Longtime Readers, Thanks! A New Look's Just a Click Away…

After fourteen years of writing Good Stuff NW, it was time for an update. So for the first time it has a brand new look and feel that I hope will enhance its function and readability, and make it a better experience for everyone who visits. For a—hopefully—short while there will be some visual back-and-forth between this site and the new site, until I get all 2,621 (yikes!) posts migrated to the new format. I hope you will bear with me during this transition because there's a lot of exciting news to break in the near future.

The new site's search function should make it much more productive when you’re looking for that creamy tomato soup recipe or the post Anthony Boutard wrote about how to escape a swarm of yellow jackets. I used to have to type “goodstuffnw tomato soup” into the Goog’s search  bar to find an old post, so you should find it a major improvement.

There’s an About page where you can find out a little about me, and a Media page where you can follow me on your preferred social media platform. By the way, I’m particularly fond of Instagram these days, but Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing articles and information. The Media page also has a curated selection of articles I’ve written if you’re curious about my work outside of Good Stuff NW.

And for you mobile device types, including tablet, phablet or “slate" users, your experience is going to be oh-so-much enhanced by the new format, loading more quickly and efficiently and with graphics that will make the old site look like the doodles on your high school Pee Chees (remember those?) in comparison.

A shoutout, as always, goes out to our stalwart sponsors for their support and encouragement. Please let them know how much you appreciate that support by stopping in and mentioning Good Stuff NW by name. Big thanks to the Beaverton Farmers Market, Providore Fine Foods and Vino wine shop!

As always, thanks for reading. As one longtime reader said, "Beautiful new look, same great content!"

Profile: Filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg's "Beaver Believers"

There’s a saying about making documentary film that likens it to taking a bunch of sentences, slicing them up, putting them in a bag, dumping the bag out on the table, then trying to rearrange the pieces into a cohesive story, according to Walla Walla filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg.

Documentary filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg.

Koenigsberg’s first documentary, The Beaver Believers, tells the story of an unlikely group of activists from around the country who are united in trying to bring back the American beaver from the edge of extinction. These advocates believe that the beaver is a keystone species, that its near-demise at the hands of fur traders caused much of the West to become arid land, and that returning the beaver to healthy population levels would restore ecosystems, creating the biodiversity, complexity, and resiliency watersheds need to absorb the impacts of climate change.

Already well-received at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, the film is a finalist in the prestigious Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, and will be screened at the Environmental Film Festival at Yale. The film was several years in the making, and shot in eight western states as well as Mexico and Canada.

“We had to really work as a team,” she said of the challenge of working with college interns to film the easily spooked animals in their natural habitat. “We had to learn to intuitively sense each other's movements. It was a really cool little dance that we ended up working out. Especially for students who'd never done anything like that before, watching them get it and watching their confidence build.”

Her path to becoming a filmmaker was circuitous. Like many young people, it took time for Koenigsberg to find her calling.

One of the stars of her first feature film.

With some theater experience in her early years, by the time Koenigsberg got to college she’d decided it wasn’t the career for her. An introductory class in environmental studies intrigued her, as did a geology class, both of which exposed her to the problems of pollution and climate change. An introductory film class she took required making a short film, and while putting it together she had her epiphany.

“The first time I put some clips together in a timeline, and put in some music, and [saw] what happens when clips go together with music, a light bulb clicked,” she said.

A critical component in her filmmaking style came when she did work with place-based collaboratives in the West. “[I was] meeting small groups of people, potentially with very different mindsets, recognizing that if they all care about the place they live, even if they disagree, they need to figure out how to work together and hear each other," she said, using a collaborative rather than a litigation model.

She moved to New York City, volunteering to work on film crews, jumping in to grab a light or hold a boom microphone. That dogged persistence earned her a stint on a film crew in Ecuador, which cemented her decision to go into documentary filmmaking.

“Being in the field, collecting stories of a community that had no voice in the world, but they were trying to have more sustainable agriculture to lead to better lives for their kids,” Koenigsberg said of her time in Ecuador. “It all just resonated.”

She returned to Walla Walla and started her own film company called Tensegrity Productions, after a term coined by architect Buckminster Fuller to describe the fluid interconnectivity in nature, a tensional integrity, or tensegrity.

