountain Pastured Meats.

New Series: Hug a Farmer!

Whaddaya think? A whole series demonstrating how to properly hug a farmer?

This particular hug is with one of my favorite farmers—also a graphic designer, horsewoman, blogger, photographer, winemaker—Clare Carver of Big Table Farm.

Photo by Jeremy Fenske.

Harvest 2012: One More Shot

This is a fantastic shot by Clare Carver of Big Table Farm showing the grapes coming out of the destemmer and falling into the bin where they'll start the fermentation process. A lot of the wine she and Brian make is whole-cluster, meaning the grapes are left on the stems to get as much of the flavor of the whole fruit as possible, but some of the grapes go through the process above, as well.

So much to learn!

The Wines Are Coming! The Wines Are Coming!

Bumper-to-bumper traffic, congestion, crazy drivers, flaring tempers. Sounds like the Terwilliger curves around 5 o'clock, right?

Pinot noir grapes from Sunnyside Vineyard.

Well, commuters, you can be comforted knowing you're not the only ones feeling the pain of too much traffic in too few lanes. The normally idyllic backroads of Oregon wine country, from NE Gun Club Road to the Dayton Cutoff and beyond, are clogged with hundreds of old rattle-traps loaded to the point of collapse with grapes destined for wineries big and small, up and down the valley.

Pinot gris straight from the vines.

The harvest this year is rumored to be one of the best since the fabled '08 vintage, maybe even as good as the best the state has ever seen. The long, dry Indian summer with its warm days and cool nights has been ideal in the region's vineyards. Winemakers and vineyard managers, the folks who control the levers of the harvest as far as how the vines are groomed and when the grapes are ready, have had the pleasure of actually letting the fruit hang until it's reached its moment of perfection, without the pressure of impending rain or frost.

How much is ten tons of grapes? 37 bins, sorted in one day!

For the third year in a row, Brian Marcy and Clare Carver of Big Table Farm allowed me to come out and help sort the grapes that'll be going into their 2012 pinot noir and pinot gris wines. In previous years, vigilance was required to spot mold hiding in the tightly-packed clusters. And this year there was almost no damage from birds, which caused a huge problem two years ago (compare the photos above with those from 2010).

The beautiful Lucy Hoffman applying some gentle pigeage.

In both those years, the conveyor belt carrying the fruit had to be slowed way down so we could better see any flaws, and we ended up tossing out copious amounts of fruit. This year the grape clusters were gorgeous and the belt whizzed by, since all we had to do was pick out leaves and debris. (I even got to save a praying mantis that had somehow fallen into the bin.)

Thanks, Clare, for a great day!

It was a pleasure to grab a cluster and chomp down, letting the fruit explode in my mouth. Standing on the line was also much nicer this harvest, too, with the warm-but-not-hot sun on my back and the yellow jackets few and far between.

I can't wait to taste of the wines from this vintage when it's released next year, having experienced how luscious the fruit was. Knowing the talent of the winemakers we've got around here, I'm guessing it'll be legendary.

Food Wisdoms: What It Takes to Make An Egg

Spending a moment at the sink with farmer and artist Clare Carver of Big Table Farm gave me a whole new appreciation for those eggs I so casually crack into a bowl.

Watch the longer interview I did with Clare for Food Farmer Earth.

Food Farmer Earth: Which Came First, The Chicken or the Farm?

In this interview for Food Farmer Earth, I talk with farmer and artist Clare Carver of Big Table Farm. To find out about this series of interviews with local food producers, and to get some terrific recipes featuring the ingredients discussed, consider a free subscription. This week's recipe: a Dungeness crab and green garlic quiche.

Eggs aren’t just for breakfast at Big Table Farm.

Eggs, and the chickens that lay them, are a critical part of an integrated system that sustains the land and the couple who farm it, Clare Carver and her husband, winemaker Brian Marcy. The birds are also a frequent subject of Clare’s paintings, a living part of the landscape from which she draws her inspiration.

Carver was raised on her family’s farm, but at the age of 7 she moved to the city with her family. She took to riding horses at a nearby stable and participated in 4-H activities through grade school and in high school. Carver also started painting, often finding inspiration in the natural environments that surrounded her.

Now, as she and her husband live and work on Big Table Farm in Gaston, Oregon, Carver’s canvas largely focuses on the farm animals she raises, including her chickens and even their eggs—the latter more of a challenge, as she explains in this video.

Read the rest of Clare's story. Spend a moment at the sink with Clare as she washes eggs and talks about what it takes to produce them.

The Untold History of Milk Production

If you hear about raw milk, it's almost always portrayed as a fringe product consumed by wacko hippies who are just asking to get sick.

