Growing a Feast: The Chronicle of a Farm-to-Table Meal

by Kurt Timmermeister

The story of a feast two years in the making, from the farmer who harvested the vegetables, raised the animals, and prepared the meal. In Growing a Farmer , Kurt Timmermeister recounted the toil and joy of wrestling an empty plot of land on Vashon Island, Washington, into a dairy farm. Now he tells the story of a feast made from only what the farm provides. But the story of the meal begins two years earlier with the birth of a calf, Alice. When she is grown, Alice will produce the cream to be churned into butter, made into sauce Béarnaise, and served alongside poached eggs and kale gathered the morning of the feast. Along the way we meet Leda, who trades onion seedlings for Kurt’s cheese; Michiko, who forages the white chanterelles for the antipasti course; and Bill, whose large, thin-skinned tomatoes will form the basis of the tomato upside-down cake. Rich in detail, resonant in story, Growing a Feast depicts the effort behind every meal, the farm that comes before every table.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Memoir, Gardening, Cookbooks

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 2014

About the author

Kurt Timmermeister grew up in Seattle and was a successful restaurateur before moving to Vashon Island. There he transformed a rough patch of earth into Kurtwood Farms, presently a vibrant farm where he raises Jersey cows, produces farmstead cheese, and hosts weekly farm dinners composed entirely of ingredients from his tidy Vashon farm.

Reviews

[Matt Lennert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, but it was somewhat difficult to get through. I understand why some others quit on the book. For starters, it's not really a book, it's more of a diary written in clipped and stunted phrases. It is very matter of fact and in some passages that really works, and in some others it comes across as aggressive, or even angry. I'm not sure if the intent was to demonstrate how tough the life of a farmer is, or if Timmermeister just didn't feel like writing actual prose. It's also frustratingly over-detailed in many of the descriptions of things that aren't as interesting as he thinks they are. (e.g., entering a cheese cave, pickling pumpkin slices, making pizza dough) and it repeats itself several times. It suffers from poor editing, really.

Contrast this with his latest, Farm Food, which is wonderful, philosophical, edited, and curated. Having now read all three of his books, I feel like I have a very deep understanding of this man's life and what it takes to live the way he does. He has also accomplished his stated goal of getting me to think about where food comes from, and what it takes to produce any of it, whether that be some cut of protein, or a flake of salt. I can also say that I learned quite a few things that I didn't know and that makes the read really worth it.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would probably rate it a 3.5 stars but only full stars are available. I felt like he changed his writing style a bit making it more detailed but at times I felt it was a bit too much detail. A lot of it I had already learned from reading his first book, some of it added greater depth and some of it could have been left out and I felt some details were missing. I feel out of his two books, his first was definitely my favorite and would have been enough. It was neat to see how the first book played into creating the feast which is the central focus of this book, but I felt a lot of it was redundant which is probably why it took me longer to get through this book.

Recommend for:
- Ages 14+
- foodies
- Aspiring or accomplished gardeners, farmers, and/or homesteaders
- Anyone curious as to how your food gets on your plate

[Dorothy Greco · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book version of Babette's Feast, Growing a Feast will most appeal to those in the slow food movement or foodies. Timmermeister lost me on some of his descriptions, not because he's a poor writer but because I simply don't care enough about how to pickle some random vegetable to read his three page description. It did help me to appreciate what it takes to get a healthy meal on the table and I commend the author for his vision and for caring enough to bring it to fruition.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kurt Timmermeister lives on the 13-acre Kurtwood Farms on Vashon Island in Washington state. Kurt was a chef and originally bought the farm when it was smaller to try to grow more of his restaurant's food. He now is a full-time dairy farmer creating artisan cheese from his cow's milk. He also regularly hosts farm-to-table dinners for paying friends and guests that showcase all the abundance of food the farm creates. This book shows all the work that goes into one of these farm-to-table meals. It starts two years before the actual meal with the birth of a calf who will come to be one of Kurt's best milk producers. He also goes through the cheese aging process which can take up to 18 months. The book was very interesting and it shows just how much work goes into food production, which I think most people completely take for granted and are very removed from. He also includes a few of the recipes from the farm-to-table dinner at the end of the book. My only complaint was that the book was VERY detailed - lots of very detailed descriptions of every single activity and every step in every process, recipe, etc. I could have gotten the picture without so much detailed description. I still would like to read his previous book "Growing a Farmer" which chronicles the creation of Kurtwood Farms and how Kurt began living off his land as a farmer. Overall, I liked it, but it was a little too detailed and overly descriptive for me to rate it higher.