Living out her principles and challenging her own presumptions is a key to being a successful documentary filmmaker, Koenigsberg believes.

“No matter how good your education, there are always other modalities of knowledge, other bodies of experience from living and working in a place, that you've got to listen to,” she said. “If you go in assuming you already know everything that person has to offer as a character or as a viewpoint, you're not going to give them the chance to give you the most little beautiful nugget of truth. You're just turning them into a very flat character. I want to find very vibrant characters who, through their personal journey, are hinting at much larger, global-level issues.”

Photos from Tensegrity Productions.

Providore Adds Revel Meat, Two X Sea

I just got permission to unburden myself of a secret I've been keeping for almost two months, one that is going to make my life—and hopefully the lives of many other fans of local meat—so much more delicious. Fans and those whose lives were bereft when Ben Meyer closed down Old Salt, his palace of sustainable meat, can now rejoice: He and his partner in Revel Meat, James Serlin, have just signed a lease and stocked cases of their local meat inside Providore Fine Foods.

Kaie Wellman, co-owner of Providore and longtime Portland specialty grocer, Pastaworks, with her husband, Kevin de Garmo, and Bruce Silverman, termed the partnership a "perfect marriage."

Bringing Revel Meat to Providore continues the group's commitment to partner with providers who have deep relationships with local farmers and can give customers the kind of high quality, thoughtfully sourced products they're looking for, Wellman said. "Partners who excite us are the people who are as passionate about food as we are."

Serlin echoed that excitement, saying it was Providore's roster of partners like Rubinette Produce, Little T Baker and Hilary Horvath Flowers that made it an ideal choice for Revel's first retail outlet. "It's a big deal for Revel to be associated with Providore," Serlin said. "The idea behind it, as a place where people can come to get the best produce, meat, fish, cheese and bread, is a perfect fit."

Beef and pork from local farms like Pat-n-Tam's Beef in Stanfield, Campfire Farms in Mulino, Rieben Family Farms in Banks, and 6 Ranch in Wallowa County will stock the big meat cases on the west end of the store with both frozen and fresh cuts. Don't see what you're looking for in the case? Revel will also be happy to accommodate orders for custom cuts—I've already put in my order for some beef neck—with pickup available at Providore. (Read more about Revel Meat and its mission to rejuvenate local meat processing.)

And who will be occupying the coveted space recently vacated by Flying Fish Company? None other than Two X Sea (Two By Sea) the Bay Area fishmonger born in 2009 out of owner Kenny Belov's frustration with the lack of honesty and accountability in the seafood marketplac and fair pay for the fishing industry.

"The only way to change wholesale was to become wholesale," said Belov, who has been selling seafood to top Portland-area restaurants for more than four years. All of Two X Sea's suppliers must answer specific questions before their fish are accepted into its program: Who caught the fish? Who was the captain? What's the name of the boat? How was the fish caught? Was the fish caught on purpose (as opposed to it being bycatch, which means fish caught while targeting other species)? Belov believes that those answers give an opportunity to share with consumers all of the information about every piece of fish in the case.

"Their sustainability standards are unmatched anywhere," Wellman said. "These guys walk their talk."

Belov said that architectural drawings for the new space are being completed, and he's hoping for Two X Sea to open in late spring. Plans include an oyster bar and a menu that showcases the offerings in the fresh case. He said it's an opportunity to expose guests to preparations of seafood that they might also make at home, and he's excited to see what chef Jacob Harth—chef at the much-lauded Erizo and who will compose Two By Sea's offerings—orchestrates in conjunction with Providore's other partners.

Wellman said that Pastaworks, with its nearly 40 years in Portland, and now Providore, are set to move to the next level in its evolution as a vortex for people who love to cook and who care about where their food comes from. "It's a community of like-minded businesses and business owners," Wellman said. "It's the antithesis of a grocery store experience. It's a place where customers come in and are surrounded by real food and high quality products from small producers they can't find elsewhere."

Then comes the throwdown: "Nowhere else in the U.S. has this level of a food experience and offers customers this kind of engagement with their food."

Providore Fine Foods is a sponsor of Good Stuff NW.