In this video from a new series about local farmers and cooks called Food Farmer Earth, farmer Mike Guebert of Terra Farma Naturals in Corbett reviews the history of milk production in this country. From its roots in small farm-based dairies to its current state as a highly processed commodity with a hugely influential political lobby promoting it, I found his take on the subject riveting.

In Oregon, raw milk can only be bought on the farm that produces it. And if you're considering consume raw milk, the best advice I've heard came from Clare Carver of Big Table Farm, a customer of Champoeg Creamery (see link below). She said, "If you're going to buy raw milk, go to the farm and ask to see their operation." Asking questions is the key: find out what the cows eat, how they're treated and how clean the farmer's process is.

Which, come to think of it, isn't a bad idea when it comes to the milk we buy in the store.

You can also read about another small farmer, Charlotte Smith of Champoeg Creamery, who produces raw milk in St. Paul.

Horses. Camera. Action!

My friend Dana is taking a film class and one of her first assignments was to make a 10-minute film. As an avid horsewoman, she naturally decided to make a film about her favorite subject. Which prompted me to introduce her to Clare Carver of Big Table Farm. The rest, as they say, is (film) history.

Speed the Plow

Blue skies and a wide green field beckoned hundreds of visitors yesterday to watch teams of gorgeous draft horses turning over perfect rows of black earth for the 46th Annual Farm Fest in McMinnville.

There were Percherons, Clydesdales, Belgians and Shires, along with lesser-known breeds like Halflingers and Fjords, as well as a team or two of mules. They were harnessed to comparatively delicate-looking plows steered by men and women who walked in the furrows they dug, directing their teams with whistles, calls and an occasional pull on the lines.

The sweat dripping off both horses and handlers showed how hard this work was, despite their methodical speed and the undulating waves of turned earth left in their wake. Each team was competing to plow a 50 by 150 foot section, which would take about three hours, with prizes awarded based on the straightness of the furrows and the performance of the team.

There won't be another chance to see these magnificent beasts (equine or human) demonstrating their skills until next year, but mark your calendar for early next April…you can even combine it with wine tasting or a picnic and make it the perfect day trip!

Photo at top of Clare Carver of Big Table Farm driving Huston and Hummer, her team of Halflingers, in this year's competition.

A Really Great Day

The e-mail's subject line was enough to grab my attention: "Oink oink."

Turns out my friend Matt Berson, winemaker under his own Love and Squalor and Behemoth labels, had bought half a pig from Chris and Amy at Square Peg Farm and was looking for some moral support. He'd observed a couple of other butcherings, and taken the hands-on pig butchering class from Melinda at Portland's Culinary Workshop, but this was his first solo effort.

I told him I'd only butchered a pig once under close supervision, but he said the company would be helpful, so I was (more than) happy to come and lend a hand. I climbed the stairs at his friend Matt Johnson's Secret Society and up to the kitchen where Peg the pig (named after its former home) was waiting on a long table.

After consulting a couple of online resources, Matt set to work cutting it into the large primal sections, leaving the leg in a single piece for prosciutto. The jowl came off, then the belly, a nice long slab of bacon-to-be. We threw scraps of meat and fat into a bin for sausage, then after removing the backbone and dividing the rib sections, I had to leave Matt to do the rest of the piecework since I was meeting my friend Kathryn for a lunch date.

Kevin was just turning the "CLOSED" sign around as I got to Evoe, so I grabbed two seats at the prep table, the better to observe the chopping, shaving and mixing of the ingredients that makes this place my personal choice for the best restaurant in town. By the time I'd perused the chalkboard with the day's offerings, Kathryn had arrived and we promptly ordered two house-made elderflower spritzers and the pickle plate.

Knowing as I do that Kathryn's appetite for Kevin's food is as prodigious as mine, despite the fact that she is (quite astonishingly) petite, we set about ordering. Nettle dumplings with cream (left) were the essence of spring, three light-as-a-feather quenelles arranged in a dish of cream and briefly set under the broiler to warm and brown.

To follow that we chose a light salad. Kevin has had a way with butter lettuce salad since the early days of Castagna, and we knew this one would be the perfect mid-meal break with lightly dressed whole leaves tossed with chopped anchovies. The culmination of lunch was duck confit (right), a whole leg that had been sitting in duck fat for several days, which was then toasted to crunchy, crusted perfection and served with a spoonful of thick applesauce. After that we considered splitting the spicy pork sandwich for dessert, but decided that might be a bit too much even for us.