"I have slaughtered many animals - pigs and cows and chickens - here in the past decade. It has become part of my life now. It is only when someone walks around that corner and sees a large dead animal hanging that I am reminded how unusual this seems. That does strike me as somewhat sad. Most of us eat beef or pork most every day, and yet can spend our entire lives never observing the slaughter and butcher of the meat that will become our dinner." (p. 130)

[robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something about this book won me over.

The writing isn't amazing and the story isn't unique; there are a lot of stories out there about farming, cooking, and every combination of the two. Even so, its structure - the story of a meal, the story of a farm, the story of a life - is well crafted and the ending feels like a reward. You can feel the passage of time, whether it's the time it takes to cook a meal, the time it takes to grow a tomato, or the time it takes for a calf to become a milk cow and its milk to become artisanal cheese.

Timmermeister is a chef who is running a dairy farm (and this is an old fashioned farm, he is also growing vegetables, flowers, fruit bushes and trees, slaughtering his own meat and gathering his own eggs) and planning a dinner for twenty close friends. The book tells the story of the growing, the cooking, and the eventual eating of the feast. It closes with him walking away at the close of the evening, the guests hurrying to catch a ferry home, the table uncleared, the dishes left for morning.

I think that's the detail that won me over, those dishes waiting for the next day. It got across the reality of the feast, that all the time and work and thought and preparation (two years, in the case of the cheese) ends with that empty table in an empty room, a man and his dog walking wearily to their beds.

it feels like life.

Aside from that, it's a bit idyllic. He doesn't paint his life as an easy or effortless one, but his farm feels like a mildly enchanted place, even for those whose stay is measured in a few short hours.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read overall...reminded me of my time living in the country where I experienced a lot of "farm to table" meals. The setting on Vashon Island was a tie to the time that I lived in the Seattle area. While the book appealed to me in many ways, it is a "quiet" book so if you are looking for action and intrigue this is not the right one.

The author makes cheese (has a small herd of Jersey cows). He also starts some plants, has a fairly extensive garden and is well experienced in the kitchen. The feast involves work by the author and others, including an entertaining chef who twirls the pizza dough in front of the guests before baking the pizzas in a wood fired pizza oven. I'm sure the guests left entertained and very full after the multiple courses.

Warning: meal includes meats that are fully prepared on the farm...from the raising of the animal to the finished dish. No intrigue but some fairly explicit description.

[Mary Havens · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned on page 28. I thought I was getting more of a warm fuzzy book on the whole farm to table thing. Anecdotes and whatnot. Instead, this book is more of a manual/diary of this guy's life getting this meal to the table. Last night: cow was born. It was beautiful and it made never want to eat beef again. Today: he's making cheese and I want to scream. "I separated the cheese with three blades for the hard cheese and poured the blah blah blah". STOP!
He also seemed really arrogant. I almost abandoned the book in the introduction. Maybe it was just his writing style but I wasn't having it.

[Leigh Kramer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a farmer's granddaughter but I still learned a ton from this book. (It made me want to read his first book even more.) Timmermeister starts with the birth of a calf, which will eventually make its own contribution to the feast at the book's end. I do wish we could have learned more about Timmermeister himself (maybe this is in the first book?) and why he has made certain choices, how he feels about living on a farm by himself, and so on.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like this one as much as his first. Perhaps it just seemed like too much more of the same. I did learn a good bit about cheese making, but beyond that I felt it was going over harrowed ground, so to speak.

[Jennybeast · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid work, with all the romantic phrasings one could desire to praise the slow food experience. I enjoyed the book, even though I find Timmermeister a little too self-absorbed.

[Adèle Blennerhassett Corke · Rating 2 out of 5]

interesting but completely humourless.

[Hal · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author writes about his 12 acre dairy farm on lovely Vashon Island, just a 20 minute ferry ride from Seattle. As he discusses the details of raising 12 cows, cheese making and life on the farm, he also writes about his two farm employees and the several contractors he has hired. Contractors he hired built what must have been an extremely expensive "cheese cave", approximately 30 concrete raised planting beds, a greenhouse, a barn and who knows what else. This does not sound like a farm but more like a Martha Stewart project. Just when you think he is going to do the work to get his spring garden planted by using his greenhouse to grow vegetable starts he talks about taking a trip to a local farm to purchase vegetable starts. In the mean time one of his employees cleans out the cow barn and makes compost piles that the employee with turn and tend throughout the year. It sounds like all the planting beds have already been prepared form him so he can just pop in the starts. I guess I expected the author, a relatively young man with a very small farm, to actually be working on the farm himself.