Dave came home that evening in the mood for a martini, so while I cubed up some of the jowl from Roger the pig that he'd cured and smoked the weekend before, he shook up a couple of his house specials. In Italy a cured, unsmoked jowl is called guanciale and, when sliced, looks a lot like bacon with ribbons of fat streaked with meat. It's used in dishes like carbonara and pasta all'amatriciana, and since I had a couple dozen of Clare's amazing eggs, I decided to go with the carbonara, a fitting tribute to Roger's home and an appropriate end to a spectacular day.

Eggs the Color of Clementines

They're baaaaaaaaack!

It was a happy day yesterday when I went out to Big Table Farm in Gaston to pick up eggs from my friend Clare Carver…we've had to make do with store-bought (organic) eggs that can't hold a candle to the flavor and freshness of these pasture-raised beauties (left, with the "chicken bus" that Clare's husband, Brian Marcy, made).

Trying to describe the yolk from the egg she'd just poached, Clare held up a clementine next to it and said it was the closest she could come to matching its color. Creamy and rich, with a sweetness from the new grass in their pasture, these needed nothing but a pat of butter to cook them and a little salt sprinkled over the top. Heaven!

Great Gifting: Seeing the Art Around You

By now, "buy local" is a mantra for everything from where we shop for groceries to where we buy our books. Not that the internet doesn't provide a handy outlet when the thing you're looking for isn't available locally or the price is prohibitive. But there's nothing like going to your favorite neighborhood bookshop, browsing the shelves or talking to the owner…you know, in person…and discovering, say, a new favorite author.

Same goes for buying gifts from local artists and designers. I mean, not that there isn't some decent mass-produced stuff out there, but isn't it more fun to say something was made by a friend, a neighbor or even someone in the area, particularly if it's totally gorgeous?

With all the holiday bazaars, gift shows and studio tours going on, it's not hard to find something for everyone from beer drinkers to great-aunties. Here are a few local artists to get you started, and feel free to add your own faves in the comments section!

• Occupy Pubs t-shirts from Beer Goddess Lisa Morrison.
• Delicate jewelry made with precious stones from Lisa Belt of Maefly Designs (above left).
• Plein air landscapes, plus chickens and farm implements from Clare Carver (top).
• Contemporary illustrations layered into beeswax from Amy Ruppel.

Read the other Great Gifting posts: Eating is Believing, Giving From the Heart and Keeping Spirits Bright.

Thinking of Eating: The Meat of the Matter

I arrived at Portland's Culinary Workshop (PCW), where I would be butchering my half of Roger, about thirty minutes before Clare was to arrive with him and her half of Don. I walked in to find the tables set up for the butchering along with the various knives and saws we'd be using to do the job. In the spirit of the day, there were also two tubs set up to hold the butchered meat, one labeled "Roger" and the other, "Don."

Melinda Casady, Mistress of Meat.

A hands-on cooking school started by my neighbor, Susana Holloway, and her friend, Melinda Casady (left), both former culinary school instructors, PCW seemed the perfect place for this part of the process. Especially because Melinda, nicknamed "The Mistress of Meat," loves to teach people how to cut up whole animals or, to use the term of art, "break down" carcasses.

Roger's tub.

The halves of Roger and Don had been hanging in Clare's shed at the farm to chill overnight, and when she drove up they were cool as cucumbers, wrapped in plastic sheeting in the back of her truck. She'd stopped at a friend's winery on the way in and weighed the halves, with my half of Roger coming in at 96 pounds, making his live weight close to 320 pounds. Quite the pig.

Just getting started.

We carried the carcasses in and laid them on the tables—end to end it was about five feet of pig to cut up—and Melinda discussed with each of us the different ways we could cut up our pig. Did we want lots of chops and steaks? Or would we rather have more roasts? Big or small? Bone in or out? What about the ribs? Did we want whole racks?

Can't wait to throw these on the grill!

Some decisions were easy…we're more roast types than steaks, but a nice chop is good once in awhile, too. Some decisions we left until we saw what the actual cuts were like, made easier because the breaking down involves cutting the animal into large sections called primals, then sectioning each primal into smaller and smaller pieces. It also involves finding and cutting out glands and other non-edible bits, and I was glad for Melinda's expertise with that particular chore.

I gotta get me a hacksaw.

There was very little waste, even from a pig that big, since I was planning on making stock from the bones and making sausage with the inevitable collection of scraps of meat and fat. While I was secretly relieved that I'd decided not to keep the head because it would be too recognizable as Roger, I was also a little sad I wouldn't get to make scrapple again.

Getting a little rummy.

While I won't go into the blow-by-blow on breaking down a carcass, it was fascinating to see how much a pig's anatomy resembled our own, and how the different joints are connected. Emotionally it wasn't hard to do, probably because the carcass didn't look like Roger any more (the head thing again), and I was focusing on the job at hand, trying not to slice myself up in the process. It was all kind of geeky in a messy, sweaty sort of way and as we got down to the last few cuts, after four hours or so of work, I was getting really exhausted.