[Samantha George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Follows the story of how each item in a single meal was farmed, starting 18 months out. Really made me dwell on food systems, and appreciate the incredible range of things I eat and the effort involved in each thing.

[Jim Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise of this book is to provide a narrative for all of the preparation activities executed to provide a multi-course, gourmet and entirely on site produced feast for twenty people. The author is a professional chef / restaurateur turned farmer who primarily subsists by turning milk from his small herd of Jersey cows into cheese. The location of his farm is Vashon Island, outside of Seattle, WA.

In essence, it is a series of detailed descriptions of mundane farm activities: planting onions, making cheese, milking cows, harvesting honey, cooking, etc. The detail level falls somewhere between a self help or recipe book and a broad description. From this reading I am inspired but not fully informed to try some of the techniques myself one day.

The last couple of chapters focus on the actual meal preparation - again, not quite recipes, but enough detail to fill out a narrative (although the actual recipes appear in an appendix). The overall tone is reserved with occasional philosophical ramblings on our food system, and yet it is not presented in a political or social context; rather he is presenting his own model with a 'take from it what you will' attitude.

It is hard to describe exactly why this is such a good book. It should be boring, and yet it is not. He has a knack for describing the area between the mundane and bucolic to underscore both the blissful simplicity of the farm life without sugar-coating some of the grinding drawbacks (twice a day milking and dealing with manure in the winter, for example).

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this detailed account of a former chef turned farmer/cheese maker and the 2 year journey from the birth of a calf to presenting a gourmet meal of food raised almost entirely on his farm. It really made me think about all the processes that go into growing our food as well as things like why artisan cheese costs $20/lb. As a wannabe homesteader and lover of home grown food, I got a lot out of the author's accounts of growing vegetables and other foods, and enjoyed reading his thoughts on farming and food. I did find some of his descriptions to be overly detailed, but for the most part I enjoyed the details as he painted vivid word pictures of the farm, the activities, and his perspectives on food preparation and eating. My only real complaint is that I noticed several editing errors which was surprising and disappointing in such an otherwise beautiful book.

[Astrid Yrigollen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was more of of a diary /dialogue of Kurt and his every day life on the farm. It was an interesting read but be prepared, it is very detailed. There are some aspect of his farm life that will offend vegans or rather, make them sad to read about such as slaughtering an animal or taking a new born calf away from it's mother after it has only been with her one day.
His journey is an interesting one and while he does seems to do a lot of work,it seems very satisfying and simple.There are some recipes at the end of the book as well. One other thing I would like to add is that this book is not a how to book.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does exactly what it claims to do: describing the process of creating a meal from scratch on a small farm. I gave this book 4 stars because I did feel that the content could have been more condensed. Overall, it was entertaining and educational and made me realize how detached we are from our food sources, as well as how much work it really takes to create much of what we take for granted.

[Josie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of detail on how a meal gets from the farm to the table, starting with milking the cow to make the cheese, and ending with leftover butter cookies on a table recently vacated by diners. I enjoyed the deep detail of the farm side of the meal, but got bored with the actual cooking description; for me the last two chapters were eternal and boring. But the first 200 pages were lovely!

[Ali]

This was a really amazing journey, I enjoyed the daily ramblings about a farm and the author is very descriptive making you crave to be there and to at least work a few days on his farm. the best part has to be in the very back of the book he includes all of the recipes he used for the dinner.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read for anyone interested in the farm-to-table movement. Some sections became a bit tedious with pages and pages devoted to the making of a singular dish. Overall, an interesting and educational read.

[Jordan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I finished the book because I hate to leave things unfinished but it did not hold my interest except for a few chapters. Neat story but drug out over 300 pages and it was dull.

[Virginia]

Parts, like the cheese cave were great, but overall did not hold my interest.

[Sharon]

This book was kind of boring. I never finished.

[S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm learning so much about small farming, keeping cows, and cheese making. I am loving it. Some of the descriptions are overly long but I appreciate his need to be exact.

[Kendall]

So, I didn't finish this. On one hand, I feel guilty that as a farming/food policy wonk (hello, target demographic) I barely made it a quarter of the way through. On the other hand, I'm actually kind of proud that I was able to put it down and move on. I can't tell you the number of books I've suffered through purely out of principle. This one, quite frankly, was tedious. And I don't think it's a reflection on the movement as a whole; really, it just goes to show that I don't need to read (among many other long-winded things) a six-page long description of the author's cheese cave.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just extremely soothing and enjoyable to read.