Wrapped and ready.

When the wrapping and packaging were finally done, we opened beers and a bottle of wine and toasted, first, Roger and Don for the wonderful meals they'd provide, then ourselves and Melinda for a job well done. Roger is now resting comfortably in our freezer, and I can't wait to have our first dinner featuring him.

Read the other posts in this series: Roger and Me, Roger Grows Up, Saying Goodbye, The Day Finally Comes and Pasture to Plate.

Thinking of Eating: The Day Finally Comes

I hadn't slept well the night before the slaughter, waking up several times thinking about what was going to happen later that day. It was odd because I'd witnessed a slaughter at Clare Carver's Big Table Farm before and, while it had been both moving and fascinating, I certainly hadn't lost sleep over it.

The turmoil reminded me of the time several years ago when I had scheduled our vet to come to the house and put our beloved old Husky, Nikki, to sleep. The night before he was to come, my mind roiled with conflicting thoughts. "Maybe today's not the right day. Maybe the vet won't be able to make it. Maybe…" But of course the morning came and he did as we had asked, giving our old girl a peaceful sendoff.

Around three o'clock I picked up my friend Linda, who was coming to watch the slaughtering process, and we drove out to the farm. It was a beautiful warm day, and Roger and Don were hanging out in the shade of their pig house. Richard arrived in his truck and pulled on his big orange rubber overalls and mud boots, clipped the white chain carrying his knives around his waist and picked up his small black rifle. As Richard walked up to the pigs, Clare was feeding them raw eggs, one of their favorite treats, just as we'd done the day before.

I'd hoped that Roger would be the first, since I was worried that he might be upset if he noticed Don getting shot, but I couldn't tell which pig Richard was closest to. If I could have yelled, "Stop!" I would have, but Richard put the point of his gun to the back of the pig's head. There was a popping sound as the gun went off, and the pig flopped over. Richard then straddled him, cut one of the arteries in the neck and blood started spilling out onto the ground (above left). There were some residual muscle spasms as the pig's heart pumped the blood out, but it quieted and I was able to go over and confirm that, yes, it was Roger. I couldn't help reaching over and scratching him behind his ear.

By then Richard had finished with Don and was getting ready to drag the bodies up the hill to the shed where he'd dress the pigs. It's a frankly fascinating process, and Richard is a master at field dressing, the skinning, gutting and halving of whole animals. At this point it was hard to identify the carcass as being Roger, the pig I knew, which made it easier to watch.

When it was all over, my half of Roger and Clare's half of Don were eventually hung in the shed to cool overnight (above right), we washed the driveway of the blood and bits, then went into the house to share a bottle of Clare's wine and cook dinner. As we sat at the table in the dooryard of the farmhouse, we toasted each pig and thanked them for their lives and the good food they would provide.

Read the other posts in this series: Roger and Me, Roger Grows Up, Saying Goodbye, The Meat of the Matter and Pasture to Plate.

Thinking of Eating: Saying Goodbye

"You're cruisin' for a bruisin'," were his exact words. I'd been interviewing Portland bartender Dave Shenaut for an article about Portland Cocktail Week, and he asked what I'd been up to lately. I told him about Roger, the pig I was getting from Clare Carver of Big Table Farm, and that I'd wanted to get to know him, to put a name to the food on my table.

I've had other friends express everything from horror to admiration about the idea, but when I went out to Big Table to say a last goodbye to Roger before he was slaughtered, I knew that Mr. Shenaut had hit the nail on the head.

When I went into the pasture he shares with Don, the other pig Clare is raising, Roger drank some of the water we'd just poured into his bowl. Then, while Don slurped away, Roger came over and stood near me so I could scratch his ears and back. Clare had said that he liked his belly rubbed, so when I reached over his back and started scratching his belly, he slowly sank to his knees and rolled over on his side. He closed his eyes, and his piggy mouth turned up as if he was smiling.

As much as I've dreaded and, in an odd way, looked forward to it, this is Roger's last day. At six o'clock this evening, Richard will drive up to Clare's farm and kill Roger and Don, giving them an instant and humane death. I'll be there, as will another family who are taking half of one of the pigs. It's going to be hard, and tomorrow morning we'll butcher the meat, wrap it up and freeze it for what I'm sure will be some amazing meals.

I'll miss you Roger. You were a good pig.

Read the other posts in this series: Roger and Me, Roger Grows Up, The Day Finally Comes, The Meat of the Matter and Pasture to Plate.